THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 16

I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song

On our wedding day, I sang Daisy a Day¹ to Robyn. It was not tucked away in a private moment when there was nobody else to hear me get it wrong, but offered in front of the people who had gathered to watch us begin whatever it was we thought marriage would become. By the time I finished, every woman in the room appeared to have tears in her eyes, while most of the men looked as though I had committed an offence against the agreed rules of the gender. I had not merely sung to my wife; I had raised the expected standard for every husband present, and they had not been consulted before the motion was carried.

That is how the moment remains in my mind, although memory may have made the division between the women and the men more orderly than it really was. There were probably men who were moved and women who were simply hoping I would finish before the food went cold, but the broader reaction felt unmistakable. The song had reached somewhere ordinary conversation rarely went, particularly among the men of my generation. I had found a way to say something tender in public, and the fact that I had needed Jud Strunk’s words and melody to do it did not seem, at the time, to weaken the declaration.

The song itself carries a whole marriage in a few minutes. It begins with youthful affection, continues through the years and follows the couple into old age, where the small daily gift has become more important than any extravagant display. Its power is not in the cost of the flower but in the repetition, because one daisy is a gesture while a lifetime of them becomes a language. The ending also places mortality quietly inside the romance, which may explain why the women were crying and the men were annoyed with me for having introduced both love and death before the reception had properly settled into itself.

I chose it because I meant it. I was not performing a joke, showing off a voice or trying to win the wedding, although I may have accidentally collected a few points in the husbandly competition that nobody admits is taking place. I wanted Robyn to hear a promise of constancy, and I wanted the people around us to hear it as well. Yet the older I become, the more I recognise the strange contradiction in that moment: I could stand before a room full of people and sing a lifelong promise, but I would often struggle in the years that followed to place much smaller feelings into my own sentences.

That contradiction is where Jim Croce’s I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song² enters this chapter. The title sounds gentle, almost apologetic, but it also contains an admission of failure. The feeling is present, the desire to communicate it is present and even the intended recipient is present, yet the ordinary words will not come out in the required order. A song becomes the translator, carrying what the speaker cannot manage to deliver without accompaniment.

I have always understood that problem more readily than I have solved it. Emotions and I are not strangers, despite whatever impression I may have created from the outside. They are close companions, occasionally too close, crowding the room and talking over one another until none of them can be introduced properly. My difficulty has rarely been an absence of feeling; it has been the conversion of feeling into words that can be safely handed to the people who most deserve to receive them.

That distinction matters because emotional silence is often mistaken for emotional emptiness. A man who does not say what he feels can appear detached, ungrateful or untouched, while inside him the emotional traffic may be banked up for miles. The outside observer sees no movement and reasonably concludes that nothing is there. The man himself knows there is too much there, but knowing that does not excuse the failure to build a road out.

I was raised in a world where emotion was not treated as useful information. Children should be seen and not heard, which meant that a child’s words were already suspect before the feelings behind them had any chance of being considered. Distress was something to get over, sensitivity was an invitation for ridicule and tears were evidence that the lesson had not yet been applied firmly enough. The safest response was not to develop a better emotional vocabulary but to reduce the occasions on which one might be required.

Silence, in that environment, could be mistaken for maturity. The child who stopped protesting was considered to have learned, although what he may actually have learned was that expression increased the danger without changing the outcome. Feelings did not disappear merely because they were unwelcome; they went underground and found less direct ways to survive. Some became fantasy, some became humour, some became fierce internal argument, and some waited until there was enough pressure to return as anger.

The instruction was not only that children should be quiet. Men were expected to become rocks, solid enough to be leaned upon and sufficiently self-contained that nobody had to ask what the weight was doing to them. Paul Simon’s I Am a Rock³ gave that posture a memorable shape, including the claim that isolation can protect a person from pain. I once heard strength in that image more easily than I heard the loneliness, because strength was the part I had been trained to admire.

A rock appears dependable because it does not react. An island appears independent because it does not ask the mainland for help, although both impressions rely upon pretending that a human being can become geography. A man may stand still while the weather hits him, but that does not mean the weather has not entered. He may refuse to cry and still be drowning in something nobody else can see.

