You learn something about your own country by being outside it during an election.

Everyone has an opinion about America. People who will never live there, can’t vote there, may not even particularly like the place, follow an American presidential race with astonishing attention. They know the candidates. They know the scandals. They know which states matter.

And if you’re the American in the room, eventually somebody asks.

I was living in New Delhi, India during one of those years.

Once a month I met a group of women to explore the city. Delhi is really several cities layered on top of one another — capitals built, abandoned, conquered, rebuilt. We were working our way through seven of them, one Saturday at a time.

A guide would take us through a fort or a tomb or what remained of an old city wall, and afterward we’d have lunch somewhere nearby. There were usually eighteen or twenty of us. Indian women and expats. British, German, Australian, American. Women whose husbands were posted there for work and women whose families had been in Delhi for generations.

I had moved often enough by then to know the peculiar rhythm of a posting. You arrive knowing almost no one. You make friends quickly because there isn’t much point in pretending you have years. You find the grocery store and the doctor and the person who can tell you where to buy something you didn’t realize would be difficult to buy. Slowly, a place that isn’t yours begins to feel familiar.

Those women were part of that for me.

I liked them. I liked our mornings together. I liked walking through places old enough to make our own little dramas seem ridiculous.

And then election season arrived.

Politics began turning up at lunch.

For the most part, I stayed out of it. I listened. Other people talked. Nobody seemed especially interested in what I thought, and I was perfectly happy to leave it that way.

Until one day someone asked me directly who I supported in the primary.

I answered.

The table gasped. Actually gasped.

I remember that more clearly than anything anyone said afterward: the sudden intake of breath around me.

Then lunch continued.

Nobody yelled at me. Nobody told me I was a terrible person. It was much more civilized than that. The conversation simply moved on without me.

There was a woman on the ballot, and for several women at that table her candidacy meant something I hadn’t fully understood. It wasn’t simply a matter of preferring one politician to another. They had waited a long time to see a woman get that close to the presidency.

I was a woman too.

Apparently that fact had come with expectations.

What surprised me was how hurt I felt.

Twenty minutes earlier I had been a person they knew. Not terribly well, but at least in the ordinary ways people know one another. I had a family. I had opinions about restaurants. I loved the history we were learning. I could tell Humayun’s Tomb from Safdarjung’s.

Then I answered one question, and suddenly all of that seemed to collapse into a single fact about me.

I went home angry.

For a long time, the story I told myself was that they had put me in a box. They had.

What took me longer to notice was that I had done exactly the same thing to them.

I had been listening to those conversations for months. I knew what several of the women thought politically. Or at least I thought I did. I had never asked why. I had never asked what mattered to them, or what experience sat underneath those opinions, or whether the reasons I had assigned them were remotely accurate.

I had filled in the blanks myself.

At that lunch, perhaps eight women were actively part of the political conversation. In my memory, though, the whole table became one thing. They had judged me. They had decided what kind of woman I was. They were unwilling to hear another point of view.

I didn’t know that. I had built a version of them just as surely as they had built a version of me.

And nobody asked anybody anything.

That may be the part that has stayed with me longest.

Years later, as I was developing the Practice of Dialogue, I gave one of its beams a deliberately simple premise:

Understanding is not endorsement.

It sounds obvious when you read it on a page. It does not always feel obvious when you’re sitting across from someone whose answer has just disappointed you.

Sometimes trying to understand them feels disloyal.

If the issue touches something you care deeply about — your family, your faith, your country, your sense of justice, your own experience — curiosity can feel suspiciously close to surrender. You can feel yourself wanting to say, I already understand enough.

I know that feeling because I had it at that table.

And because, apparently, I’ve been having the argument with those women in my head ever since.

For years I composed the things I wished I had said that afternoon. Brilliant rebuttals delivered eight hours late. Devastating follow-up questions. The sort of conversation in which everyone pauses eventually and realizes I have made an excellent point.

This is not a particularly useful hobby.

Eventually I tried writing the questions down.

A few were real questions.

What is it about her candidacy that matters so much to you? That one I wish I had asked.

Another might have been: If the same positions belonged to a different candidate, would you feel the same way?

I would have wanted to hear the answer.

But most of what I had been calling questions weren’t questions at all. They were arguments with question marks at the end.

I wasn’t curious. I wanted an opening. There is a difference, and I still don’t catch myself every time. A real question contains the possibility that the answer may complicate what you already believe. Maybe not change it. Maybe not even move it very far. But complicate it.

That’s what I wasn’t willing to risk at that lunch.

I wanted them to understand me before I had made any serious attempt to understand them.

Afterward, I kept going on the tours.

The women who had been sitting closest to me that day never really spoke to me again. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no confrontation and no official rupture. We still sat at the same long tables. We still admired the same buildings. We still said hello.

There was simply a little pocket of quiet where there hadn’t been one before.

Then eventually our posting ended, as postings do. We left Delhi. Life moved on.

A few of those women are still connected to me on social media, which may be the modern world’s most efficient way of remaining vaguely aware of people you once had the opportunity to know.

It would be easy to say the loss was insignificant.

Eight acquaintances. One lunch. A city I no longer live in. Years ago.

Maybe it was.

But I’ve come to think this is how most separation actually happens. Not through spectacular arguments or families tearing themselves apart. A conversation gets a little shorter. Someone stops asking. A room becomes quieter by one person. The losses accumulate in increments too small to mourn.

We spent those months walking through the remains of cities built by people who were certain their version would last. And somewhere in the middle of all that history, at a restaurant table in Delhi, I had two questions I genuinely wanted answered.

I didn’t ask either one.

The field guide includes a section on this exact moment — when trying to understand someone begins to feel like betraying something you believe. It goes to everyone who signs the Pledge.

Part 7 of 14