Some evenings they just existed in the same space and did different things.
She was working — editing something, her laptop open, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair where she kept forgetting them. He was cooking, something with a lot of garlic, a podcast playing quietly from his phone on the counter.
They didn’t talk much on these evenings. That had taken some learning — for her, specifically, because she’d come from a family that filled silence like it was a task. The quiet had felt, in early relationships, like absence.
Now it felt like something else entirely.
Margot looked up from her screen, stretched her neck, and watched him for a moment without him knowing. The easy confidence with which he moved in a kitchen — unhurried, competent, tasting things, adjusting. He’d gotten better over the years, and she’d watched the getting-better, which felt like a specific kind of intimacy.
She went back to her screen. He turned the podcast up slightly when an interesting part came.
Twenty minutes later he set a bowl beside her laptop without interrupting. She didn’t look up, but she reached over and touched his hand briefly as he pulled it back. He squeezed her fingers.
The bowl was the good pasta, the one with the breadcrumbs she particularly liked.
Intimacy, she thought, is comfortable silence in the same room. It’s being known well enough that someone can put exactly the right thing beside you without asking. It’s staying — just staying — without needing every moment to perform.
She ate without stopping her work.
He went back to the stove.
✦ Today’s Reflection
How comfortable are you and your partner in shared silence, and what does that feel like to you?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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