Crisis or opportunity?

The woman I'm in love with announced last night that she's "unhappy with the relationship".

This after my repeated inquiries over the past several weeks as to whether anything was wrong and repeated denials and reassurances that everything with us was fine. Maybe I'm too 'male' in my approach to these things - I want to find out what's wrong quickly, talk about it (not usually the male way, or so I'm told), and then work on fixing it. But this pattern of denial, reassurance, signal, detection, denial, reassurance, signal, detection, denial, reassurance, etc., is one I've seen before from a lot of women I've been involved with, so there must be something that I'm doing that makes it a safe or comfortable option for dealing with things.

It's maddening. I want to fix what is wrong. I want to talk about what might be wrong. I want to clear up misunderstandings. Isn't that what men are always accused of not being able to do? And yet.

The title is a joke - that hoary old cliche about the Chinese characters, blahblahblah. Yes, the Holocaust represented a wonderful opportunity for Polish Jews to rid themselves of their troublesome bridgework, offspring, mortgages, etc... Just the same way that the Cultural Revolution was a wonderful opportunity for the 'intellectuals' to experience famine with the peasantry after denouncing their parents to the Red Guards.

I think it's just a crisis.