‘They say’, ‘They’, that when you fall in love with someone, you begin to learn things about your own self that you never knew before.

I’d always thought this meant something about having the strength to get through rough times, or a beautiful sense of euphoria, ecstasy, and eternal youthfulness.

Actually…
I never knew that I speak with a whistle with words beginning with the ‘s’ sound.
I’m shocked, horrified, insulted, and now extremely self conscious—as though I’ve sprouted some sort of wooden teeth. He swears it’s precious, but I’ve just been told that I have an inherent speech impediment. Worse still, it’s quickly evolving from a whistle sound, to a softened muffled ‘th’ lisp as I try to compensate. In my suspicious mind, it’s certainly a most clever way to shut a chatty woman up. When I ask my family about this, they begin laughing hysterically, and Chris is a huge hit. I even see my father’s hand fly up and actually pat him on the back. (This has NEVER happened…)

“It’s not a tick really, it’s like, a head thingy, probably picked up from someone that you thought was cool’.
When asked what this ‘head thingy’ is, I see this weird valley girl head wobble that seems vaguely familiar enough to be mine. Perhaps, as he also suggests, I did pick it up from the gay; my little brother or something. Or maybe I’m overly caffinated, and this is just the physical manifestation of my perpetual coffee overdose. Maybe delirium tremors brought on from too much drinky-drinky in my college years. Brain damage suffered from anesthesia at the oral surgeon? Too much dodge ball at Saint Eugenes. A desperate cigarette butt I fished out of a foreign ash tray? An old friend that drove me crazy by talking too much?

I try to trick my accuser into feeling guilty in his revelation. “Listen, it is most definitely a tick, probably brought on by some severe imbedded stress and pain.”
“Like what? A WAR? Maybe the poverty you endured as a child? Oooo-ooo maybe the beatings and abuse you somehow managed to pull yourself through…I don’t know how you did it…”
So, there are trade offs to getting to know someone better than you know yourself. Tradeoffs in someone getting to know you better than you know yourself. To knowing that knowing someone else better is better than better knowing yourself…so, you don’t have to. They do.