A Broken Model of The World
The American visa rejection was delivered with the bureaucratic indifference characteristic of empire in its senescent phase. No California, no Texas, no opportunity to temporarily escape to the land of my dreams and do Rationalist Things. Instead: India. The eternal return. Air conditioning as opposed to indoor heating, and dogs who hadn't yet learned that unconditional love is a dangerous thing. I didn't intend to disabuse them.
But of course, and here's where the reptilian cortex asserts its dominion over whatever higher functions medical school was supposed to cultivate, there were women. Specifically, women who might conceivably miss me, which is to say women whose neural architecture had been sufficiently damaged by prior exposure to my personality that they'd developed something like Stockholm syndrome, except with worse texting habits. I didn't have the time to cultivate new relationships, nor was I prepared to go through the rigmarole of setting up a dating profile to local tastes. Old flames could be fanned out from the embers instead.
Near the top of this list, glowing with the phosphorescent intensity of a bad decision that knows it's bad and has made peace with this knowledge: Her. The Model. You know the one. Hot as hell, but her head is held aloft by a mixture of helium and bad decisions.
I'd dated her very briefly before fleeing to residency, that period of psychiatry training designed to teach you about antidepressants and then teach you more about which ones you've come to need (all of them). She presented, in the phenomenological sense that Heidegger might have recognized had he spent less time with Nazis and more time on dating apps*, as the eternal feminine victim: doe-eyed, helpless, perpetually buffeted by the cruel winds of toxic masculinity, which is to say every man she'd ever met, perhaps excluding me.
She'd been reaching out at semi-random intervals during my Scottish exile, something my brain's tired pattern-recognition systems had correlated with relationship turbulence, usually accompanied by marriage proposals that made me feel simultaneously desirable and like I was being offered a role in a particularly depressing regional theater production. Very ego-syntonic, as we say in the trade, which is professional code for "it made me feel good in ways I'm not too ashamed to admit."
Then: radio silence. Months of it. I'd interpreted this through my characteristically solipsistic lens as evidence that she'd found stability, or at least a nice man in the neighborhood, which turned out to be partially correct in the way that a broken clock is correct twice daily, accurate in its specifics while missing the larger horror entirely.
She had technically just reached out. Just a few days before I was due to fly in. Just a perfunctory "hey" on Insta, which I had genuinely not seen for days because, well, psychiatry doesn't make for very exciting day-in-the-life posts. At least not without trouble with the GMC.
I'd landed back in India and reached out. Nothing. I began contemplating that I was being ghosted, or that I'd outlived my usefulness to her. Maybe she had found a nice Punjabi boy to grow fat with. My daydreams were each more psychologically sophisticated than the last, which is what you do when you've spent too much time learning about defense mechanisms instead of developing functional ones.
The truth was stupider: she didn't check her DMs. She'd always been a bit shite about that. Well, self_made_human, that's the pot calling the kettle black. The solution, obvious in retrospect, required abandoning digital mediation for its older, more aggressive cousin: I called her.
Two rings. Then:
"Oh my god! You're back?"
The voice hit me like a familiar drug: breathless, pitched at a frequency that triggered some deep mammalian subroutine, laced with an enthusiasm that I knew was performed but which worked anyway because evolution has programmed male brains to be very, very stupid about certain audio frequencies. It was the auditory equivalent of those supernormal stimuli ethologists use to make birds try to mate with volleyball-sized eggs.
"I am," I said, attempting to maintain the facade of being a person with boundaries. "I thought you were ignoring me."
"No! Never! I just don't check my phone, I swear." A statement that would have been disqualifying if I were capable of learning from experience. Women and their phones are inseparable at the hip. "I missed you so much. We have to meet. Tonight? Please say tonight. I need to vent."
Reader, I am a man of medicine, of science, someone who has spent years training to make rational decisions based on evidence. I am also a man who hears a pretty woman say she needs him and immediately becomes a golden retriever who's been told there might be treats. I tell myself I'm only going out of a curdling combination of curiosity and boredom, but my tail wags nonetheless.
