from college; I’d come from middle-class suburbia and those were the values I returned to, undergraduate philosophy sliding off me like the extra pounds from dining-hall food and Everclear punch. My husband had attended a state school where they hadn’t waded knee-deep in identity politics and irony. He professed his love to me in an e-mail, after a chatty message about some repairshe was having done on his car. He was forthright and direct.
PS,
he wrote,
I love you.
In person, this became his thing. At the end of a phone call: “Well, I’ve gotta go,” he’d say. “PS, I love you.” Sometimes he’d even hang up, then call back to say it.
After the wedding, he joined an Internet startup that was targeted immediately by enthusiastic investors, and all of a sudden we were floating in money. We had salaries and stock options and a brand-new car. My husband began speaking in acronyms. I’d thought
PS
was cute but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. He had code for everything. BRB, he’d say when he was going to be right back. IMO, when offering an opinion on current events.
One night, at a dinner party, I heard him say, “LOL!” He wasn’t laughing, or even talking about it using real words; he was using the
code
for laughing instead of just chuckling, as if throwing back his head and laughing would be too much trouble, and take too much time.
What would Derrida say about that?
I wondered. It made me hate him—my husband, not Derrida.
You might think it’s a small thing, the use of Internet-derived acronyms in ordinary conversation, and of course you’d be right. But it became an emblem of everything about my husband’s new and prosperous and grown-up self that I didn’t recognize. And it swelled up right in front of me, inflating like a balloon, until it obscured everything that had once drawn us together. My irritation was so gigantic it filled the horizon; it made me miserable every single moment of every single day, and soon enough, so was he.
What kind of love is this,
I thought,
that can be eclipsed not by infidelity or loss but by irritation? What kind of person am I?
We got divorced.
· · ·
My husband cashed out his stocks before the Internet bubble burst, we sold our car, and he moved to California. I stayed in New York, the city’s hard times seeming entwined with my own. After a while people asked me when I was going to start dating again, but truthfully I couldn’t get interested. It seemed to me that I wasn’t relationship material, that all those dreams I’d had back before getting married—of a house with a yard, a life with children, a couple growing old together—were meant for other people, not for me, in the same way that I just can’t wear orange. Sometimes my husband and I talked on the phone, and we were friendly, solicitous, but our failure hung in the air between us, even across thousands of miles. I still thought of him as my husband, not because I still wanted to be married to him but because he was the person I’d chosen to marry, and the subsequent collapse didn’t change the facts. Our failure made me more of an adult than getting married had. I was thirty-six but felt middle-aged, as if the best I could hope for was to
maintain.
I spent my disposable income on facials and manicures, grooming my carapace, which was how I thought of my body, something to be buffed and polished but never used, like a car in a showroom, gleaming inside glass walls.
A year passed, and I had a new position as an organizational consultant. I went from company to company with a laptop and a pad of yellow lined paper for taking notes. My job was to improve company performance by assessing its existing climate. I handed out questionnaires and conducted interviews, and in the process, I’d inevitably find out who was competent, overworked, or lazy, resented, or loved. Part efficiency expert, part psychiatrist, I diagnosed the health of these companies, and recommended
PS,
he wrote,
I love you.
In person, this became his thing. At the end of a phone call: “Well, I’ve gotta go,” he’d say. “PS, I love you.” Sometimes he’d even hang up, then call back to say it.
After the wedding, he joined an Internet startup that was targeted immediately by enthusiastic investors, and all of a sudden we were floating in money. We had salaries and stock options and a brand-new car. My husband began speaking in acronyms. I’d thought
PS
was cute but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. He had code for everything. BRB, he’d say when he was going to be right back. IMO, when offering an opinion on current events.
One night, at a dinner party, I heard him say, “LOL!” He wasn’t laughing, or even talking about it using real words; he was using the
code
for laughing instead of just chuckling, as if throwing back his head and laughing would be too much trouble, and take too much time.
What would Derrida say about that?
I wondered. It made me hate him—my husband, not Derrida.
You might think it’s a small thing, the use of Internet-derived acronyms in ordinary conversation, and of course you’d be right. But it became an emblem of everything about my husband’s new and prosperous and grown-up self that I didn’t recognize. And it swelled up right in front of me, inflating like a balloon, until it obscured everything that had once drawn us together. My irritation was so gigantic it filled the horizon; it made me miserable every single moment of every single day, and soon enough, so was he.
What kind of love is this,
I thought,
that can be eclipsed not by infidelity or loss but by irritation? What kind of person am I?
We got divorced.
· · ·
My husband cashed out his stocks before the Internet bubble burst, we sold our car, and he moved to California. I stayed in New York, the city’s hard times seeming entwined with my own. After a while people asked me when I was going to start dating again, but truthfully I couldn’t get interested. It seemed to me that I wasn’t relationship material, that all those dreams I’d had back before getting married—of a house with a yard, a life with children, a couple growing old together—were meant for other people, not for me, in the same way that I just can’t wear orange. Sometimes my husband and I talked on the phone, and we were friendly, solicitous, but our failure hung in the air between us, even across thousands of miles. I still thought of him as my husband, not because I still wanted to be married to him but because he was the person I’d chosen to marry, and the subsequent collapse didn’t change the facts. Our failure made me more of an adult than getting married had. I was thirty-six but felt middle-aged, as if the best I could hope for was to
maintain.
I spent my disposable income on facials and manicures, grooming my carapace, which was how I thought of my body, something to be buffed and polished but never used, like a car in a showroom, gleaming inside glass walls.
A year passed, and I had a new position as an organizational consultant. I went from company to company with a laptop and a pad of yellow lined paper for taking notes. My job was to improve company performance by assessing its existing climate. I handed out questionnaires and conducted interviews, and in the process, I’d inevitably find out who was competent, overworked, or lazy, resented, or loved. Part efficiency expert, part psychiatrist, I diagnosed the health of these companies, and recommended
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