You Should Have Known Read Free Page A

our own lives, even as we’re looking at some other deluded woman and thinking: How could she not have known? And I feel, just so strongly, that we need to hold ourselves to that same standard. And before we’re taken in, not after.”
    â€œBut you know”—Rebecca looked up from her pad, while her pencil, impressively, continued to write—“it’s not just men. Women lie, too, right?” She was frowning, and there was, in the middle of her forehead, a pronounced V. Clearly—happily—the magazine she wrote for had not persuaded her to inject herself with botulinum toxin.
    â€œRight. Of course. And I do talk about this in the book. But the fact is, nine times out of ten it’s the woman sitting right there on my couch, totally distraught because, in her view, her male partner has hidden something from her. So I decided, right at the start, this book is going to be for women.”
    â€œOkay,” the girl said, returning to her pad. “I get it.”
    â€œI’m being didactic,” Grace said with a rueful little laugh.
    â€œYou’re being passionate.”
    Right , Grace thought. She would have to remember that.
    â€œIn any case,” she said deliberately, “I reached a point where I couldn’t stand to see so many decent, well-intentioned women suffering through months or years of therapy, ripping their guts out and spending a fortune, just to realize that their partner has not changed at all, possibly has never seriously tried to change, or even expressed a willingness to change. The women are right back where they started when they first came in and sat where you’re sitting right now. Those women deserve to hear the truth, which is that their situation isn’t going to improve—at least, not nearly as much as they want it to. They need to hear that the error they’ve made might be irreparable.”
    She stopped herself, partly to let Rebecca catch up, partly to savor the impact of this, her “bombshell” (as Sarabeth the agent had put it in their very first meeting the previous year). It still felt just slightly seismic. In fact, Grace could remember the moment she had decided to actually write down the thing she really thought, the obvious thing made ever more blindingly obvious with each passing year of her professional life, with every dating guide (which never said it) and marriage manual (which never said it either) she had devoured in preparation for writing her book, and with every International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors conference she’d attended (where it was never uttered). This thing no one talked about, but which she suspected her colleagues understood as well as she. Should she say it in her book and call down the vitriol of her peers? Or just reiterate that ridiculous myth that any “relationship” (whatever that was) could be “saved” (whatever that meant).
    â€œDon’t pick the wrong person,” she told Rebecca now, emboldened by the presence of Vogue in her bland little office, the artificially long and lean woman on her oatmeal-colored couch, wielding her retro steno pad and tape recorder. “Pick the wrong person and it doesn’t matter how much you want to fix your marriage. It won’t work.”
    After a moment, Rebecca looked up and said, “That’s pretty blunt.”
    Grace shrugged. It was blunt, she wasn’t going to argue with that. It needed to be blunt. If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn’t be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty. At best, Grace thought, it was terribly sad, but at worst it was punitive—a lifetime of punitive. That was no way to have a marriage. If these couples were childless, the effort should go into separation. If there were children: mutual respect and co-parenting. And