Less Than He Bargained For
I have grapheme-color synesthesia. Basically, I see letters and numbers in colors. The letter ‘E’ being green, for example. A couple of months ago, I was explaining it to my boyfriend who’s a bit of a skeptic. He asked me what color certain letters and numbers were and had me write them down. Since then, he’ll randomly quiz me and compare my answers to what I said a few months ago.
My answers are always pretty much the same, of course. Still, he still seemed a bit skeptical, as if maybe I just memorized them really well. Tonight we were laying in bed and my boyfriend quizzed me again. I tried explaining to him I just see the colors automatically when I visualize the letters in my head. Then I asked him what color are the letters in his head.
He looked at me weirdly like, “What do you mean ‘in my head,’ that’s not a thing.” My boyfriend didn’t understand what I meant by visualizing the letters AT ALL. He didn’t believe me that I can visualize letters or even visualize anything in my head, let alone anyone else on the planet. Welp, it turns out my boyfriend has aphantasia. When he tries to visualize stuff, he just sees blackness.
He can’t picture anything in his mind and thought that everyone else had it the same way. He thought it was just an expression to say “picture this” or etc. It’s crazy to him that I can even picture his face without looking at him or a banana without looking at it. Now I have a boyfriend who is really upset. He feels like his world is turned upside down and everybody else has this cool superpower.
He’s been texting all his friends and seeing if they can imagine stuff and realizing I wasn’t pulling his chain. He’s pretty upset and I feel really bad. For what it’s worth, my boyfriend wasn’t being a jerk when it came to quizzing me, it was more of a fun curiosity thing or a science experiment. He never thought I was lying. I think it’s one thing to wrap your head around synesthesia when you can visualize normally, but it’s way harder when you have aphantasia.