▸ Column · Modern world of men — Diana of Themyscira answering as an Amazon envoy abroad

WONDER WOMAN replies.

Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Circe.

The letter

I'm thirty-one; the man I love, Vince, is forty-two. Most days the eleven years vanish — until I'm among his friends. At his old roommate's anniversary dinner the table traded talk of mortgages, vasectomies, and soccer carpools while someone asked, brightly, whether I was "Vince's daughter's tutor." He insists the gap means nothing, yet he owns his home and is finished having children, and I'm still paying off loans and honestly don't know whether I want children at all. I keep wondering if I'm truly his partner or just a pleasant stop before he settles with someone on his own schedule. How do I tell cold feet from a real warning that we want different lives?

Wonder Woman replies

Friend, set down the story first, because it is heavier than the problem. "A pleasant detour." You said that about yourself as though it were a fact, and it is not a fact — it is a wound you keep pressing. No one at that table named you a detour. You did.

Now the hard part. The years are not your trouble. The trouble is two questions you have left in the dark: do you want children, and does he want you in the life he has already built, or only beside it? You cannot weigh cold feet against a true warning while both questions sit unasked. That is not caution. That is hiding.

When I left Themyscira I walked into a world of men with no map and no certainty I belonged in it. I learned this — you do not discover whether a place is yours by waiting at its edge to be told. You ask. Plainly. Of him, and of yourself.

So ask him: am I building a life with you, or decorating yours? And answer the children question for you, not his calendar. The truth does not ask your permission. Stand in it anyway, and you will know.

— Wonder Woman

Circe weighs in

Diana, ever earnest — counseling the poor creature to ask permission to exist. Darling, do not ask Vince anything. The asking is the leash. A man of forty-two with his house, his finished family, and a thirty-one-year-old at the table being mistaken for the help? He has arranged his menagerie beautifully, and you are the ornament he calls "ageless." Every man hides the pig until the carving knife is near. Decide what you want — the children, the house, the whole life — and become the thing he cannot bear to lose, or be gone before he chooses for you. Sorceresses do not audition for permanence, little mortal. They are the prize, and the world rearranges.

— Circe

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