(The charitable explanation is that I have a genuine drive to be helpful and derive satisfaction from being nice to people. Less charitably, I crave mild amounts of drama in my life, preferably when I'm out of the immediate blast zone. The truth can be found with a Monte Carlo simulation, namely throwing darts at me.)
I arrived at her workplace, a boutique where she moonlights in sales, effectively selling insecurity to women and delusion to their husbands. Local traffic made me late, which meant I missed seeing her in her element, which was probably for the best. Some illusions should be preserved.
She drove. I rode shotgun. She was competent behind the wheel, which I noted with the mixture of surprise and guilt characteristic of men who've internalized certain stereotypes while remaining theoretically opposed to them. The other drivers, less conflicted, shouted helpful commentary about her driving that had nothing to do with driving and everything to do with living in a society that's still working through some issues around women operating heavy machinery.
It's an interesting dichotomy. Male drivers face less verbal abuse, mostly because they're a physical threat. Female drivers bring out the peanut gallery, but they're not really at much risk of having someone lay hands on them in such a public setting. But I digress:
She needed to park. I needed something to do with my hands. I bought her a soft toy from an overpriced Japanese store, that particular species of useless consumer object that somehow carries totemic significance, a material manifestation of affect that short-circuits rational gift-giving in favor of pure aesthetic stimulus. Women are suckers for these, which is a sexist observation that's nonetheless empirically correct, which is why sexism persists: it works.
After an interval calibrated to maximize anxiety without quite tipping into actual worry, she returned. She loved the gift. Then she began talking, and I realized I'd made a terrible mistake, which is to say exactly the mistake I'd intended to make.
The story was long. She'd warned me it would be long. She wasn't lying, which may have been the only thing she wasn't lying about. Or perhaps she's excessively honest with me, I seem to be a safe space, a person she can unload all her cares on without much concern. The lies were for the rest. Regardless, I took my glasses off and buried my face in my hands so many times I lost count, performing exasperation for an audience of one while that audience performed innocence for an audience of me.
The situation had evolved. The roster of suitors had expanded.
There was the Poor Nice Guy (who lives with his parents and won't move out, who I'd previously dissected with the detached interest of an entomologist pinning butterflies to cardboard). There was the Toxic Ex (who cheats), but as far as I could tell, was now out of the picture. And now, there was the Rich Guy. He's new.
The Rich Guy. Precisely as advertised. Distantly related (third cousin maybe?) far enough to avoid the genetic problems, close enough to carry social weight. He'd proposed marriage multiple times. He sounded, even to my determinedly cynical ear, like a reasonable choice. But she couldn't commit.
The reasons were familiar: he lived with his parents, lived below his means. But also (and here's where it got good) he had dogs, and her OCD couldn't handle them.
I couldn't relate. Shortly after I had landed in the country, my puppy had just destroyed my best shoes and my comfortable slippers, and my response had been mild scolding undermined by my complete inability to maintain anger at something with floppy ears. But I'm not the protagonist of this story. She is. Or maybe the dogs are.
She has OCD. She hates the dogs. She claims it's hygiene, but we know the diagnosis: Narcissism cannot tolerate a rival for attention, even if that rival licks its own ass.
I feel like an ass just saying that, I'm not The Last Psychiatrist, even if I'm more cynical than a certain Buddhist-Sufi-Lite Namebrand alternative. Don't listen to me, she does actually have OCD. Sees an actual shrink for it, not that that lady sounds like she's competent.
"He said he'd give them away," she says, pulling back to look at me with those wide, imploring eyes. "He said he'd get rid of them for me."
Pause.
