I have spent a great deal of time since trying to understand how that happens — how an intelligent, capable woman thanks the man who is quietly disabling her — because I know how it sounds from outside, and I know that people who have never been inside it imagine they would have seen it at once.

But it does not arrive as control.

That is the whole genius of it.

It comes as love, and as relief, and as care, wearing the face of the most generous thing anyone has ever offered you. You don’t need to work.

Let me take care of everything. Said with warm hands and warm eyes, by a man everyone admires, to a new mother exhausted and frightened and grateful for any help at all — it does not sound like a trap closing.

It sounds like being rescued.