The Radical Idea That Feelings Should Leave Your Head

Boston man Gerald Ullman is being asked to do something no one warned him about when he entered a relationship: turn the feelings in his head into words, and say those words out loud, to another person, using his mouth.

He is not taking it well.

"I just don't get what she means when she says I should use my mouth to communicate," Gerald said, visibly wounded by the suggestion that thoughts require transportation. For years, his internal monologue had served him just fine, humming along privately, understood by exactly one person: him. Now someone wants access to it. Someone wants a translation.

Friends describe Gerald as a man who has never once said "I'm upset" and instead prefers a rich, expressive silence, occasionally punctuated by sighing at a volume he insists is normal. He has apparently mastered fourteen distinct varieties of shrug, each meant to convey a specific emotional state, none of which his girlfriend has correctly decoded, despite what he calls her having "known him for three years now."

Sources close to Gerald confirm he remains baffled that gazing meaningfully out a window has failed, again, to produce the outcome of being understood.

He is currently considering whether the relationship can survive this level of scrutiny, this demand that he perform the basic maintenance of being a person with an inner life connected to an outer one. He has not ruled out journaling about it, alone, forever.

Distilled from The Onion