The feeling with only one place

We drove home from the beach and I had the best feeling I'd had all week sitting in my chest, and absolutely nowhere to put it.

That's the thing I had to learn. Ordinary pride comes with plumbing. A man whose husband gets promoted tells the whole office. A man with a beautiful partner posts the photo, brings him to the party, says my husband twice in one sentence at dinner. Pride is built to be spent — it's a social emotion, it wants a room.

Cuck pride has exactly one recipient. The only person on earth I can say it to is the man it's about.

So it stayed in the car. It came into the house with us and never got mentioned again, and the next day someone asked how the weekend was and I said it was nice, we went to the beach, the water was cold.

I used to think of that as a loss. Something we were being denied.

It's not.

Because everyone else's pride leaks. It gets handed to colleagues and cousins and people at parties who half-listen, and by the time it's been told six times it's a story rather than a feeling. Ours can't go anywhere. It has one room, two people, and no exit — so it stays whole. He is the only one who knows what he did that afternoon. We're the only ones who know what it did to me. Nobody at that dinner table gets a version of it, not even an edited one.

There's a word for a thing two people hold that nobody else is allowed to touch. It isn't secrecy. It's closer to a vow.

Wednesday: the Deep Dive. Two kinds of pride, why only one of them is actually yours, and the three places it stops working.

One more thing

Pick the one that's true today. It takes you to your shelf, and it tells me something I've been guessing at for six months: where most of you actually are. That's what I plan around for the next topics. One click does it:

→ I've never said it out loud
→ I said it. He isn't sure yet.
→ It's happening
→ It's been happening for years