I’ve been puzzling over the #1-most-emailed Modern Love column on managing a husband who wants to move out. I guess if I’ve been puzzling over a Modern Love column this long, it can’t be all bad. Some disconnected thoughts:

(1) This approach probably works in a shocking number of situations, because this central insight —

I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

— is so often correct.

(2) But what about all the situations there this WON’T work? Is it good advice? I guess she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have physically stopped him from moving out. So if he’d really wanted to, he could have done it. And probably, in that case, she’s still better off having treated him like a child; in that case, even though he’d left, she’d still be sitting on the nice high ground, waiting for him but never begging, etc.

(3) OK. So maybe this is a great idea. What’s weird, though, is how essentially religious this whole idea is, without being religious. She’s essentially saying that the family is a non-negotiable bond for her husband, the way it is for a small child. This is the kind of thinking we normally associate with appeals to a higher power.

(4) But she doesn’t mention God; so on whose authority is the family unbreakable? The crazy thing is, the answer is basically her own refusal to suffer. That’s the mindblowing crux of the whole theory. He has to remain a part of the family forever because she refuses to suffer: that refusal is her God. Basically what this woman has done is burrow so far into a sprituality of the self that she’s actually finding a binding commitment for other people in it.

(5) This makes this essay, to my knowledge, the only Styles section article to date that sets forth an entirely new and entirely radical cosmology.