A big part of what Eric perceived and described as my “negativity” was me correcting him.

I know I used to correct him (and others) when I knew they were wrong, more often than they liked. I worked on it, trained myself out of the habit. It was not enough.

I let him be as wrong as he wanted without saying anything. He can call plants by the wrong name, and I say nothing. He can order “hot cold milk” from a menu written in Italian, and I say nothing. He can say we’re walking east when we’re going north. Whatever. It’s never worth saying anything.

If I still corrected him EVER then I could see him immediately shut down and get quietly furious. And I did correct him, in two specific kinds of scenarios.

One was when the discussion topic was specifically about facts, for example if Adrian asked about how something works. I mostly let Eric have center stage in those conversation (see later post) and only added my bits when he had had time to shine. The only time I stepped in and corrected when he was unequivocally wrong about some essential part, and I didn’t want Adrian to walk away with entirely wrong information. I made very sure to express myself very politely and diplomatically, wrapping the correction in soft phrases. None of that was acceptable. He just could not accept me correcting him.

The other scenario is in particularly stressful situations. Factual errors stress me out when I’m already anxious in a stressful situation. If we’re navigating public transport in a foreign city, or we’re barely on time for some important-ish appointment and someone calls a street by the wrong name. I know it doesn’t matter at all, but it just makes my anxiety worse. Correcting people in that situation is a reflexive action, not even intentional – it’s almost like batting away a wasp hovering in my face. It’s rare, literally happens no more than a handful of times per year. (I have grown to be hyper aware of each time this happens.) But even that was too much, and Eric reacted strongly every time.

Maybe it is all my fault. Maybe my behaviour twenty years ago traumatised him to the extent that even the slightest criticism now is unbearable. I don’t know, but I accept that it is possible. If that’s the case, then we’re in an untenable situation – if he can’t forgive me (for lack of a better word) then we’ll never get past this. The only thing to do then is to accept that and for both us to move on.