The Same Paper: On Love, Control & the Limits of the Outside View

I once said, in a public argument about a book that advocated for divorce, that if I found my wife reading it we would have a conversation about it. My wife is a surgeon and the family breadwinner; the idea that I could control her is faintly comic to anyone who knows us. None of that mattered. Within minutes I had been assigned a role — controlling husband — and the assignment was made not from any fact about my marriage but from the shape of the sentence. A man wanting a say in what his wife reads: the template fired, and the template does not stop to check whether the woman is a surgeon. That small misfire is the whole problem in miniature, so it is worth being precise about what happened — and precise about what did not. The reflex was not stupidity, and it was not, mostly, malice. A man wanting a say in what his wife reads is, across the run of cases, far more often the leading edge of control than an expression of partnership. The template that fired is a well-calibrated prior…