“But you never read it…”

If your primary romantic partner is generally your best friend and provides many levels of support in many areas of life, it’s okay for him not to discuss with you the details of a short story you emailed him three months ago that led to eight years to write?

“No relationship is perfect,” says an opinionated person in your life. “To live with anyone, you have to put up with certain things. Forty years into my marriage, I feel comfortable saying that love is about how much you can stomach!”

Maybe you are too picky, too sensitive. It’s quite possible that you see your partner’s failure to engage with your personal creative cup as just another unwanted trait—inevitable, as it is with all humans—like leaving the dishes and the toilet seat dirty.

The voice that brags you is then confronted with the other opinion. Maybe it’s someone’s mother or another matriarch. Maybe it’s just someone more powerful:

“If it’s really that important to you that your partner reads your short story, climb into bed and read it to him! Better yet, get them to read it to you! Even better, handcuffs!’

Of course you could. But is forcing an activity on someone the same as coming to it on their own? Is being pushy really the goal here? Does tripping someone up to admire your art make their subsequent admiration fake? Isn’t it only natural that your partner wants to read something you made because you made it?

When it comes to perceptions of trivialities and inequities in love relationships, I’ve heard more than one person say, “Just turn it around. How would they feel when a hot guy invited you to their Italian villa alone, without them?” And, for that matter: “If your partner had emailed you something he’d written, how long would it have stayed in your inbox?”

In this case, my partner had not emailed me anything. Their artistic medium was the piano. Music, sweet music—immediate, soothing, instant, sharing, here. Music, without ink, is lighter than fiction. Music is air.

Music is fun. We lived it together. I could dance to what my partner had made and feel that it was somehow mine, to that comforting, affirming quality of music that can make you feel like it’s yours by simply joining in.

But writing is different. Writing is ink. Writing is lonely eyes on a page—a reader’s voice inventing a narrator. Reading my writing could send my partner back to parts of his own memory, confront him with certain aspects of his life, and maybe even help him see certain things in new ways. It wouldn’t be the same as music, just different. Still good.

All this happened in New York, in the spring, as a middle school teacher in the Bronx, I filled in for absent teachers. My favorite class to complete was Playwriting. There were never any lesson plans, so one day in late May, I took it upon myself to outline the plot of my novel for my students so they would have something to choose from and study as a group.

“No, no, no,” said Kalista and Alanis, best friends, after I got to the point where an up-and-coming pianist working in administration at a prestigious music school receives the “gift” of performance from a student:

“You can’t make him give her the gift. No, no, no, people won’t go for it. You have to do it the other way around.”

On the train ride home, I thought about what Callista and Alanis had said. Even if it hadn’t come from my partner, it had come from someone—and not just one, but two. Although the source wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, I still received feedback. My work had been respected, taken seriously and reinforced in the way I had hoped it would be. Who cared how or why this had happened: the point was that it had happened.

Besides, my partner did a terrific job reading my cover letters.