You Asked Sir What He Was Thinking and Regretted It Immediately

A quiet man can do extraordinary things to a woman’s imagination, especially when he has been staring out the window for seven minutes with that faraway expression that suggests something important may be unfolding behind his eyes.

And once you notice it, of course, the silence begins to look terribly significant.

Naturally, you replay dinner, trying to work out what on earth could have caused this sudden little cloud over Sir. He seemed perfectly fine, although now that you think about it, he did go a little quiet after you mentioned the trip. Was it the trip? Or something you said just before the trip? Maybe this has nothing to do with the trip at all and Sir has been carrying around some enormous feeling for weeks while behaving beautifully over pasta.

And by now, in your mind, there is only one way to know for sure: you have to ask him.

“What are you thinking about?”

Sir turns toward you.

“Whether I should get the car washed tomorrow.”

Oh.

Surely That Cannot Be All

The trouble is that once you have prepared yourself for an emotional revelation, car washing feels almost rude.

“No, I mean what are you really thinking about?”

Sir gives this proper consideration, because clearly the first answer has disappointed the room, and adds that he was also wondering whether it might rain.

Goodness.

You had been standing at the gates of intimacy while Sir was trying to decide whether the car could survive another week without a wash.

This can be surprisingly hard to accept because women are often rather good at hearing the conversation underneath the conversation. Your girlfriend says, “It was fine,” and you already know we are nowhere near finished. Who was there? What did she say? What did you say? And when you say she looked at you strangely, exactly how strangely are we talking?

Sir hears “It was fine” and may enjoy the rare pleasure of believing that something was, in fact, fine.

So when Sir goes quiet, your mind begins filling in the blanks before Sir has even noticed there are blanks. Maybe something is bothering him. Maybe the relationship has shifted by half an inch and you somehow missed it. Or perhaps he has been sitting there wanting to tell you something, gathering courage while you wait for the great emotional unveiling.

Meanwhile, Sir is trying to remember the name of the actor in that movie with the submarine.

Sir Has Now Been Asked Twice

Of course, asking once does not always settle matters because his answer can be so gloriously ordinary that you assume he has misunderstood what kind of answer you were hoping for.

“Nothing,” he says.

Nothing?

Madam, you have never thought nothing in your life.

You can brush your teeth, revisit a conversation from three years ago, decide what you should have said and briefly wonder whether bangs would change everything, all before rinsing.

So naturally, “nothing” deserves another look.

You ask again, and this time Sir makes a sincere effort. You can almost see him rummaging around inside his own head for something worthy of the occasion.

“I was thinking we’re almost out of coffee.”

And there it is: no hidden sorrow, no secret reconsideration of your future, no tender confession waiting quietly behind the curtain.

Coffee.

Sometimes the Silence Is Just Quiet

None of this means Sir is wandering through life without an inner world. He worries, remembers things at odd moments, misses people, gets hurt and occasionally thinks about something considerably more profound than whether the refrigerator needs milk.

He just may not be narrating all of it while sitting beside you.

Which is what makes the whole thing so funny. You can spend ten perfectly good minutes wondering what his silence means while the man three feet away is having a perfectly satisfactory thought about tire pressure.

Eventually you ask, he tells you, and somehow his answer still feels less believable than the six explanations you had ready before he opened his mouth.

Poor Sir. He was quiet for seven minutes and you had already given him a secret emotional life, a relationship crisis and unresolved feelings about the trip.

He was wondering whether he had enough gas to get to work.

Sometimes, Madam, the mystery man is not nearly as mysterious as advertised.