▸ Column · Modern Marvel age — corporate New York, read from behind a fashion-mogul's desk by a man who treats a marriage like a two-holding portfolio
HOBGOBLIN replies.
Replied to by Hobgoblin, with a rebuttal from Green Goblin.
The letter
My husband Greg and I were married in the plain stillness of a Quaker Meeting — every week began side by side on the same bench, holding hands through the silence. Two years ago I came into the Catholic Church, and now my Sundays are incense and kneeling and the rosary, while he sits at home in his quiet, waiting for me to return so his peace can resume. Neither of us mocks the other. It's that the thing that once bound us is gone, and Sunday has become the loneliest morning of our week. Last week he asked, very gently, whether I might skip Mass just once and sit in Meeting beside him — and I heard "no" leave my mouth before I'd even weighed it. His face afterward has haunted me. We love each other, but I'm frightened that two sincere faiths are quietly laying brick down the center of our bed. How do we each worship as the people we've become without losing the marriage we built as the people we were?
Hobgoblin replies
Let's be precise about what your husband actually proposed: that you liquidate your position to prop up his. "Skip Mass, just once." With respect, that reflexive no was the soundest piece of governance you've executed in two years. Don't apologize for it. The defect isn't your answer — it's that you've both decided Sunday must be a merger. One pew, one balance sheet, and therefore somebody has to eat the loss. Terrible structure.
You're running two profitable holdings with diverging strategies. The disciplined move is not to consolidate them; it's to stop pretending the synergy was ever in the building. Let his silence be his silence. Let your incense be yours. Then put a third thing on the calendar — deliberately — that belongs to the people you are now, not a nostalgia tour of the couple you were. Saturday supper. A long walk. Whatever clears.
I watched a man house an empire and an obsession in the same skull and lose the son who actually mattered because he could not separate his holdings. Norman built the wall himself and blamed the world. Don't do that and pin it on God. The marriage is the asset. Protect the asset.
— Hobgoblin
Green Goblin weighs in
Heh heh HEE HEE! Listen to the knockoff — "protect the asset," "Saturday supper." Roderick, you pried my glider and my pumpkins out of my journals and STILL you'd file a marriage under accounts receivable! Pathetic little parasite.
Madam, here's the truth your accountant won't invoice you for: a wall down the bed means somebody's WINNING. Don't split the holdings — plant your flag! Make Sunday so blazingly YOURS the poor Quaker forgets he ever owned a bench. Faith is only power in its church clothes! And a husband who whispers "skip it just once"? That's a man begging to be ruled. Drop a pumpkin on the compromise — and DANCE!
— Green Goblin
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