He Works Away and He Has Gone Quiet

Three weeks on, one week home. That has been the pattern for four years and it worked, more or less, until about six months ago.

Nothing happened six months ago. That is the difficulty. There was no argument and no event and nothing anybody could point at, and if she tried to explain it to a friend she would get about two sentences in and hear how it sounded.

He rings. He rings most nights, actually, which is why she cannot make a complaint out of it.

The calls are four minutes. All right? Yeah. Weather's been bad. How's your mum. Fine. All right, I'll let you go.

That last one is the phrase she has come to dread. I'll let you go. As though she were the one who wanted to be off the phone.

When he is home he is not unkind. He is helpful and he does things around the house and he sleeps a great deal, and there is a quality to it that she has finally found a word for, which is guest. He behaves like a guest in his own house, politely, for a week, and then he goes back.

And she has been filling the quiet, because a person will always fill a quiet.

Is there somebody. Is he depressed and cannot say so. Has he stopped loving her and is simply waiting for the children to be older. Is the job worse than he says.

Four theories, none of them checkable, all of them running at once at half past eleven at night.

That is you, and the quiet is not information, whatever you have been building out of it.

Three things I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you what is going on with him. I do not know. Nobody who has not been in that room knows, and an article that offers you a confident theory about a man it has never met is giving you something worthless and possibly damaging.

I am not going to promise you an outcome. He is a grown man with his own account before God, and nothing on this page and nothing in any song will be aimed at moving his will, because that was never ours to move.

And I am not going to tell you this is your fault or that a better wife would have fixed it by now. That is not in the Bible and it lands hardest on women who are already carrying too much of it.

If there is anything frightening in this, if you have ever been afraid of him or of what leaving would cost, that is a different situation and there is a helpline for it and it should be your first call rather than this page.

You are not being graded on your marriage. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it is nearness without a precondition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in that kitchen at half past eleven when the four theories are running.

The verse is about what He finishes

There is a line at the end of Psalm 138 that is exactly the size of your situation.

The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8

That which concerneth me. It is a wide phrase, deliberately. Not the parts of my life I can affect. The things that concern me, which for you includes a man three hundred miles away whose inside you cannot see.

Will perfect. It is a completing word. It means to bring to its finished state, and the subject of the verb is the Lord.

And notice the last clause, which is a prayer rather than a claim: forsake not the works of thine own hands. He is asking. That is the posture: not certainty about how it goes, but a request made to somebody who finishes what He starts.

I cannot tell you that this marriage will be well. Nobody can and anybody who does is inventing. What the verse gives you is not a prediction. It is the identity of the one who is working on it, and He is working on a part of it you cannot reach, which is precisely the part that has been keeping you awake.

You are not the only one working on this marriage. Scripture says the Lord will perfect that which concerneth me, Psalm 138:8, and the concerning is wider than the reaching, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a man in a room in another town on a Tuesday night.

The four theories

Let me be honest about what those are doing, because they feel like vigilance and they are not.

You have four hypotheses and no way to test any of them. So the mind cycles: it takes one, runs it, finds no evidence either way, and moves to the next. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 138:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

That process has produced nothing in six months, because it cannot produce anything. It is not investigation; there is nothing to investigate with. It is a way of feeling active about something you cannot act on, and the cost of it is your sleep and a slowly hardening picture.

Because here is what happens over six months. The theories stop feeling like theories. Repetition does that. By now you are not wondering whether he has stopped loving you; some part of you has begun to live as though he has, and you have started behaving accordingly, and that is a change in the marriage that you introduced rather than him. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 138:8, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

That is not blame. It is the ordinary thing that happens to anybody left in a silence for long enough.

You are not obliged to believe the worst reading. Scripture says charity... beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, 1 Corinthians 13:7, and believeth all things is a decision about which reading to hold when the evidence does not decide it, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of the version that runs at half past eleven.

Ask him one real question

Here is the only practical thing, and it is small and it is difficult.

Ask him something real, once, without warning, in the middle of an ordinary call.

Not are we all right, which is a question that produces yeah, course from any man on a four minute phone call.

Something specific and answerable and not about the marriage. What is the worst part of your day out there. Who do you actually talk to. When did you last laugh at something.

Men who have gone quiet very often have not gone quiet about the marriage. They have gone quiet full stop, and it shows up first in the place with the least pressure in it, which is a phone call to somebody who will not push.

Ask one question. Then be quiet and let the silence run longer than is comfortable, because the answer to a real question usually arrives about four seconds after most people would have moved on.

And if you get nothing, you have lost nothing, and you can ask again next week.

You are not powerless here, and none of it requires him to change first. Scripture says a soft answer turneth away wrath, Proverbs 15:1, and the principle underneath it is that the manner of a thing does a great deal of its work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts one right question into an ordinary evening.