The car park

It's a Sunday in August and you're in the car park of a pub where your partner's family have just had lunch.

The children are strapped in. Your partner, Sam, is putting the pushchair in the boot and says, cheerfully enough, "I told Dave I'd do the long ride next Saturday, so I'll be back about four." And you hear yourself say, much louder than you meant to, "Of course you will. You're never here. I do everything and you swan off every single weekend and you don't even notice."

Sam looks as though you've slapped him. Then his face closes. "Where's this come from? You've never said a word about Saturdays." His mother is twenty feet away, pretending to look for her keys. The drive home is silent. That evening there's a row that starts with Saturdays and goes through his mother, the holiday you didn't want and something he said at Christmas two years ago. By eleven o'clock neither of you can remember what the subject was.

Here's what the subject was. Since March, Sam has gone cycling with his club every Saturday from eight until about two. Since March, you've had both children on your own for most of every Saturday. You mind this. You don't mind the cycling itself, which you can see is good for him. You mind that it's every week and that it was never discussed. You'd like some time of your own too. It's a reasonable thing to mind, and there was a reasonable conversation to be had about it. You've been meaning to have that conversation since April.

You nearly raised it in May, but he'd had a bad week at work. In June you decided to wait until after the holiday. In July you started sighing on Friday evenings and being a bit short with him on Saturday afternoons, and hoped he'd ask what was wrong. He didn't. In bed you ran through what you'd say. In those rehearsals you were calm and clear, he was defensive and unfair, and you'd lie awake annoyed at things he hadn't actually said.

Then it came out by itself, in a car park in front of his mother, as "you're never here".

I'll use a few terms throughout. The thing is the subject you need to raise. The rehearsal is the conversation you hold in your head in place of the real one. The hint is any attempt to get the message across without saying it, such as a sigh, a joke with an edge, or going quiet. The blow-up is what happens when the thing comes out on its own, at a time and in a tone you didn't choose.

Putting off a conversation has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

You know what the thing is. This isn't a vague unease. If someone asked, you could state it in a sentence, and that tells you it's ready to be said.

You're waiting for a moment that would make it easy. It has to be a time when they're in a good mood but not so good that you'd spoil it, and when you're calm and there's time and nobody's tired. Weeks can pass without one.

You're having the conversation anyway, alone. The rehearsals are frequent, and the other person always plays their worst self in them.

And it leaks. You think you're concealing the thing, but it comes out as coolness and short answers, and the other person can tell something's wrong without knowing what.

Try one thing before reading on. Write down, in one sentence, the thing you've been putting off saying, and who it's to. Under it, write roughly when you first knew you needed to say it. If you can't think of anything, this may not be your habit. If the date is more than a month ago, read on. And if, having written it, you feel like going and saying it now, go. The book will keep.