Grounds for divorce: Wine, late nights, and instant communications

Image via softsolder.

Celebrated author David Brooks expresses himself uncharacteristically in verse in his New York Times posting today:

So much of life is about leave-taking:
moving from home to college,
from love to love,
from city to city and
from life stage to life stage.
In earlier times, leaving was defined by distance,
but now it is defined by silence.

Gradually a story seems to emerge, told in the scientific third person as a kind of universal experience, stripped of all individual detail, of a breakup between a man who acts or doesn't act, and a "friend", a woman, who "probably" perceives and feels; he slowly cuts off communications, one word at a time, she suffers "amazing" pain:

The person moving on and changing a relationship
no longer makes a one-time choice
to physically go to another town.
He makes a series of minute-by-minute decisions
to not text, to not email or call,
to turn intense communication
into sporadic conversation
or no communication.
His name was once constant
on his friend’s phone screen,
but now it is rare
and the void is a wound...

The person left in the vapor trail
is hurt and probably craves
contact. It’s amazing how much pain there is
when what was once intimate conversation
turns into unnaturally casual banter,
emotional distance or just a void.
The person left behind also probably
thinks that the leaver is making a big mistake.
She probably thinks that it’s stupid
to leave or change the bond;
that the other person is driven
by selfishness, shortsightedness or popularity.

Or perhaps the genders could be reversed ("The person being left has to grant/the leaver the dignity of her own mind"), but it's far from clear how you grant someone the dignity of her own mind, I mean, it doesn't really depend on your "granting" it whether her mind is dignified or not, does it? ("Thanks, your majesty, for my mental dignity, I owe it all to you.") He uses the word "leaving" eight times, "left" nine times, "communication" nine times, and "void" twice, for what it's worth. Ultimately, anyway, he seems to settle into the point of the view of the one abandoned—the only one of the two represented as having a representable point of view:

Without accepting the idea that she deserved to be left,
the person being left has to act
in a way worthy of her best nature,
to continue the sacrificial love
that the leaver may not deserve
and may never learn about.

How sad, that love that must forever remain silent. Definitely no drunk dialing:

That means not calling when you are not wanted.
Not pleading for more intimacy
or doing the other embarrassing things
that wine, late nights and instant
communications make possible.

Incidentally, speaking of drunk dialing, according to the Android version, the column was filed, or at least last updated, at 3:24 am. Actually, I think I'll just quit on this one. Aware of rumors that Mr. and Mrs. Brooks themselves may or may not have broken up recently—and they did sell the Cleveland Park house with its vast spaces for entertaining, for $4.495 million, in September—I might be tempted to suppose the piece is in some way about that, though I know very well he would never be so vulgar as to discuss his personal life in the Times...

Driftglass thinks it might be about Netanyahu (Obama finally dumped him after catching him cheating one time too many and now he's in Washington stalking the president, who refuses to take his calls?). Or Dr. William Kristol, don't even ask. At LGM, Lemieux has aggregated a bit more, plus great comments of course.