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Shikha Sharma
My husband got a promotion last March.
It was a good promotion. The kind that comes with a new title and a meaningful increase and a set of responsibilities he had been working toward for two years. He called me from the office when he found out and his voice had the quality it has when something has happened that he is genuinely happy about and has not yet processed. I was happy for him. I am still happy for him.
I was also, at exactly the same time and in equal measure, going through a professional period that was not a promotion. A period of waiting and not-quite-getting-there and watching opportunities not land in the way you had hoped they would. Nothing had gone wrong. Nothing bad had happened. The trajectory was fine. But the trajectory was not a promotion.
We had both been working hard. We had both been doing the things that are supposed to lead somewhere. One of them led to a promotion in March. The other one was still leading.
I came home that evening. He had picked up dinner from the place we like and there was Sunfeast Marie Light on the table for after and he was visibly trying to be both celebratory and sensitive simultaneously, which is a difficult thing to navigate and which he was navigating with more care than I had expected.
He said I want to be happy about this with you.
I said I want to be happy about this with you too.
We sat with both of those sentences for a moment. They were both true. They were also, each of them, not the complete picture.
The Complication
The complication is not resentment. I want to be specific about this.
I was not resentful of the promotion. The promotion was his. He had earned it. The work he had done was real and the recognition was deserved and my not having a promotion at the same time was not caused by his having one. These things are not connected. His good thing is not the reason I did not have a good thing at the same time.
But feelings do not always follow the logic of what is not connected.
In the moment of his promotion, my own professional moment was thrown into sharper relief by contrast. Not because he had taken something from me. Because the contrast was simply present. He was at a milestone. I was between milestones. The between-milestones is fine on ordinary days. On the day of his promotion it was more visible than usual.
My friend Priya went through this with her husband two years ago, in reverse. She was promoted. He was not. She said she had felt, unexpectedly, almost guilty about it. Not that she did not deserve it. But that the timing meant she was arriving somewhere while he was still en route and the dynamic between them had briefly shifted and she was not sure how to hold the shift without making it bigger than it was.
She said the thing that helped was that he said congratulations first and meant it fully. The fullness of the congratulations left no space for the complication. She received the congratulations and the complication still existed but it had less room.
What He Did
What my husband did was the right thing.
He did not diminish his own good news. He was happy about the promotion and he let himself be happy about it. He did not perform sensitivity by pretending the promotion was less than it was. That would have been its own kind of wrong, a diminishment that would have introduced a different complication.
He also did not ignore what was happening with me. He did not pretend we were both at the same place. He acknowledged, without making it the centre of the evening, that things were not symmetrical right now and that he saw that and that the asymmetry was temporary.
Temporary was the right word. The asymmetry is temporary. I know this. He knows this. Saying it out loud made it easier to hold.
My friend Kabir has been on both sides of this in his marriage. His wife was promoted twice before he was. He was promoted once and she has not been since. He said both sides feel different from the outside than they do from the inside. On the outside, when she was promoted, he thought he was fine and he was mostly fine and some part of him was not fine and the not-fine part was small and he managed it without it becoming anything. On the inside, when he was promoted, he was happy and then he noticed she was quieter than usual and the noticing made the happiness more complicated than it had been in the moment of finding out.
He said the quieter was not resentment. He knows his wife. The quieter was her processing the asymmetry in the way she processes things, which is quietly and then she was done and she congratulated him and the quieter was over.
He said he wished he had waited for the quieter to pass before asking if she was okay. He asked while she was still in it. She said she was fine. She was fine. It would have been better to let her arrive at fine herself.
What It Left
The promotion evening ended well. We had dinner and the Marie Light and we talked about what the promotion meant and what came next for him and what I was working toward and what came next for me.
The asymmetry was on the table but it was not the centre of the table. It was just there, acknowledged, not inflated.
He knows I will get there. I know I will get there. The there is just not the same March.
My friend Meera said the best thing her husband ever said to her during an asymmetric period was: I am rooting for you in the specific way that I am rooting for myself. She said she held that sentence for a long time.
My husband has not said that sentence. He has said the equivalent of it in other ways, across other months.
I am rooting for him too.
We are going in the same direction.
The timing is occasionally different.
