pain · you feel you may lose a thing · relationships · wife
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you feel you may lose a thing, in your relationships — specifically with wife — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
Her pulling away is real. Your inability to call her back the old way is also real. Epictetus makes the cleanest cut available here: of things some are in our power, and others are not. Her interior state, what she is moving toward, the speed at which she is going — these are not in your power. The man you show up as in the next hundred days is. The call-back is not a single conversation; it is a hundred ordinary acts of being available, present, and undefended. You cannot make her return. You can be the man worth returning to. That is the work, and it is the only work that is yours to do.
heart
Stop trying to pull her back. Show up as the man she would choose to return to, one ordinary act at a time.
connection
You stand in the line of all men who could not control whether a woman came back and did the only work that was theirs — being someone worth coming back to in the hundred small moments she could see.
Action
This week, do three ordinary acts of being present she does not have to ask for. Do not announce them. Do not test her response.
Reference
Of things some are in our power, and others are not.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 1
practice
Doing the ordinary work of being available without managing her response
principle
Her return is not in your power; the man you are when she is here is
value
Constancy in the only thing that is yours to control