Perhaps the greatest power we have together, and a lot of it is attributed to you, is that we are good at problem solving. not the kind of independent problem solving we each have on our own, but the one we have together.

I told you before that one of the good parts about you is the fact that you do not throw confusion on the table. you wait for those thoughts in your head until they either have an initial shape and texture, so we can craft them together, or you deliver them crystal clear. this is your power, North. this is what sets you apart.

Many women are called confusing because when they do not understand something, they tend to fight or create tension. but not you. you would rather have your heart broken and your mind drained from thinking than share confusion in its raw form with someone else. even if they could help, you fear they would panic first. you do this because you care for others.

As you might have guessed, this feature can backfire on you sometimes. it puts weight on you, always thinking, always trying to put things in shape before asking for further crystallizing through discussion. this can sometimes take forever. take me for example. you tried to understand the game of push and pull I was playing, but it was random. I did not stay long enough for you to feel something, nor was I honest enough to hint at what was going on. so confusion ate you up. and I am sorry.

There were other moments where you probably wanted me to initiate things, just so you could know whether I felt something, or whether I was being mindful.

The analogy I keep in my head is this. I imagine confusion as a yarn of knitting. dense, tightly wrapped, overlapping. when confusion arises in your head, you do not throw that yarn at me as it is. this is not you. this is what I think most women do, but not you. you work on it.

You already love knitting in real life, and maybe that is why you love figuring things out first on your own. before sharing that dense overlapping yarn with me, you divide it into sections. you take two to four overlapping parts and bring them to me, saying, hey can we work on this. and that is what I love. you do not share confusion in its big, scary form. you know I might have run, or you know it is not healthy for a relationship. so you decide to divide it into smaller, definable problems with clearer workarounds, and we work through them together. communication, North, is what sets us apart.

I am not a relationship expert. I do not think women are confusing. maybe because I lived mostly with my sisters and I know how women are different. or maybe because I keep boundaries and that invites clarity. what I do know is that most relationships suffer here. I do not blame women. the core problem is often the man, lost in life or lost in his head. this creates confusion in the woman.

When a woman does not find answers, she becomes stimulated. rage, confusion, whatever the feeling is, and this leads to two scenarios. one, she drops the whole yarn of knitting on the man. this often freaks him out. men do not deal well with confusion, especially when it is not directly about them. they call women confusing because what women keep inside is often what men consider unimportant, and they run.

But it is not only about sharing confusion. it is about how it is shared. if it comes as rage, as sharp words, they cut. even if the intention was not harmful. the form matters. yours is beautiful. you are considerate. you never backfire at me. you never made me feel confused. you never made me feel discomfort. you never said a single hurtful word.

I know holding it all inside hurts, but it maintains something fragile.

The second option is keeping everything inside. and this has its own consequences. we will talk about it someday. I call it the black dots. Between the two Lies the way our communication should be, It is already good, and we don’t need to make it better We need to just acknowledge what helped us reach here.

What I want is this. I want us to keep this. this communication we have, this habit of stopping and reflecting on what went wrong. because without it, we are helpless. we cannot move forward without it.