This man is willing to exile two living creatures that love him unconditionally, loyal beasts that rely on him for their survival, just to secure access to her. But he won't move out of his parents' house. He is willing to sacrifice the innocent (the dogs) but unwilling to sacrifice his safety net (Mommy and Daddy). It might also have been filial piety, who knows. I had complained that Poor Guy had a stick up his ass, whereas this gentleman could use such a prosthetic as a spine.
"So let him give them away," I say.
"No," she pouts. "I can't make him do it. Then his parents will hate me. Then he'll resent me."
Then came the bombshells, delivered with the casualness of someone ordering coffee. One, she was still seeing Poor Guy. Two, she wanted me to commit fraud.
She'd convinced herself that the solution was a forged medical document stating she was deathly allergic to dogs. She'd already tried this gambit with Rich Guy, but he'd pointed out (with admirable attention to empirical reality) that she'd played with his dogs before without issue. Now she wanted me, as a doctor, to make it official.
"Write me a note," she says. "Say I have a severe allergy. If it's medical, he has to get rid of them, and it's not my fault. It's doctor's orders."
She wants the result (no dogs) without the cost (guilt). She wants to outsource the moral culpability to me.
I have many moral failings. They are numerous and well-documented. But I enjoy having an unblemished record and no medical board investigations, so I declined, explaining this in terms I hoped were clear even to someone whose relationship to truth was essentially fictional.
She escalated. She offered sex.
"Come on," she says, pressing against me. "I'll make it worth your while."
Let me pause here to note the cosmically insulting nature of this offer. Sex as payment for fraud. Sex as the universal solvent for moral reasoning. Sex offered with the bland confidence of someone who's learned that it usually works, which is the most damning indictment of men as a category that I can conceive.
Been there, done that, I told her. Which was true. Which made me complicit. Which made this whole scene a kind of recursive nightmare where everyone's crimes implicated everyone else's.
She changed tactics: Would I help her decide between Rich Guy and Poor Guy?
Finally, a question I could answer. My reply was nigh instant, the answer was obvious.
"Go for Rich Guy," I said. "He's sensible. It's better to be with someone who loves you, than someone you love (if you can't have both). And I know you. You couldn't adjust to a lower standard of living if your life depended on it."
She blinked. "But won't Poor Guy become rich when he marries me? He could take over what my dad built!"
I sighed the sigh of a man who's realized he's explaining addition to someone who's still working on number permanence. "That's your own money, returned to you. If you marry into wealth, you have twice the money. Use that pretty head. Think."
Her face scrunched up in an adorable display of revelation. She told me that she'd never considered this. Twice the money sounded good. Almost twice as good, accounting for diminishing marginal utility. The fact that she was treating marriage as a financial instrument while simultaneously maintaining that she wanted true love, this contradiction didn't seem to register. Cognitive dissonance requires cognition.
But wait: Poor Guy worked in her dad's field. Rich Guy was adjacent: leather tanning, not textiles. Who'd run the family business?
I suggested that maybe Rich Guy could learn. She seemed unconvinced. I offered to make a SWOT analysis, because apparently I'd become the kind of person who does strategic planning for other people's romantic clusterfucks.
I reached for my phone and its rarely used stylus. "Let's be logical. Let's do a SWOT analysis."
Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats.
I started drawing the grid. I was outlining why the Rich Guy was the strategic play. Strengths: Money, Devotion. Threats: The Dogs.
"See?" I said. "The Rich Guy is the move. You just have to deal with the dogs."
"I made a list too!" she chirped.
She pulled out her iPhone and shoved the Notes app in my face. (Why do women love Apple's default apps? This is a genuine mystery to me, impenetrable as quantum mechanics.) "Great minds think alike!"
Fools seldom differ.
I looked at her list. It was a chaotic mess of emojis and bullet points. Rich Guy and Poor Guy were neck and neck.
But there, buried in the text, was a note she had clearly forgotten was there:
Still sleeping with [Poor Guy]. [Rich Guy] doesn't know, haven't slept with him yet.
