Patience

What Patience means in a partnership

You ask where your partner would like to live next year. Before they finish thinking, you offer a city, a neighborhood and an argument about the weather. Your question has become a guided tour. You stop and let them begin with what matters to them. They want to be nearer their aging parents, but do not yet know what that would mean for your work. There is more here than a choice of postcode.

Patience gives a worthwhile conversation time to become more than the first available answer. A person may need to find language for an uncertain preference, consider a change or untangle two competing wishes. Leaving room for that work is an active choice: you keep listening without filling every pause. Where a practical decision has a deadline, agree how to return to it. Time should help both people participate rather than quietly decide the matter for them.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

Whether to have children

Make room for uncertainty and different hopes without treating an unfinished answer as consent.

Family holidays

Let each person explain what a visit means before deciding how to divide time between families.

Nearby virtues, different work

Attentiveness

Attentiveness listens for what is emerging. Patience permits the process to take the time it needs.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Avoidance counterfeits Patience when “giving it time” replaces any intention to return to a shared decision. A pause needs room for both people’s choices; it is not a promise of indefinite availability.

Cultivating Patience

• Notice when your next suggestion would answer your own question.
• Distinguish a deadline imposed by circumstances from urgency created by your discomfort with uncertainty.

Try it today

In a conversation both of you want, leave room for an unfinished answer. If time matters, agree how and when to return to the decision.

Questions worth returning to

• What did the pause allow the other person to discover?
• Did I make uncertainty easier to discuss or harder to admit?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. Now I am going to ask you a question, dearest of mine, and you will consider it carefully and examine your own wishes in respect to it, before I have any answer. In fact it is not necessary to treat of the subject of it at all at this moment—we have a great deal of time before us.

   Elizabeth Barrett Browning · The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. II
   Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Robert Browning, Tuesday, postmarked 2 June 1846; Vol. II, page 198; Tuesday. [Post-mark, June 2, 1846.];
   Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett in the correspondence) · Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1899, second impression; correspondence 1845–1846

   Barrett asks Browning to consider whether they should travel separately to Italy or postpone their plans. She leaves time for him to examine what he wants before answering.

2. We must wait for each other a long while; but Fred knows that.

   George Eliot · Middlemarch
   Chapter LXXXVI, Mary speaking with Caleb about Fred; CHAPTER LXXXVI.;
   Mary Garth · H. M. Caldwell, New York and Boston; undated imprint in captured transcription

   Mary and Fred’s marriage depends on making a workable living. She describes a wait they both understand, after his conduct has begun to earn her family’s confidence.

3. They will learn each other’s ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their whole weight.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers
   Virginibus Puerisque, I;
   Robert Louis Stevenson · 1897 Chatto & Windus edition transcription; Project Gutenberg 386

   Stevenson imagines familiarity becoming a practical knowledge of one another. The learning takes time: different situations call for different kinds of approach.

4. She promised to think of it, and advised him to think of it more …

   Jane Austen · Emma
   Volume III, chapter XV, the proposed move to Hartfield;
   Narrator · Project Gutenberg 158 transcription; print imprint not identified

   Knightley proposes moving into Emma’s home so she can remain with her father. She recognizes the cost to his habits and gives a major shared decision further consideration.

5. I will not be such a hypocrite as to pretend that I desire to wait so long myself, but as my marriage is to please myself, alone, I ought to consult my friends about the time of it.

   Anne Brontë · The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
   Chapter LIII, Conclusion;
   Helen Huntingdon · John Murray, London, 1920; selected novel text excludes Mary A. Ward’s introduction

   Helen wants to marry Gilbert but asks him to accept a delay. Her desire is real, and so is her wish to make room for people affected by the decision.

6. Bless you, dearest—I cannot but acquiesce in your postponing our day for such reasons.

   Robert Browning · The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. II
   Vol. II, letter accepting a postponed shared plans; Wednesday Morning. [Post-mark, September 2, 1846.];
   Robert Browning, writing to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett · Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1899, second impression; correspondence 1845–1846

   Robert accepts a delay in their plans despite his impatience. The surrounding letter considers illness, Elizabeth’s circumstances and the practical risks of their departure.

7. Slowly, gradually, by successive experiments, we shall find out how to meet new demands …

   Charlotte Perkins Gilman · The Home: Its Work and Influence
   Concluding discussion of changes in the home;
   Charlotte Perkins Gilman · Charlton Company, New York, 1910 republication; copyright 1903

   Gilman expects domestic arrangements to develop through experiments. A shared home can be improved by trying and revising an arrangement.

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