▸ Column · Contemporary — Diana Prince walking the modern world of men, 21st century
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Ares.
The letter
My husband Bekele gave me nothing I can actually point to — no suspicious hours, no locked devices, no obvious signs. That's almost what makes it worse. A few months ago he started laughing at texts he waves off as "just work," and now he reaches over to turn his phone face-down on the nightstand — small reflexes, new ones, after nine years without them. When I asked him directly whether something was going on, he pulled me close and told me I was being paranoid, and I walked away feeling like I'd invented the whole thing. I have no proof. Only this hollow, cold certainty that the man eating dinner across from me is somewhere else entirely. Am I manufacturing a betrayal out of anxiety, or do I trust what my gut is screaming — and if I do trust it, how do I act on a hunch without destroying a marriage that might actually be fine?
Wonder Woman replies
The feeling you are describing is not paranoia. Nine years with a person teaches you things your mind cannot always name — the exact cadence of his laugh, the precise weight of his attention when it is actually on you. You know this man. Those were not his reflexes.
But the part that troubles me most is not the phone. You went to him with the most important question you can ask someone you love, and you came back apologizing in your own mind for the asking. He held you, called you paranoid, and it worked. You left that conversation smaller than when you entered it. That is what I want you to hold.
I have been told, by people with far more power than a nightstand habit and a private text chain, that my instincts were hysteria and my questions were presumption. Being dismissed does not make you wrong. It makes you dismissed, which is a different thing entirely, and worth knowing the difference.
Go back to him — not with a phone in your hand, not with evidence, not with an ultimatum. With this: that a hug is not an answer to what you asked, and you love him too much to let it stand as one. He may meet you there. He may not. But you will stop being the one who is paranoid and start being the one who told the truth. Those two things cannot occupy the same conversation at the same time.
You were not made small, sister. He just needs to know you know that.
— Wonder Woman
Ares weighs in
The Amazon counsels another conversation. I suggest you examine what the first one cost you.
You opened the field, mortal — you asked him plainly — and he embraced you and called you paranoid, and you accepted it. Accepted it enough to write this letter asking a stranger whether you imagined the whole campaign. That is not anxiety. That is what a soldier sounds like when she does not yet know she has already lost the opening engagement.
Diana will tell you to speak more bravely. I am telling you the speaking already happened. He gave you his answer. The only question left — the one she declines to put to you directly — is why you still require his permission to believe what you already know.
— Ares
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