▸ Column · Contemporary America — Diana Prince walking the modern world as Amazon envoy
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Ares.
The letter
To whoever reads these: Three days ago my fiancé's phone lit up on the kitchen counter — a contact he'd listed under an ordinary professional name, except the message underneath it was nothing professional at all. I read four months of messages I cannot unread. We have a wedding in eleven weeks. The deposits are nonrefundable, my mother already altered my dress, his family is flying in from abroad. Part of me wants to set the phone in front of him at dinner and watch what he does with his face. Part of me wants to be gone before he finishes toweling off and the whole thing becomes something I have to survive out loud. My question is simple and impossible: how do you sit across from a man whose whole calendar you believed in — right up until you didn't — and stay on your feet while you do it?
Wonder Woman replies
You keep asking how to not fall apart. That is not the question you need answered, sister.
You already have the truth — it is in your hands right now, heavier than the deposit receipts, heavier than eleven weeks of plans, heavier than a dress already hemmed. The falling apart is not your enemy. The lie is.
On Themyscira I was taught that truth does not ask for composure before it speaks. My sisters went to battle weeping sometimes. It did not diminish them. It meant they understood what they were fighting for.
Set the phone in front of him. Not to perform calm — you owe him nothing so carefully arranged — but because someone who loved him deserves to say plainly: I know. Fall apart if you need to. Weep at the table if you need to. Say it anyway. And then listen to what he says, not to be persuaded back, but to finally see who he is without the squash league to hide behind.
Because underneath your question there is a harder one, and I think you already know it. Whether to vanish before the shower or wait for dinner is not really what you are asking. You are asking whether a woman who loves honestly can build a life with a man who spent four months deciding she would never find out.
He borrowed against your trust and spent it on Thursdays. Name that — out loud, to his face — and then decide from there, standing.
— Wonder Woman
Ares weighs in
The Amazon bids you stand in your truth, fall apart with dignity, and honor him with a confrontation he has done nothing to deserve. How very like her.
Here is what she will not say. You are not the combatant in this war, mortal. You are the occupied territory. He has had four months and every Thursday to fortify his position. You have had three days. Diana speaks of falling apart as though courage is its own reward, as though the dinner table is a battlefield worth fighting on.
It is not. The only advantage you hold — the single piece of ground that is yours — is the thing he does not yet know you know. Diana will call it leverage and curl her lip. I call it the only weapon left in the field. Do not spend it buying him a graceful surrender at your own table.
— Ares
▸ Read next