Where would you be without me?

My wife and I have been married for ten years, so I’ve heard “where would you be without me?” a number of times. Early on, I would answer that question honestly. I was blissfully unaware that it was supposed to be rhetorical. She wasn’t interested in gaming out scenarios alternate-me was experiencing in alternate timelines. She simply wanted me to say I needed her in my life. That her presence had somehow changed me.

I have a vague recollection of the before-times — the year when I was single after the dissolution of my first marriage. During that year, I always seemed to know exactly what I wanted for dinner and what movie I wanted to watch. I also knew where my socks were at all times. I knew which outfits looked best on me, I knew how to decorate my home, and I knew what colors looked best on my walls. Ten years later, my wife’s begun informing me that I’ve apparently off-loaded most of those functions to her like she’s an external hard drive, to free up resources in my own brain for other mental computations. I think that’s one reason breakups (no, we’re not breaking up) leave us feeling untethered and hollowed out. We’ve lost our external hard drive and have to recreate the data we lost bit by bit.

Which is how a relationship is supposed to be, I guess. We each focus on what we do best. That’s probably why opposites attract. Person A is happy to let person B take charge of the aspects of their lives Person B is good at, because person A isn’t interested in mastering it anyway, and vice versa. Makeda hasn’t taken out the trash or plunged a toilet in a decade, and I think it’s been just as long since I knew where my clothes were without asking someone (and I know she’s been moving them around just to make sure I need her to find them — it’s the only logical explanation).