▸ Column · Contemporary America — Wonder Woman as Diana Prince walking the modern world of men
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Circe.
The letter
I've been with Oliver for almost a year, and his best friend Delilah — they've known each other since grade school — has made it pretty obvious she doesn't like me. At his birthday dinner last month she stood up to toast him and said something like, "to Oliver finally being with someone who laughs at all his jokes." Then she looked straight at me and added that laughing at the ones that aren't funny counts too. Everyone kind of just sat there. Oliver says that's her sense of humor, she'll warm up, she doesn't mean anything by it. But she talks over me constantly, she "forgets" to save me a seat when the group goes out together, and she told Oliver straight to his face that she thinks I'm putting on some kind of act. (I'm not — or I'm at least not doing it on purpose. I'm just nervous around her, which honestly seems reasonable.)
Now Oliver wants the four of us to spend the entire Fourth of July weekend at Delilah's family's lake house. Three full days. I'm already dreading it. So I genuinely don't know — do I just go and push through it to prove I'm not the difficult one? Do I tell Oliver I'm not going to spend a vacation with someone who's been this cold to me? Or do I finally make him admit that his best friend has been quietly voting against our relationship this whole time, and I never agreed to give her that kind of power?
— Dreading the Dock in Cleveland
Wonder Woman replies
The toast wasn't the problem. Delilah showed you exactly who she is, and there's a clarity in that which at least saves you the guessing.
The problem is what Oliver did next. He called it humor. He asked you to wait for her to come around. He is now inviting you into three days on a dock, hoping patience will settle what he hasn't had the courage to address himself. I have stood in far more dangerous rooms than a lake house kitchen, and I have watched people I loved choose comfort over their own integrity. We had a name for a peace held together by one person's silence. We called it surrender with better posture.
You don't need to give him an ultimatum. You need to ask him, plainly and without softening it: What did you actually think when she said that? And then you wait for the true answer, not the comfortable one. Not the one about her having a sharp wit. The one about whether he sees what has been happening and whether he is willing to say so out loud.
The lake house answers itself once you have that. You cannot prove you're not the problem by absorbing more insults in silence. That isn't strength. That is just a quieter surrender.
— Wonder Woman
Circe weighs in
How earnest. Diana sends you in with an honest question, trusting a man who watched you be humiliated eleven months running to suddenly find his spine. Millennia should have cured her of that faith.
Darling, go to the lake house. Delilah has claimed that dock as her territory, and she has been performing for an audience — the table, the boyfriend, him. So perform better. Be so effortlessly yourself that mocking you becomes the embarrassing move. Make the pack laugh with you.
She is not protecting Oliver. She is protecting her position. Show her you are not begging to keep yours.
— Circe
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