The perception is that the rock feels nothing, while the reality is that the man has learned to conceal the evidence. That concealment may make other people more comfortable, especially those who depend upon him to keep functioning, but it does not make him stronger in every sense that matters. It can make him less reachable, less able to ask and less able to recognise when somebody close to him is trying to cross the distance. The island does not avoid the storm; it simply receives it alone.

There was another advantage in becoming useful rather than expressive. Usefulness could be measured, praised and defended, while feeling remained untidy and exposed. I could solve a problem, provide an answer, carry a responsibility or make myself necessary without having to explain what any of it cost me. Love could be converted into service, which is still a form of love, but it is not always the form the other person needs.

That has been one of the recurring mistakes of my life. I have sometimes assumed that people should understand the feeling from the evidence of what I did, as though affection could be reconstructed from a ledger of responsibilities met. The analytical Jeff is comfortable with that approach because the transactions are visible: a problem existed, an action was taken and the required outcome was achieved. The human Jeff knows that relationships are not tax returns and that the supporting documentation may still fail to disclose the most important figure.

Robyn has lived with both versions of me. She has known the man who can speak for hours when there is a problem to analyse, a system to improve or an argument whose logic has offended him, and she has also known the man who can become strangely inarticulate when the sentence concerns gratitude, fear or dependence. She has heard me explain complicated matters in language other people could understand, then watched me fail to use a few uncomplicated words in the room where they mattered most. That is not a charming contradiction when another person has to live inside it.

It is tempting to describe Robyn as my ballast, because she has brought practical steadiness to a life and mind capable of listing without warning. The word carries gratitude, but it also carries a danger. Ballast is hidden below the visible part of the vessel, valued because it absorbs instability while receiving little attention of its own. Robyn is not an object placed in my life to keep me upright, and any praise that reduces her to that function becomes another form of failing to see her.

She has contributed in practical ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they have been reliable. Reliability creates its own invisibility, particularly beside a person whose crises, ideas, responsibilities and darker moods occupy more space than they should. The world notices the ship moving and may congratulate the person standing at the wheel, while the work that kept it from tipping is treated as part of the scenery. I have not always recognised that imbalance while it was happening, and recognition after the fact is useful only if it changes what happens next.

Bob Dylan’s If Not for You⁴ offers another language for dependence. It imagines the beloved as the difference between darkness and light, confusion and direction, winter and the possibility of spring. I understand the emotional truth of that because there are parts of my life that would be difficult to imagine without Robyn’s presence. Yet the older analytical voice also asks whether such declarations can place too much weight upon the person being praised.

To say that I would be lost without her may be true in one sense, but it can also sound like an assignment. It risks turning love into a permanent rescue contract under which Robyn is responsible for my weather, my direction and my ability to find the door. That is not what Dylan necessarily intended, and it is not what I intend when the song enters my thoughts, but intention does not remove consequence. Gratitude should recognise what another person has given without quietly making her responsible for everything that remains unfinished in me.

The same caution applies to the idea that Robyn is the only person who sees certain parts of me. There is intimacy in being known privately, but there can also be an unfairness when the private person receives what the public world is spared. Outside the home, I have usually been able to contain anger behind competence, humour, professional discipline or the practical need to keep moving. Robyn gets the less edited edition, including the rage that can bubble until it breaks the surface.

My father’s anger became part of his notoriety. It did not remain carefully inside the family boundary or submit itself to the discipline of appearances, and I grew up knowing what public and private eruption could do to a room. I did not want to become that man, and in many visible ways I did not. However, I may have been too willing to count privacy as proof of improvement, as though anger becomes harmless once only the person closest to you has to endure it.

It does not. The fact that others see a composed man does not cancel the experience of the person who sees the pressure escape. Control in public may demonstrate that control is possible, which makes its absence in private harder rather than easier to excuse. Robyn’s proximity should not make her the safest place to release what I have refused to name elsewhere.

That is an uncomfortable sentence to write because it shifts the story away from the sympathetic explanation I might prefer. Childhood taught me suppression, masculine culture rewarded it and professional life gave it respectable clothing, but none of those things removes my responsibility for what followed. They explain the architecture without repairing the house. Robyn has had to live in that house, and a song sung beautifully on a wedding day does not protect her from the rooms I later left unattended.

