Would you please absorb this, so the rest of us don’t have to look at it?

That is what a family asks a wife to do.

Not out of malice.

Out of exhaustion.

Because a marriage ending means Christmas has to be reorganized and cousins have to pick and somebody has to explain it to the grandmother, and all of that is enormously inconvenient, and there is exactly one person present who can make the inconvenience go away by agreeing to be less hurt.

I said it once, at the end of that first week, in my own living room, and then I never had to say it again because it went around the family in about nine hours: