You Should Have Known Read Free Page B

separation.
    Not, of course, that she didn’t feel for them. She truly did feel for them, her own patients especially, because they had come to her for help and it was too late to offer them anything but the equivalent of garbage bags and Windex after the oil spill. But what she hated most of all was the sheer preventability of all this distress. Her patients were not unintelligent. They were educated, insightful about others. Some, even, were brilliant people. And that they should have met, on the paths of their younger lives, a potential companion who offered sure or at least likely pain, and that they should have said yes to that sure or at least likely pain, and thus received the very sure or at least likely pain that was promised…well, it baffled her. It had always baffled her, and enraged her, too. Sometimes—she couldn’t help it—she wanted to shake them all.
    â€œImagine,” she said to Rebecca, “that you are sitting down at a table with someone for the first time. Perhaps on a date. Perhaps at a friend’s house—wherever you might cross paths with a man you possibly find attractive. In that first moment there are things you can see about this man, and intuit about this man. They are readily observable. You can sense his openness to other people, his interest in the world, whether or not he’s intelligent—whether he makes use of his intelligence. You can tell that he’s kind or dismissive or superior or curious or generous. You can see how he treats you. You can learn from what he decides to tell you about himself: the role of family and friends in his life, the women he’s been involved with previously. You can see how he cares for himself—his own health and well-being, his financial well-being. This is all available information, and we do avail ourselves. But then…”
    She waited. Rebecca was scribbling, her blond head down.
    â€œThen?”
    â€œThen comes the story. He has a story. He has many stories. And I’m not suggesting that he’s making things up or lying outright. He might be—but even if he doesn’t do that, we do it for him, because as human beings we have such a deep, ingrained need for narrative, especially if we’re going to play an important role in the narrative; you know, I’m already the heroine and here comes my hero . And even as we’re absorbing facts or forming impressions, we have this persistent impulse to set them in some sort of context. So we form a story about how he grew up, how women have treated him, how employers have treated him. How he appears before us right now becomes a part of that story. How he wants to live tomorrow becomes part of that story. Then we get to enter the story: No one has ever loved him enough until me. None of his other girlfriends have been his intellectual equal. I’m not pretty enough for him. He admires my independence. None of this is fact. It’s all some combination of what he’s told us and what we’ve told ourselves. This person has become a made-up character in a made-up story.”
    â€œYou mean, like a fictional character.”
    â€œYes. It’s not a good idea to marry a fictional character.”
    â€œBut…you make it sound as if it’s inevitable.”
    â€œIt’s not. If we were to bring to this situation a fraction of the care we brought to, for example, our consumer decisions, problems would arise far less than they do. I mean, what is it about us? We’ll try on twenty pairs of shoes before we make a purchase. We’ll read reviews by total strangers before we choose someone to install our carpeting. But we turn off our bullshit detector and toss out our own natural impressions because we find someone attractive, or because he seems interested in us. He could be holding up a placard that says, I will take your money, make passes at your girlfriends, and leave you consistently bereft of love and