Sport has occasionally opened another escape valve. On a field or course, frustration can appear in public because competition gives men permission to display emotions they would otherwise deny possessing. My anger there is often directed less at another person than at the gap between what my mind believes I should still be able to do and what my body is prepared to deliver. The mind remembers competence, the body supplies evidence, and the disagreement can become audible.

There is something almost comic in expecting a body to obey an instruction merely because the mind considers it reasonable. I have spent a professional life believing that a properly explained position should carry some authority, yet age and health have proved remarkably resistant to the quality of my submissions. The ball does not care about the argument, and the muscles do not accept precedent as binding. Frustration arrives because the body has exposed a limit that thought cannot negotiate away.

The sporting field is therefore one of the few places where the concealed emotional system becomes visible to people beyond Robyn. Even there, the visible anger is not the whole feeling. Beneath it may be grief for lost capacity, fear of decline, embarrassment at failure and the old conviction that worth must be demonstrated through performance. Anger is simply the emotion most culturally authorised to speak on behalf of all the others.

That permission has consequences. A man who cannot say he is frightened may say he is furious, and a man who cannot admit disappointment may attack the standard, the circumstance or himself. The anger sounds strong because it occupies the room, but it is often the least accurate description of what is happening. It is the emergency broadcast transmitted when the ordinary station has lost the language for the weather.

Croce’s song understands that failed translation without pretending the feeling is absent. Its gentleness appealed to me because it did not demand a grand masculine conversion. The man in the song does not suddenly become an orator of emotional precision; he finds another channel and sends the message through that. I did the same on my wedding day, although I chose a different song and a promise that extended across a lifetime.

Borrowed words have always offered me a kind of safety. Somebody else has already tested the sentence, placed it within rhythm and made vulnerability sound intentional rather than accidental. I can step inside the song as I once stepped inside a theatrical role, allowing another voice to carry me into a place I might resist entering alone. The audience receives the emotion, while I retain the small protection of being able to say that I was only singing.

That protection is both useful and dangerous. A song can open a door, but it can also become a decorative screen placed in front of a door I still refuse to use. The fact that I once sang publicly to Robyn does not mean I have consistently spoken privately with her. One memorable declaration cannot carry the daily work of a marriage any more than one daisy can represent a lifetime unless another follows tomorrow.

This is where Daisy a Day has changed for me. On the wedding day, I heard the romance of the grand arc: a boy and girl, years passing, devotion surviving and the small token continuing beyond loss. Now I hear the daily part more strongly than the daisy. Love is not proven by the beauty of an isolated performance but by whether it remains visible in the repetitive, inconvenient and frequently unmusical business of living together.

Real marriage does not move in three-quarter time. It moves through work, money, health, family, tiredness, disagreement, private jokes, practical decisions and mornings when one person’s darkness becomes part of the other person’s day. It contains affection that is not spoken, irritation that is spoken too quickly and gratitude that arrives in the mind but fails to complete the journey to the mouth. The daily gift may be patience, attention, restraint, apology or the willingness to listen without immediately converting the conversation into a repair job.

I have often been better at repair jobs than listening. A problem presented itself and I reached for analysis, because analysis was how I made myself useful and usefulness was how I proved I cared. Yet some feelings do not want to be repaired before they have been heard. Robyn has sometimes needed the human Jeff while the analytical one arrived early, opened his toolkit and began explaining why the structure should not have failed.

That is another form of emotional indirectness. It appears active and responsible, which makes it difficult to recognise as avoidance. Solving the surrounding problem can spare me from sitting with the feeling at its centre, particularly when the feeling includes my own contribution. The person beside me may receive a plan when what she needed was acknowledgement.

The failure is not that I feel too little. It is that the feelings can remain trapped inside a system designed to process them without public display. They circulate, gather supporting evidence, revisit old hearings and eventually produce conclusions far more severe than the original event justified. The analytical mind, deprived of honest emotional evidence, becomes a prosecutor working from incomplete records.

That is rich food for the Black Dog. Unspoken affection becomes doubt about whether I have loved well enough, unspoken regret becomes a case against my character, and unspoken fear becomes proof that something terrible is already approaching. The Dog does not require an accurate account; it requires silence in which it can prepare one. When I cannot turn emotion into words, it supplies its own language, and its language is rarely generous.

