Another Bubble Burst

 A friend sent me a cartoon earlier this week from the New York Times that offered a particularly bleak window into the state of the contemporary heterosexual marriage. My friend said he found the piece "unsettling" but insightful. I agree it's unsettling—and I would even grant that it's gesturing toward an insight—but I'm not sure it gets there. Or maybe it reaches a different insight from the one it intends.

There are a number of strange things about the piece. One is the title—which I'm sure was chosen by an editor, rather than the author, since it reflects very little of the cartoon's actual contents. The Times's chosen headline reads: "I Quit the Patriarchy and Rescued My Marriage." But in the course of the cartoon, it's by no means clear that she either quit the patriarchy or saved her marriage. 

The author begins by describing how she went into her marriage expecting—on some level—the fairy tale narrative that our society has implicitly promised people from romance—complete with a prince and castle. I was expecting, therefore, that the takeaway might ultimately be that she realized she had projected expectations onto her partner that no one could actually fulfill, and that this has been unfair.

But no; the conclusion of the piece—if I read it correctly—seems to be that the author's position is still correct. She does not renounce the basic justice of her own viewpoint. But she suggests that she learned to give up on the need to articulate her position. She no longer needs to "name" or "define" the source of their problems; she has learned instead to "hold back" and keep her viewpoint "in the dark." 

I don't see anything here about "quitting the patriarchy." She doesn't leave the marriage, for instance, even after acknowledging it's grounded on a patriarchal myth—the "fairy tale" prince. And ultimately, she chooses to suppress her own viewpoint in order to preserve the relationship—hardly a victory for feminism. But it's also not clear the marriage has been "rescued" by this course of action either. The proposed solution of simply biting her tongue and swallowing what she believes to be true doesn't seem particularly workable in the long term. 

For one thing, the proposed "solution" strikes me as disingenuous. The author obviously isn't biting her tongue or keeping any of this in the dark in practice—she's talking about it publicly on the pages of the New York Times opinion section. But even if one were capable of simply suppressing one's own sense of truth about another person—I can't believe that is sustainable for long. 

William Blake told us long ago—in his poem about the "Poison Tree"—everything we need to know about what happens when you try to bury and suppress your rage against another person. "I was angry with my foe:/ I told it not, my wrath did grow," said Blake. This is what "holding back" and keeping your actual viewpoint "in the dark" leads to. In other words, darkness does not actually solve the problem. The dark cellar is where problems sprout mold and mushrooms. 

That is to say, suppressing your actual viewpoint will not make it go away. Of course, the creator of the cartoon disagrees. "Some things heal better, you now understand—in the dark," she writes. But—do they? Or was Blake not closer to the mark. As Blake wrote elsewhere: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." In other words—desires suppressed will only tend to fester. 

But the alternative of simply "naming" and voicing all of your opinions may not work either. We all have run into the futility before of trying to communicate certain truths or experiences to people who simply will not ever understand us. Maybe the truth is that it is too much to expect of any relationship that this will never happen, and the other person will always see things our way. The creator depicts her marriage as evolving from a pair of intersecting lines moving past each other to two new lines running in parallel. But perhaps this is another illusion. 

Ernesto Sabato's novel The Tunnel describes the existential ache of realizing that, in every relationship—no matter how seemingly close—there is an envelope of loneliness that cannot be pierced. The titular  "tunnel" refers to a character's misconception that his romantic partner had been living in a (metaphorical) tunnel parallel to his own. By the novel's cruel end, he admits he had always been alone in his digging. 

The same tragic insight appears in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "The Mirror." The subject of the poem describes the moment of disappointment when one realizes that a loved one does not actually understand one's emotion or perspective. I thought you of all people would get it, we often say to someone close to us at such times. When they don't in fact get it, we experience it as a betrayal. 

This moment of betrayal and disappointment Rossetti describes as "but another bubble burst/Upon the curdling draught of life[.]" He goes on to liken the experience to seeing an object in a "distant mirror" that one takes for a reflection of oneself. One moves one's arm, expecting the distant simulacrum to imitate oneself. When it doesn't, the poem's subject "finds his thought betray'd" and realizes he "must seek elsewhere for his own."

One is reminded very much of Sabato's narrator in his metaphorical tunnel, seeing his partner through a glass wall in its side and believing for an instant that she was in a parallel tunnel of her own. But eventually—he is left to the same cruel insight as the character in Rossetti's poem: all along, he was the only one in a tunnel. Or, to use Rossetti's imagery: there was no reflection, and that was no mirror. He was alone the whole time. 

Perhaps people, then, are simply expecting too much of their relationships. Perhaps, from the origin of the species on, there has never been a way to fully transcend the envelope of the self. Perhaps no one has ever fully merged their viewpoint or selfhood with that of another, and no two lines have ever run perfectly parallel in human life since the beginning of time. 

But maybe this too—ultimately—is the author's point. In the cartoon's last panel, she says that she has "let go of the fairy tale." And maybe the fairy tale wasn't just the patriarchal myth of princes and princesses. Maybe the fairy tale was the illusion that Sabato and Rossetti are describing—the "bubble" that was "burst"—namely, the illusion that we can ever escape the fact of existential loneliness. Maybe the actual myth that needed puncturing was the belief in the glass wall in the tunnel, or the reflection in the "distant mirror." 

Maybe the true fairy tale the author means is the belief that there is any way to achieve a mystical union of the flesh. Perhaps we will all be in our tunnels, waving to each other through the glass walls—and the best we can do is achieve the patience and compassion that it takes to accept the fact of our ultimate existential loneliness, rather than blaming one another for it, or demanding—unrealistically—that romantic relationships will help us escape it. 

And maybe that's the author's real point. Maybe that's what she means about keeping things in the dark, and giving up the desire to name one's own position or truths. Maybe the darkness she has in mind is the darkness of the tunnel. In which case, I take back my criticism above, and think my friend's first reaction to the cartoon was right—unsettling, but insightful.