Telling my wife I love her

“Oh, my god,” my friend says, rushing up to me, “Did you hear about the Norwegian farmer?”

“No, what?” I ask.

“He said he loves his wife so much he almost told her.”

This is the kind of joke I heard growing up in a Norwegian-American family. It’s one of many light-hearted critiques of Scandinavian reserve. Another of these jokes I heard defined the difference between Norwegian introverts and extroverts — introverts look at their shoes when they talk to you, while extroverts look at your shoes.

This famous Norwegian reserve is part of a broader cultural sensibility we often attach to Americans of northern European Protestant Christian backgrounds. The Minnesota writer Carol Bly, who worked for the National Farmers Union, published an entire book — “Letters from the Country” — in which she sought to understand and articulate some of the reasons why we often feel lonely and dissatisfied. One of the things Bly noted was that Midwestern mothers taught their children three rules above all: be nice; think nice things; and if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything. That is, be reserved.

Of course, as Bly knew, we should try to be nice — don’t be rude to people. But the rule to think nice things — that’s never going to fly. Still, our thoughts can stay inside us, so perhaps we can modify this to say, “don’t cling to your cruel thoughts and don’t act on them.” It’s rule No. 3 that worried Bly the most, for in saying nothing, we often repress truths that need to be told for our own good and the good of those around us. Sometimes the truth really will set us free.

I have a friend who came to Wyoming after living much of her life in New York City, where she said people met regularly and talked about everything, including their fears, their anger, their doubts — in short, their feelings. If they couldn’t meet in person, they talked on the phone. “Every day,” my friend told me, “Talk, talk, talk about everything. We knew each other. Here in Wyoming, you could live next door to someone for 10 years and know almost nothing about them. Hello, hello and that’s that, plenty said.”

While my friend’s experience may be at the extreme end of our culture of reserve, it’s not completely inaccurate. I, too, have noticed that it can be hard to get to know people. Another friend told me that when he moved to Wyoming, people asked him which church he would attend. When he explained that he was not a churchgoer, he was then asked how he thought he was going to make friends. Staying in our own closed spheres is another part of reserve.

One thing that happens when we practice too much reserve is that minor disagreements and social conflicts get bottled up. Time goes by, and we’re jamming more and more of these pieces of discord into the bottle until one day it can’t hold anything else and we explode. We go to meetings where people shout obscenities at one another, where someone gets shoved or punched. Our annoyances, kept in check for too long, become rage — and then, watch out.

I was once at a rather fancy dinner party here in Wyoming where people got to arguing about politics. I expressed views that another person disagreed with and as we talked, the person suddenly stopped and asked me, “Where are you from?”

“What does where I’m from have to do with the subject?”

“Where are you from?”

“Really, it has nothing to do with…”

“Where are you from?” The person asked yet again with barely withheld fury.

“Well, I live here in Wyoming but I was born in Oregon and grew up in Arizona.”

“Born in Oregon — that’s just the East Coast on the West Coast.”

That was the end of the talk, as my place of birth was enough to indicate that whatever I said was not worthy of consideration. It was as if I’d drunk dangerous thoughts with my mother’s milk.

All these little vignettes are related in that they deal with how we understand reserve and its link to both politeness and social conflict. I think Carol Bly is right in arguing for telling the truth, while I recognize that we can’t tell all the truth all the time. Maybe in those moments when the truth won’t serve anyone, reserve is the best option. But really, reserve’s limitations or possibilities aside, that Norwegian farmer should tell his wife he loves her.