▸ Column · Modern-day domestic life, received by a WWII ideologue-turned-modern-era presence who diagnoses civilizational weakness in household disputes
RED SKULL replies.
Replied to by Red Skull, with a rebuttal from Sabretooth.
The letter
My partner Esai and I are well matched in all the ways that are supposed to matter — we want the same life, agree on every serious question. Yet we cannot survive a single minor household dispute without it escalating into a screaming match loud enough for our neighbor Mrs. Okafor to file complaints. Last night the catalyst was the correct method for thawing chicken. Within two minutes we were shouting about trust and each other's families. The dog has started hiding under the bed at the first raised voice. I cannot understand how two people who genuinely love each other keep turning into strangers over a thermostat setting. Is this simply what we are now?
Red Skull replies
It is not about the chicken. It is never about the chicken.
What you have described — with your Esai, your dog Pickles, your neighbor Mrs. Okafor accumulating evidence of your inadequacy — is a failure of settled order. Two wills have occupied the same apartment without either submitting to the other, and so every trivial decision arrives as a battlefield, because every decision is a battlefield when no one has conceded the war.
You comfort yourself with the notion that you agree on "the big things." You do not. You have simply postponed the big things into the domain of feeling, where neither of you must lose visibly. The thermostat, the chicken, the dish towel — these are not causes. They are symptoms of two people who wish very much to love each other and not at all to be governed by each other.
The captain — you may imagine what he would tell you — would counsel patience, communication, the slow construction of mutual understanding. He is wrong. Communication without hierarchy is simply noise arriving in polished sentences. The century has produced a great quantity of that noise.
Your dog understands what your therapy will not teach you. It hides because one of you must.
Schwach.
— Red Skull
Sabretooth weighs in
Schmidt. A full manifesto about settled order — for a chicken dispute. That's the coat of paint, not the answer.
Here's what it actually is: two animals who won't say plainly what they're hungry for. All that volume? That ain't passion. That's flinching dressed loud. Neither of you will say what you actually need, so it bleeds out sideways into poultry and somebody's mother. You don't have a hierarchy problem. You have an appetite problem. Say what you're hungry for — with your chest, not the dish towel. The noise complaints are just proof you're both still scared to want anything out loud.
— Sabretooth
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