Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

He couldn’t seem to convey to her that he was a real person, that he was not a blinking cursor awaiting her instructions, that he still existed when she wasn’t in a room with him.

Was the marriage over when the problems that would never get solved started or when they finally agreed that the problems couldn’t be solved or when other people finally learned about it?

“But why does that annoy you?” Toby asked. She couldn’t explain it. Only later would he see that when something created annoyance in her as a result of envy, that was how she knew she wanted it.

His mother had always told him to look at his neighbors and ask himself if he wanted his children to turn out like them, because they would. Neighbors, she’d said, were a far more powerful force than parents. Neighbors were how you voted for a child’s future.

“Marriage is for young people who don’t have a concept of time,”

Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that?

Fuck

Nobody told you how important it would be to constantly appear stable while you were getting a divorce, because everything you said and did would be more meaningful and poignant than you’d intended.

“I’ve been in training for old age my whole life,”

To be a woman at a men’s magazine is to have a very specific task: It’s either to be compliant or noisy, to be the category: other person asking the questions that a man wasn’t allowed to ask in a time of burgeoning political correctness, or to be the wide-eyed kitten that maybe had sex with her subject.

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.

It was an obsession with sex and a wholesale contempt for what he saw as the condition of the sex, or its barrier, or its delivery device: the actual women. The actual women weren’t really people. They were just a theory.

Your softness was no longer a liability. The softness was now the point.

Are you supposed to want to get married? Or are you just supposed to marry the person you’re into when you decide it’s time to get married?”

“I feel like I have to tiptoe around my success, that he loves what the money brings and hates me for bringing it.”

the advantage in couples therapy accrued to the person who could hold their shit together.

less fortunate people are more accepting of these things. Not the rich ones. Rich patients couldn’t believe that money couldn’t help, that their positions and club memberships and status couldn’t help. They couldn’t believe that nobody was coming to save them.

I think you don’t get that marriage isn’t really about your spouse.”

what if we search to make sure we are lovable and worthy of someone who commits to us absolutely and exclusively, and the only way we can truly confirm we are worth these things is if someone wants to marry us; someone says, ‘Yes, you are the one I will love exclusively. You are worthy of this.’ And then, only when you’re actually married, once this need is fulfilled, you can for the first time wonder if you even wanted to be married or not. The only problem with that is that by the time you realize you have access to love, you’re already married, and it is an awful lot of cruelty and paperwork to undo that just because you didn’t know you wouldn’t want it once you had it.”

A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.

He was angry, and he could no longer see why the winning move was to pretend he wasn’t.

he would find Rachel and blow his anger at her until she ceased to exist so that she would only have the brief satisfaction of being right for a few seconds, and that his rage would be the last thing she ever knew before she evaporated.

she was one of the only women Rachel had ever met who was truly free. She had no burdens. She thought she did—her wealth, her sense of social responsibility, her kids who were raised by an army of other people—but being born rich, you never really know about burden, or survival, no matter how much you think you feel it.

Miriam Rothberg was able to think straight and read books and think about who she would vote for and be sexually available to her husband because that was what money did. It bought you an additional life that ran parallel to your regular life, and between those two lives your goals were somehow achieved and everyone around you was satisfied.

She didn’t yet realize that children’s love was like parents’ love: It was understanding and enduring and destined to be a little fucked up.

sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.

She

here

The teachers would call her a working mom, and somehow that was insulting even as it was true. Maybe because it was such a rarity in the school. Maybe because it applied an asterisk to her name and seemed to be an explanation for why she was falling short.

As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it.

Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.

She felt so bad for anyone who remained allegiant to a life they’d built just because they’d built it.

He would divorce her and what these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore.

When