The Unmuddled Mathematician

Unfinished Sentences

By Chris Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician

Maybe it is just my wife and her sister, but maybe it’s many more.  You decide.  Anyway, I am suffering with two kinds of communication or the lack thereof.  First, it seems to me with increasing frequency that my wife finishes my verbal sentences before I do.  I mean, I can be making a perfectly cogent statement about something of extreme interest and importance to every person on the earth and some milliseconds after my first words, my wife jumps in and finishes the sentence, the thought, the whole deal.  She’s fast and I am left with unspoken words, unsaid thoughts, and pretty much feeling like Charlie MCarthy  (look that up).  She tells me that I do not speak quickly enough.  Often she jumps in so early that her finish has absolutely nothing to do with what I was about to say.  This does not bother her in the slightest.  I can’t decide if she is using a wife-filter to make sure I don’t embarrass her in polite company or she has just gotten ever deeper in this habit.  But her sister is the same way.  I accept advice if you have any.

The other issue is in some strange way the inverse of the first problem.  Over the past few years it has become increasingly her habit to involve me in a game the kids call “Freeze”.  Not in the way you think.  What happens is that she will begin to speak to me but often she utters only a couple of words which are clearly going to be followed by more (mostly instructions).  But then she stops speaking, leaving me hanging and waiting for the rest.  For example, she will say, “Are you…” and then stop speaking.  Now I am in the freeze mode, waiting for the rest of the question.  I literally stop doing whatever I’m engaged in and wait for further data.  I am frozen.  But nothing happens.  Just silence.  After a while I will ask her if she would finish the question or sentence, as I do not want to be found wanting in the husband department.  But by this time she has mostly moved on to something else.  If I let it drop and go blithely on my way I take the severe risk of having her tell me later that, “I told you (or asked you” about this very item 2 days ago.  She actually thinks she did, when in fact it is not so.  Go ahead, try to win that argument.   Not wanting to take the risk of silence I have with increasing frequency asked her to complete her thought.  She is then as puzzled as I am.  We discussed this and this was her response, and I am quoting directly, “My mind had completed the thought and I’ve moved on”.  I’m sort of like a member of a pit crew in the Indy 500, watching the driver zoom off at 220 mph, leaving me smelling fumes and breathing dust. 

The smart move is to remain frozen in space and time and try to nudge her Indy car back into my lane and perhaps dropping me a verbal or mental note/hint about what I’ve missed.  She thinks I losing my mind because I can’t remember what she has not said.  Am I alone in my predicament?  I could use a little help from a support group of friends.  Reach out to me. But don’t kill me by starting a phrase and then after three words leaving me in the silence of the males.