FIX YOUR MARRIAGE

“I talked to Jess, my wife, about it, not just before I wrote it, but while I was writing it. And I would say, I don't think I'm giving me anything away by saying that there was a fair amount of negotiation going on during the process, on all ends, on the ends in terms of the New York Times magazine editors, wanting certain things from me, and then talking to Jess about what I wouldn't, you know, would and wouldn't reveal about our marriage, about myself, about her, and then other figures in the picture, I guess, are my parents.”

“I don't think you can talk about how screwed up you are as much as I do in that article without at a minimum being there's some, you know, there being some implication that some of that screwed up-ness came from my childhood. And so there's that just at a baseline. And then also, you know, if I want to say explicitly about what kind of context I grew up in and how that led to the complicated adult figure that I am.”

“I can get very angry. I'm very reactive. So if I feel like I'm being disrespected or not being treated thoughtfully or spoken to kindly, I can snap, I can scream, I can withdraw and get very cold and contemptuous. And on her side, she has her own mechanisms for dealing with distress and feeling rejected by me or abandoned by me. I'd say they're more of the variety of like withdrawing affection, not so much yelling or being aggressive, but withdrawing affection and being cold and retreating behind walls.”

“She was frustrated because she had been putting in a lot of time on the domestic front because I had had a big project of work. And so it kind of revealed a little bit that all the time I was spending at work wasn't all exclusively devoted to doing the work. I was also kind of messing around on social media. And so she made a kind of snide comment about, oh, good that you have so much time to be playing around on social media.”

“I think that we're haunted by the sort of cultural representations of marriage. I mean, there's no total escape from that probably in any culture in a sense. There's some production of like a narrative of what marriage should be, but we have this sort of hyper saturated culture, cultural representations of marriage. And it's complicated, right? I mean, one way to characterize it is just the romantic comedy that the ideal relationship is just, you know, not only are the people best friends and they're funny and silly together, but they have hot sex.”