Rage also feeds it. The eruption may provide a momentary release, but it leaves shame, damage and the knowledge that the wrong emotion was given the microphone. Afterwards, the mind reviews the event with the relentless precision it might once have applied to a difficult file. Every sentence is replayed, every failure enlarged and every explanation cross-examined until explanation begins to sound like excuse.

Robyn may see the anger, but she also sees what follows it. She sees the retreat, the self-accusation and the exhaustion that comes from fighting both the original feeling and the consequences of its expression. That does not make the eruption easier for her, and her understanding should never be treated as an unlimited credit facility. Love can endure much, but endurance is not the same as an obligation to absorb whatever another person has failed to process.

The strange part is that writing has allowed me to do what conversation often has not. On the page, I can remain with a feeling long enough to find its edges, test the first explanation and admit where the more comfortable story is incomplete. I can revise a sentence before it wounds somebody, although I cannot revise the years in which the sentence was never spoken. Writing gives the two Jeffs time to consult rather than forcing one of them to seize the microphone.

Even that contains a danger. A chapter addressed to the difficulty of speaking can become another elaborate way of avoiding the simple act of speaking. I can write thousands of words about loving Robyn and still leave her to discover them after I have arranged them for a reader. The book may be honest, but honesty published at a distance is not identical to honesty offered across the room.

Perhaps this chapter is another song. It uses form, memory and the work of other writers to help me approach what I still find hard to say directly. The difference, I hope, is that the borrowed words are no longer being asked to carry the whole message. They provide the doorway, but the admission on the other side must be mine.

What I wanted to say on our wedding day remains true. Robyn has been companion, witness, steadiness, challenger and the person who has lived closest to both the competence and the cost of it. She has received less of the tenderness than the feeling itself should have produced, and more of the overflow than she ever deserved. No romantic song can balance that account, because marriage is not an account and love is not discharged by a declaration made once.

The men who looked annoyed when I sang may have understood more than I gave them credit for. Perhaps their annoyance was partly recognition that I had used music to cross a boundary they also found difficult. The song made visible what many of us preferred to leave implied, and implication had been our safest dialect. We could provide, protect, work, joke and remain present in all the practical ways, while hoping the people beside us would translate the rest.

Some did translate it, because love is often perceptive and generous. Yet asking another person to spend a lifetime interpreting silence is not the same as speaking. It places the risk of misunderstanding upon the person already carrying the emotional weight. The words may come out awkwardly, but awkward words offered in time are kinder than elegant words discovered too late.

I still understand Croce’s need to say it in a song. I may always need music, writing, humour and borrowed language to help loosen what was locked away before I had the tools to name it. Those forms are not failures; they are part of the voice I eventually built from what survived. The failure occurs only when I use them as substitutes for the ordinary sentences that Robyn should not have to wait for.

The rock was never without pain, and the island was never beyond tears. They were images of protection created by somebody who feared what contact might cost, and I recognise that fear more clearly now than I recognise strength. Protection can become imprisonment when nobody can enter and nothing honest can leave. The Black Dog has always preferred that arrangement because it thrives where feeling is intense, language is scarce and shame controls the door.

I cannot promise that understanding this will make me fluent. Habits formed in childhood and rewarded across decades do not disappear because they have finally been described accurately. I can, however, stop pretending that silence is strength, that usefulness is a complete vocabulary or that private rage is harmless because the public never sees it. Robyn deserved the song on our wedding day, but she also deserved all the unremarkable sentences that should have followed it.

The radio in my head will probably continue to provide assistance. It may offer Croce when I need confession, Dylan when gratitude needs a shape, Strunk when I have forgotten that love is daily, or Simon when the old fortress begins presenting itself as wisdom. I no longer have to accept every selection as an instruction, but I can listen for what it has recognised. Then, before the music finishes and the safer voice disappears, I have to try to say the words myself.

Notes

1. Daisy a Day was written and recorded by Jud Strunk. His MGM recording was first released as a single in late 1972 and appeared on the 1973 album Daisy a Day.
2. I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song was written and recorded by Jim Croce. It appeared on his posthumously released 1973 album I Got a Name and was issued as a single in 1974.
3. I Am a Rock was written by Paul Simon. Simon first recorded it for The Paul Simon Songbook in 1965; the version widely known through Simon & Garfunkel appeared on Sounds of Silence in 1966.
4. If Not for You was written and recorded by Bob Dylan and released in 1970 as the opening track of New Morning.