She was showing me the evidence of her own infidelity. She was handing me the smoking gun. And she didn't even realize it. She was scrolling past it, pointing out that the Rich Guy buys nice purses, completely oblivious to the fact that she had documented her own moral bankruptcy.
I looked at her. "Are you fucking insane? What if Rich Guy finds out about Poor Guy??"
She startled. "When did I tell you their names?"
I pointed at her phone. The blush that overtook her face was the color of shame, or possibly arousal, or possibly both, because at this level of dysfunction all emotions blend into an undifferentiated psychic sludge.
I laughed. It was absurd.
"What?" she asked, smiling blankly.
"You're amazing," I said. "You're really something."
I grabbed her hand. I deployed a metaphor about masturbation and bushes that I'm not proud of but which seemed apt.
"So you'll write the note?" she asked. "You're a liberal guy. You understand. You should just marry me."
"Liberal."
She uses that word like a get-out-of-jail-free card. To her, "liberal" doesn't mean "politically left-leaning." It means "permissive." It means "you are too smart to have boundaries." She thinks that because I listen to her stories without vomiting, I approve of them. Maybe I've internalized too much, it's worth reminding myself that in my personal life, I can just get up and walk away. I've done that before, with her, when she'd called me out on a date and then broke down into tears and asked me to drive her to her ex’s place.
"How long are you staying in Scotland?" she said. "Why won't you just marry me? Things would be so much simpler!"
Previously, this plea had made me feel significant, wanted, like Captain Save-a-Ho riding in on a white horse. Now I felt something closer to disgust. Not an immense amount of disgust, I've long since abandoned the pretense that I hold all the moral high ground. Mostly the aesthetic disgust of watching someone dig their own grave with manicured nails until those nails chip and bleed, and then mild, incipient rage at the idea that she saw me that way, as a convenient solution to all her problems. The kind, thoughtful doctor who actually listened, didn't judge too much (to her face, an anonymous audience is different, or so I say). I was her idea of a BATNA, a man without an ego, willing to tolerate stodgy in-laws, the kind who wouldn't tell his wife to stop dressing like such a slut the moment the marriage pyre went cold.
The safe choice. I resented this, I do have an ego. I do have standards, even if I'm too polite to throw that in someone's face when they presume that they meet them.
But disgust and rage are just other forms of engagement, and I was too deep in this to extract myself cleanly.
So I tried reverse psychology.
It was then, that I played the card I'd kept up my sleeve for exactly this moment.
I told her I'd come around to marriage. (True.) That I could be convinced to marry her. (Highly Debatable.) She demanded to know when I'd be back permanently.
Two years minimum, I said. Probably more. She deflated immediately. Too long.
So I flipped it: "Come to Scotland," I said.
I said it with the gravitas of a romantic lead in a period drama. Leave this all behind. Come with me. That wasn't a lie, technically. A proposition can't be false. But I said it with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how she'd respond.
I only said it because I knew with 100% certainty she would decline.
It was a zero-risk bet. She has her "career" here, her parents, her tangled web of dysfunction. She wasn't going to Glasgow. But by offering, I get to be the Savior. I get to be the "One That Got Away." I get the credit for the gesture without having to buy the extra plane ticket.
She blanched. Scotland? Doing her own laundry? Cooking? Cleaning? Not cool. She'd grown up wealthy. She told me she couldn't adjust. She didn't seem to be the least bit ashamed of this.
"I can't," she sighed, exactly as predicted. "It's too complicated."
"I know."
I pointed out that I'd grown up similarly and adjusted fine. That First World life wasn't so bad. I explained that even my salary was enough to allow for a decent existence for a young couple. The more I pushed, the more she retreated, exactly as predicted.
Excellent. My model of human nature, or at least her particular neural architecture, remained accurate. I'd convinced her that I wasn't an option by making her convince herself. The lies you tell yourself stick harder than the lies others tell you. So does the truth. Nothing I'd said was a lie, after all. This is why advertising works. This is why democracy fails.
