June 24, 2020:
"You know nothing about women," she said bitterly, adding that she'd only been play-acting, that her leaving had been a ruse, or perhaps more accurately one line of a very tired stage play, where his part in the script was supposed to have been to beg for her return.
In plainer terms, it was a failed attempt at adolescent manipulation, which, if successful, would have placed him in a permanent position of uncertainty, ever-conscious of the threat that if he failed to toe her line she'd be gone.
With the other side of her mouth she insisted on her own perfect reliability, breaking down in tears when it was suggested to her that reality might be otherwise. Along with a vehement, truly ferocious claim of absolute, non situational, noncompromising honesty. And, perhaps most ironically, of militant feminism.
She was none of those things. She was and remains a pre-feminist soldier in what used to be called "the battle of the sexes", where all's fair in love and war, and love is war, and she's determined to use her whiles and her chronic manipulativeness to capture control and keep it, the one dynamic that matters most to her. More than partnership, more than reciprocity, more than safety even, since control is the foundation of safety, and only the winner can decide what safety means in practice.
She was and remains a teenager from 1965. An odd and pervasively toxic posture for someone born a decade after that. The origin and the juice behind her destructive unhappiness.