The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 59: October 15

Today I fought with my husband. He is on a diet, not for vanity’s sake but because of a recent encounter with a scary illness. A person might think — given my own recent encounter with a scary illness — that I would unreservedly support his wellness pursuit. I do not. Until today I have acted supportive, but beneath my support a dark undertow lurked. I’d kept this undertow a secret from him. Instead I confessed my baffling hostility toward his diet to my female friends. All of them, I was surprised to learn, are or were once involved with men who’d experimented with diets for reasons of health. I discovered that the male diet is a potent relationship disharmonizer. “Threatened” is the word that arose most frequently when I spoke to women about their male dieting partners, as in “I am/was threatened by his diet.” The obvious interpretation of our reaction was this: we feared that our husbands desired to look slimmer and healthier because they’d met another woman and planned, once their transformation was complete, to leave us.

But we weren’t scared of being left. Maybe we should have been, but we weren’t. We were resentful. The dieting man does not eat the same food as the rest of his family — the diets we were speaking about were not “eat more healthy foods” diets. These diets required extreme abstinence and often had a cultish whiff to them. The adherents of these diets made YouTube videos that were both compelling and disturbing. People lost so much weight that their skulls shrank.

We tried to parse our feelings of endangerment. Was gender primarily to blame? By being on a diet, our husbands were (albeit for very different reasons) behaving like so many of our female friends, some of whom developed eating disorders and became incredibly boring. I was one of those women for a year. Luckily I was able to escape what is often, tragically, inescapable. When I emerged from my brief anorexia incarceration I thought: Well that was a very huge waste of my time. The monomaniacal dedication of brain activity required to maintain an eating disorder was an inexcusable squandering of one of my best brain years. Plus the obsession was inherently perverse. Even though I was fixated upon nothing but my body, my brain was somehow totally disengaged, save intellectually, from its singular concern. My body, despite the molecular-level attention paid to it, belonged to a faraway creature, a numb, gray sylph.

Also I did not tell my friends, but to myself I admitted: I was jealous. I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman, the man who masterminded the diet my husband is following. My husband seems to believe most everything Fuhrman says, and this affronts me because my husband doesn’t believe most everything I say. My husband approaches my claims with a loving but skeptical eye. He doesn’t not question what I say, but occasionally he believes certain ridiculous statements I make because I have probably exhausted him into a place of acceptance. Fuhrman’s claims do not exhaust my husband, even though Fuhrman advocates something called “the Nutritarian Food Pyramid,” which sounds to me acceptable only under circumstances of extreme exhaustion. Also my husband is not as sensitive as I am; he does not understand the title of Fuhrman’s book—Eat to Live—as just so bitchy and rebuking.

“Because I’m eating to die,” I said to my husband.

My husband is an alarmingly smart man; he’s a unique thinker to his bones. He is, as a friend once said, a monk or a holy person who might better live in a tower or the desert. He thrives on discipline and solitude. Despite the fact that he has a family and a job and a wife who is always planning parties that he must cook for and attend, he manages to maintain his iconoclastic integrity. Most remarkably he can, without compromising this integrity, happily follow the occasional diet mastermind like Dr. Fuhrman. He has followed a few masterminds since we got married (these are not whimsical switches; he keeps up on the research and responds in kind). While I take pleasure (when I’m trying to reason him out of his health pursuits) in pointing out how, for example, he is able to endorse the belief “fruit is bad, never eat fruit,” and then, after a mastermind shift, “fruit is great, eat as much fruit as you want,” what I’m really expressing is insecurity. He can weather a belief reversal — one based on science, granted — without doubting the soundness of his faith or his mind.

I, however, am often insecure about what I believe. So, most of the time, is my husband. “Insecure” is maybe not the right word to describe us. We are avid second-guessers because, though we are both professors and thus must act as authorities in certain situations, we find certainty a turnoff. We love to take a conviction we might, for a moment, entertain, and then turn it on its head and make a joke about it. This joking is our form of the Socratic method. Our jokes are interrogations that help us to figure out what we care about, and where our faith, at the moment, lies.

His unfailing certainty about his diet, thus, made me feel isolated. I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren’t, technically, jokes. They were criticisms driven by the fear that he was abandoning me to interrogate our future uncertainties alone.

Still, I tried to act supportive. Today I failed. I failed to act my best or at all. As my husband prepared his healthy dinner, and I prepared my moderately healthy one, I had what is best described as a tantrum.

Afterward I lay on the couch. My husband sat in a distant chair. I tried to explain why, when he was on a diet to manage his pain and secure his longevity — why, when he was trying his best not to more rapidly and miserably die — I was being so totally mean. I talked about how, as a woman, I’d spent literally decades around other women (myself included) who cared too much about food. Who obsessed over what they ate, and adhered to bib-lettuce-and-vinegar-only diets, and who became, over time, unhappy and sexless and dull. After watching for decades what I ate, I finally didn’t give a shit. I’d been freed from the female curse of perpetual self-dissatisfaction and pleasure denial. His caring about what he ate posed a threat to my enlightened, non-caring state.

I then confessed that I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman. I further confessed that really I did not give a shit about Dr. Fuhrman; my issues were related to my feeling excluded and subsequently rejected by my husband. He’d found a passion I could not share. He believed and I didn’t. Once we spent an entire summer making and eating elaborate banana splits. Now we prepared side-by-side meals. We parallel cooked and I couldn’t help but extrapolate that soon we would parallel live, and that our vectors would someday permanently cease to cross. It turned out that (contrary to what I’d said to my friends) I was scared of his leaving me, but I worried he would do so by never breaking up with me and never moving out.

My husband listened. He confessed that he’d been unceasingly aware of my ambient enmity (my secret had not been such a secret, it seems). He understood, now that I’d explained myself, why. I think we are both worried about the perils of parallel living because we share so many parallels. We are so alike that we pursue the same passion and work at the same university and raise the same children and have the same sense of humor. At the dinner parties I force us to throw more often than is probably healthy for either of us, we are often the only two people laughing. No one makes me laugh more than he does. But we both worry, I think, that we are so alike that we might start to take for granted the health of our marriage, as we have, until recently, taken for granted the health of our bodies.