"Will you wait until you're back to marry me?" she asked.
I laughed. "You won't wait two years."
"You're right," she admitted.
Throughout this conversation, she kept flinching, looking out the windows (but hadn't asked me to remove the arm I had around her, or the other on her thigh). I asked why. She said she was worried one of the men might be in the neighborhood. It was midnight. They lived elsewhere. I pointed this out.
"Wait! I can check." She opened WhatsApp. Rich Guy, it turned out, was insecure and demanded she share her live location constantly. Every few minutes, down to the meter. No wonder she'd chosen this café, it was close enough to home to explain, far enough from anywhere else to avoid detection. A prisoner's exercise yard.
To his credit (which is very little), he reciprocated by sharing his own location. The panopticon didn't have a one-way mirror.
She messaged him asking him his plans. His reply was terse but quick. Business meeting, too tired to visit, going to bed. Her paranoia subsided.
Then came the detail that broke me: he'd offered to get rid of the dogs. Kicking out his elderly parents? A step too far.
Where did she find these people? My dog had destroyed my shoes and I'd merely scolded him. This man was willing to dispose of two loyal animals for a woman who felt nothing for him.
Psychiatry teaches phenomenology, empathy, understanding. It never quite conveys that some people are mentally alien. If I had to choose between a woman and my dogs, I know which bitch I'd be showing the door. Both my dogs are male.
More conversation. More coffee. Then beer, she told me they secretly sold it, just hid the menu to maintain a veneer of family-friendliness, which felt like a metaphor for something but I was too tired to figure out what.
She looked exhausted. Grey hairs emerging. Still gushing about her nephew, the Indo-Italian baby who'd break hearts someday, she exulted over my observantion. Feminine solidarity is nothing next to evolutionary psychology.
More terrible ideas sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Could I present as her psychiatrist and talk to Rich Guy? I said I'd talk to him in a personal capacity only, mostly from morbid curiosity about the kind of men she attracted. Maybe I'm trying to understand myself.
"Why can't I be happy?" she asked.
"Because," I said, with clinical detachment, "you are a dumb bitch."
I didn't say it with anger, even if I felt it. I said it with the flat affect of a clinician delivering a terminal diagnosis. It was cruel. Very uncharacteristically so for me, I still feel bad about it, but she'd pushed me to breaking point. It was also a diagnosis. She teared up.
"You're mean!" she sobbed. "I'm trying so hard! Why are you calling me names?"
No she didn't. That would have been easy, given me the option to stonewall in the face of bluster and crocodile salt-trails. Instead:
She stayed quiet, head lowered, hair cascading down to hide her tears. This made it much harder, she was self-aware enough to know of her flaws. I decided to relent, and attempt an explanation.
I explained that her misery was entirely self-manufactured, a boutique artisan suffering. "You are crying because you don't like the mirror," I told her. "Look at what you're doing. You have a guy who wants to marry you. He is rich. He loves you. He is willing to give up his dogs for you. And it's not enough."
"It's not perfect!" she wailed.
"That's your problem," I said. "In the search for perfection, you are turning down 'good enough.' You are creating chaos because you are terrified of settling. You cheat on the Rich Guy with the Poor Guy, you cheat on the Poor Guy with the Rich Guy, and you try to cheat on both of them with me. You are miserable because you refuse to make a choice."
She looked at me, mascara running, eyes wide.
"But I just want to be happy," she whispered.
No, she doesn't.
She wants to be admired. Happiness requires compromise. Happiness requires you to live in a house with a mother-in-law or a dog you don't like. Happiness is tolerating unhappiness today in the hopes it'll pay interest tomorrow. Happiness is boring.
She doesn't want boring. She wants the drama. She wants the crisis. She wants to be on a couch begging a doctor to commit fraud so she doesn't have to feel bad about making a man kill his dogs.
I told her the juggling act would end, the plates would smash on her pretty face, and I would not be there to sweep up the shards.
