If you ever find yourself between two married people who are in the middle of an argument, the best strategy is to become suddenly interested in your shoes.
Married people, of course, know this instinctively. But unmarried people like me have a hard time remembering it. We often imagine that the two married people who are arguing in front of us are having a perfectly ordinary disagreement about whatever it is they’re talking about — the difference between rigatoni pasta and penne pasta, maybe, or if June is a good month for travel — when in fact the source of the discord is something hidden and deeply embedded in their relationship. They are not arguing about what they’re arguing about. They’re arguing about who is more unhinged and which one threw his or her life away for this.
Single people just assume it’s a fun little wrangle between friends, utterly devoid of treacherous subtext. So they often listen attentively to both sides, heads swiveling back and forth like it’s a tennis match, nodding every now and then and murmuring “good point” when it seems appropriate.
Do not do this, is my advice. Your shoes are the safest immediate thing to fixate on, followed by your phone, an unnecessary trip to the bathroom, and if it comes to it, a ninjalike exit before either one notices.
The background is this: Spouse One and Spouse Two have two children. Child Two is a student at an extravagantly expensive private high school. Child One, unfortunately for all of them, is a rising junior at an eyepoppingly expensive university where classes and exams have been disrupted or canceled due to the protests about the war in Gaza.
Spouse One is outraged at the feckless and cowardly administration of the university where Child One is currently (not) being educated. Spouse Two, it must be said, is in enthusiastic agreement. (As am I, by the way, but it doesn’t matter what I think, as I now know.)
The problem: Spouse One is really angry, especially considering the insanely high tuition that Spouse One and Spouse Two scrape together every year. Both are working professionals who earn just enough combined to make it possible to pay the full tuition through a combination of borrowing, raiding the retirement fund, and penny-pinching while keeping financial aid options out of reach.
So Spouse One has drafted an angry email to be sent to the various deans, administrators, and the president of the university. Spouse One, in the email, announces that all tuition payments will hereby be suspended and withheld until the university gets its act together. (Spouse One puts it more colorfully in the email, I promise you.)
Spouse Two thinks this is an unwise and self-defeating gambit. In the first place, says Spouse Two, there’s no use in bluffing because if they stop paying tuition, then Child One won’t be allowed to attend that university. And there’s no way Spouse Two is going to allow that to happen. (Spouse Two put it more colorfully, I promise you.) And getting branded as a cantankerous parent is sure to put a black mark on Child Two’s application to the same university in two years. Spouse Two thinks Spouse One should delete the draft email and simmer down.
The two of them were getting more and more irate with each other, and it was clear, even to me, that this wasn’t about the current mess on the campuses of America’s universities. It was about the enormous sums of money parents are spending to send their children to institutions that treat their customers with arrogance and contempt. It’s about wondering if they’ve been played for fools.
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What Spouse Two doesn’t know, and what I do know, is that Spouse One already sent the email. I was CC’ed on it, for some reason. (A lot of people were, including people at CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and, bizarrely, Elon Musk.) At some point, it will dawn on Spouse Two that when Spouse One said, “I drafted an email,” what that meant was, “I sent an email to thousands of people.” And who knows how that will go?
I have no idea how Spouse Two reacted to that news, by the way, because by then I was long gone, already on my way home. Like a ninja.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
