You Should Have Known Read Free

about it, and make our own decisions. I always explain to my clients that if all they want is for someone to tell them everything’s going to be all right, or everything happens for a reason, or whatever the pointless jargon of the moment is, then they don’t have to come to my office and pay me for my expertise. Or buy my book, I suppose.” She smiled. “They can buy one of the other books. Any of them. How to Love Your Marriage Back to Health. How to Fight for Your Relationship. ”
    â€œYes, but your title’s rather…confrontational, isn’t it? You Should Have Known. I mean, that’s what we always say to ourselves when we’re watching the press conference and some politician’s just tweeted a photo of his penis to the world, or got caught with a second family, and the wife’s standing there next to him looking stunned. You know, Really? This surprises you? ”
    â€œI don’t doubt the wife is surprised.” Grace nodded. “The question is, should she be surprised? Could she have avoided finding herself in this position?”
    â€œSo this is the title you chose?”
    â€œWell, yes and no,” Grace told her. “It was actually my second choice. I wanted to call it Attention Must Be Paid . But nobody got the reference. They said it was too literary.”
    â€œOh really? We didn’t all read Arthur Miller in high school?” Rebecca asked archly, establishing her bona fides.
    â€œMaybe your high school,” said Grace diplomatically. In fact she had read Death of a Salesman in middle school at Rearden, the proudly intense (and, once upon a time, vaguely socialist) New York private school where her own son was now a seventh grader. “Anyway, we compromised. You know how we always tell ourselves, You never know, when someone does something we don’t see coming? We’re shocked that he turns out to be a womanizer, or an embezzler. He’s an addict. He lied about everything. Or he’s just garden-variety selfish and the fact that he’s married to you and perhaps you have children together—that doesn’t seem to stop him from behaving as if he’s still a single, unencumbered teenager?”
    â€œ Oh yeah ,” Rebecca said. It sounded, Grace thought, a little personal. Well, that was hardly surprising. That was sort of the point.
    â€œAnd when it happens we just throw up our hands: We say: Wow, you never know about people . And we never hold ourselves accountable for what we bring to the deception. We have to learn to be accountable. If we don’t, we can’t act in our own best interests. And we can’t prevent it next time.”
    â€œUh-oh.” Rebecca looked up. She fixed Grace with a plainly disapproving expression. “We’re not about to blame the victim, are we?”
    â€œThere is no victim,” said Grace. “Look, I’ve been in practice for fifteen years. Over and over I’ve heard women describe their early interactions with their partner, and their early impressions of their partner. And listening to them, I continually thought: You knew right at the beginning . She knows he’s never going to stop looking at other women. She knows he can’t save money. She knows he’s contemptuous of her—the very first time they talk to each other, or the second date, or the first night she introduces him to her friends. But then she somehow lets herself un know what she knows. She lets these early impressions, this basic awareness, get overwhelmed by something else. She persuades herself that something she has intuitively seen in a man she barely knows isn’t true at all now that she—quote unquote— has gotten to know him better . And it’s that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful. And it can have the most devastating impact on a woman’s life. And we’ll always let ourselves off the hook for it, in