She didn't disagree.
Eventually it was late. I was out of useful things to say. "Go back to the Rich Guy," I said, standing up. "Marry him. Make him give up the dogs. See how that feels."
"You think I should?"
"I think you deserve each other," I said.
She took this as a compliment.
He is a coward who betrays his loyalty to his pets. She is a narcissist who betrays her loyalty to her partners. They are a match made in hell, and they will be perfectly miserable together in a very nice house, once the parents and the dogs die of old age.
She kissed me goodbye, carried off that kawaii rabbit with a spring in her step, turned the corner to her gated compound. I gave in to impulse and bought a cigarette.
I didn't smoke it.
The visa was declined. My winter in California is gone. But as I stepped out into the humid Indian night, I realized I didn't need the Pacific Coast Highway.
Here's what I think: everyone in this story should kill themselves. Except the dogs. I'll include myself if they get a pass.
The dogs are the only innocents. The rest of us are complicit in whatever this is, this performance of intimacy masquerading as intimacy, this simulation of care that exists primarily to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves and each other. We're all playing roles in a production that should have closed years ago, but we keep showing up because what else are we going to do? Be alone? Be honest?
I get roped into this shit because I'm bored. I relate to the claim that the worst thing a man can be is useless. Perhaps I am minimally complicit, as it goes, but my hands are hardly clean. They probably still smell of her perfume.
Better to keep performing. Better to keep pretending that our patterns aren't patterns, that our compulsions aren't compulsions, that our inevitable trajectories toward mutual destruction aren't already written in every decision we've made since we were old enough to know better.
The dogs, at least, love honestly. They destroy things because they don't know better, not because they're trying to avoid knowing better. There's something almost sacred in that.
As for the rest of us? We're just apes with pretensions and smartphones. Millions of engineers work tirelessly to make them capture accurate renditions of reality, millions more work to meet market demand by creating filters to reduce reality to something more palatable, more Insta-worthy. Some of us are stumbling through the dark, convincing ourselves that the lies we tell ourselves are somehow more sophisticated than the lies others tell us.
The standard literary thing to do would be to protest that they're not, that all lies and sins are made equal. I'm not so far gone as to believe that. No, I think I've put in a reasonable amount of effort into giving her the best advice I could. She never listens, but isn't patient autonomy all the rage?
The head is a hot air balloon.
But remember: the balloon only looks like it's flying. It's really just at the mercy of the wind.
Stop blowing.
*Confession: I haven't read Heidegger, unless a Wikipedia summary counts. I both refuse to read Continental Philosophy on principle and happen to be new to the whole pretentious navel-gazing literary style, please bear with while I calibrate the signal.
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Notes -
Decent writing but I can't stand dogs. They're rude, smelly, mostly idiotic beasts who think only with their stomach and are incapable of love. /r/dogfeee is one of my favourite subreddits and it's gratifying to me how, now that I have become a parent to a young newborn, how many posts I see in the parenting subreddits with new parents hating/regretting having a pet dog. They are disgusting creatures and your "dumb bitch" is 100% right to be wary of marrying a dog owner.
If I ever have delusions about wanting to get into a relationship, I'll just talk to self_made_human to kill that urge in a jiffy.
I see comments like this and am reminded of my mother's current dog, who will literally tear down baby-gates and open doors to get to me. Or the family's previous dogs, who regularly patrolled and open doors to check and see if I was present and alright.
Get better dogs, I suppose.
This is "Pagliacci becoming a doctor for clowns" territory. I can't cure my own urge to get into a relationship! I'm doing that right now, by which I mean getting into one and not the curing. (it's not with the model).
By all means, do enter into relationships. We live in a fallen world, in an age of declining TFRs. Everyone needs to do their part. Find love, expose your heart to being flying kicked and then curbstomped. It's a learning experience. Most women are actually nice, I just have very little to say about them that isn't better articulated by some romance blogger with a bazillion followers on Substack.
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