Philip Roth on being wrong.
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them menacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve shown up in our relationship, and I realize I’ve done something quietly wounding. In my haste to protect my own ways of being, I didn’t make enough room for yours. I see now that this left you feeling diminished, as though there wasn’t space for the full, complicated, beautiful person you are.
That wasn’t because you asked for too much, but because I understood too little.
What I should have recognized is that relationships aren’t competitions of needs but acts of mutual enlargement—places where two people help each other become more themselves, not less. I failed at that. I let my fears and habits take up more space than they deserved, and in doing so, I made you feel small.
I’m sorry. Truly. Not in the casual sense, but in the way that comes from seeing something clearly for the first time. I want to learn how to make room—proper room—for who you are, not who I assumed you should be.
If you’re willing, I’d like to understand you better, and to rebuild something that honors both of us.
