Songfacts®:

• Statistics show that almost 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce. As anyone who's been through it, or who knows anyone who's been through it, divorce is an ugly thing. Getting through one will strain the bounds of the human ability to cope.
  
  Sometimes, coping with the seas that rage beneath the surface of a doomed marriage result in a situation that singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters describes as becoming "almost polite" with one another. It's the gradual, subtle shutting down of emotions stemming from the death of communication where "there's too much anger, too much water under the bridge, too much pain" for the marriage to recover. She's been there. "I think the problem is that, if you're separating a relationship, usually one party gets to the realization first," says Peters. "It's not usually arrived at simultaneously. I think the other thing I was really trying to get across in this song... there comes this point when you almost start to be polite with each other, because the situation is so strained and so strange. So you don't even have the intimacy left to fight. And that point I really wanted to try and get across. Because having been in the situation, I just thought, wow, this is so weird. You get to where you've lost so much intimacy that you even feel that sort of weird, distant kind of politeness."
• Having experienced the struggle that sometimes accompanies songwriting, Peters says this song happened the other way around. It came on like a sudden storm. "It wasn't calculated. Actually, that song was one that really poured out, basically, in one sitting. It wasn't as though I sat down and thought, Hmmm, well, this is what I'm going to try to convey here. I mean, it just kind of came out. You know, one of those." (Check out our interview with Gretchen Peters. Her website is gretchenpeters.com.)