Newlyweds

An attitude adjustment: Should you change?
by Jennifer Jeanne Patterson

"I hate my job," I say to Matt, who is digging pulp out of a grapefruit while reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. It's early in the morning and I'm tired. "I want to be a writer."

"Then do something about it," Matt says. Sometimes I get annoyed by how practical he is, how he offers up easy solutions, although admittedly, that's what attracts me to him too. He tells me to visit a relative of his, Al Sandvik, who I've never met before, because he writes a column for a local newspaper.

"How will that change anything?" I ask. I wrote one novel that 20 New York agents rejected. How can Al change that?

"Stop being so afraid of people," Matt says, as he takes a sip of milk.

"I'm not afraid of people," I say defensively, but he's right; I am. It bothers me that he sees my aversion to people as a weakness, that he forces me to see it as a flaw. I've learned to compensate for my fear. At parties, I sip water and, with my fingers, retrieve the floating lemon to chew on it while Matt talks. I let him draw me into the conversation, but he wants me less dependent on him.

"Do you realize how much your fear of people limits you?" he asks, and, of course, I do. He says he wants others to see in me what he does and they can't if I stay silent. Matt tells me if you're not improving yourself, you're declining. He compares it to how your muscles and circulatory system degenerate without exercise.

"He'd love to meet you," Matt adds, and that helps alleviate some of my fear. I realize my fear isn't so much of Al, but how he will perceive me.

I call Al to prove Matt wrong. As I drive to his house, I purposely take a wrong turn to try to convince myself that I am lost. When I arrive, he leads me to the living room, where he sits down in a high-backed chair. I stir cream into my coffee, pretending to concentrate on the vanishing white lines of cream so that I don't have to speak first.

"So, you want to be a writer?" Al says. I nod. He doesn't speak much more than I do, but he knows how to guide the conversation. "Why don't you try writing a column?"

I look at him blankly because I know nothing; I have no advice for others. "About what?"

"About what you know." He sees I'm still puzzled. "You know what it's like to move from New York to Minnesota. You know what it's like to be married." He hands me a book of columns that he self published. "Write what you know."

I go home and write a column. The words come out easily, and it sells.

"Networking pays off," Matt says, because I am one step closer to becoming a writer, but I shrug him off.

I've always equated networking with asking for favors from people you don't know, but, as Matt has demonstrated, it's about more than that. It's about that spark your interaction discloses, which your insularity won't.

While I cried over boys in high school, Mom said, "Never change for a man." And she was right. You can't make somebody love you by changing who you are. But what if that person already does love you? And what if their changes make you a better person?

Four months after I met Al, he died of cancer. Matt held my hand as we walked into the funeral parlor.

Al's son gave the homily. He said that while his father was dying, he asked to have his wife at his side. Matt squeezed my hand.

I knew then that I would change for him. He gives me the strength to turn to face my fears, and, through that, I grow.

About Newlyweds

Photo: Amy Metry

I received my MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. My work has appeared in the literary journal, Creative Nonfiction, and I freelance for Sun Newspapers in Minnesota. I received The Loft's Creative Nonfiction Award and was a finalist for Chase Manhattan's Best Essay Award.

Company Website: http://www.newly-weds.com