Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman? (Reworked)

From this

At the clinic, he had been looking at her as she listened attentively to the doctor. They could not have children. It had to be either adoption or surrogacy. She had listened calmly to the details of her anatomical inadequacies that made motherhood biologically impossible. Her heart had wept. But she was not the one given to outbursts. So she had been clinical and incisive on herself. Husband and wife had walked out of the clinic in silence.

They had met, while still fledglings, mind full of ideals and eyes full of dreams. It had been intellectual chemistry of the purest kind. They could talk for hours about philosophy, books, the sciences, politics and history. Then they fell in love, or rather he thought he did. He asked her to marry him. She agreed readily. She would have told you matter of factly, if you had cared to ask, that their mental frequencies matched, as did their outlook in life, and that was good enough reason to marry. If you had probed further into her psyche, with a surgeon's knife, ruthlessly and pesistently, you would have clearly seen that what she felt for him could only be best described as adulation. His was a discerning intelligence that could appreciate, equally well, the elegance in a physics equation, Bach's Concerto in D Minor for two violins, Shelley, Jung's hypotheses and Michealangelo's David. Every moment with him opened new possibilities. That he had asked her to marry him had been the highest compliment to her intelligence. Their love was built on mutual respect and admiration. What she most feared was that he would fall out of love with her. So she moulded herself more and more into the 'intellectual'.

He would have been a little more poetical (for in this story, the hero is the incurable romantic.) He had wanted to marry her for all the right reasons and some more - the look of her eyes just before they closed after a tiring day, her rare smiles when she unburdened herself, just for an instant though, the way she would doodle on the piano, carelessly like an errant child, after careful hours of Mozart and Bach. He just felt like holding her then, on to those moments of intimate pleasure of glimpsing the child woman in her, the moments when she let her heart rule her clinical mind.

Five years flew by. They were flying high in their respective careers. They lived in a huge apartment that was picture perfect. They no longer had the time for long intellectual conversations. Over dinner, he would remark that some book he was reading was good and she would make a mental note to read it. But it would be forgotten the next day. Sometimes, very rarely, during a Sunday afternoon after lunch, he would look up from some technical journal, and hear her playing on the piano. He would walk towards her study, and stand outside the door listening. All of a sudden Pachelbel's Canon in D would dissolve into mismatched notes and her humming. He would close his eyes and smile, grateful that he had not walked in and missed the pleasure of hearing these sounds. But these moments were few and far between. He didnt know she doodled because she thought he would not be listening. In fact, she didn't want him to listen to this side of her.

If you had applied the surgeon's knife to our hero's thoughts at about this time, you would have sensed discomfort in every layer. He was not sure how or why, but he saw his wife, his love, disappearing before his very eyes. One fine morning, the truth hit him. Children. They needed to have kids. That was the missing link. He smiled when he thought of a daughter just like her. Maybe he would have a piano in his study where his very own BonnieBlueButler would doodle endlessly. There would be no need for him to listen from behind closed doors. But fate had other ideas.

Six months later, they found themselves walking out of the clinic. "Well," she said brightly, "adoption is some idea, don't you think? Wonder why it didn't occur to us before..." He stood paralysed, looking at her, as if trying to understand something. If only she had shed a tear on hearing the news...if only she had shown some kind of emotion...if only she had been devastated for an instant and then reconciled herself. She was heartless. She had no emotions. She was a robot. What had he fallen in love with? He felt revulsion filling him rapidly. He needed to get out of there. He quietly turned and walked out of the clinic and out of her life.

Would the story have ended differently had he realised that that he needed her to show her emotions for him to know they existed, that she had to shed tears, for him to understand her devastation?