We need to talk about Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Embracing chaos in a beautiful New York brownstone.

Thank you so much for reading and sending kind words, I appreciate every like, share, reply, and restack. (✿◠‿◠) I’m working out the details of my first podcast episode, but podcasting is extremely scary and new for me and it’s hard not to think why the hell would someone want to listen to this, so please be patient with me. (◠‿·)—☆

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There’s that old joke about marriage that says something like the secret to a long marriage is that it’s just two people who don’t want to get divorced at the same time. I thought about this as I watched the (very good) series written by Donald Glover starring the (extremely good) Maya Erskine.

“Who do you think you are?” Mohato asked me while he was brushing his teeth and I was getting ready to brush mine after we had binged the series on Saturday afternoon. “I know who I am.” To me, it was painfully obvious. “I think you’re John,” he said before I could answer. “You’re charming and people like you.” I laughed, flattered, he had kindly omitted some of the unsavory qualities I obviously shared with Jane.

You can’t help but try to work out who you are in the show and who really is The Worst, which is a shame since I think one of the show’s main philosophies is that in any relationship with high stakes (love is the highest stake, not international espionage) there is no The Best and The Worst, there’s just two people trying, and sometimes, painfully, not trying. But that’s life — there’s too much talk of “Everyone’s trying their best” and not enough admitting that sometimes we aren’t. We aren’t because we’re fallible, myopic, and easily fooled by ourselves, but mostly because we’re human and sometimes humans don’t try. I don’t think we admit that enough. That doesn’t make us bad, the same way not making the “most of each moment” doesn’t make us bad. We don’t try and we don’t make the most of each moment and as I read recently (in a great article about pants¹) “your capacity for stupidity is how you know you’re still alive”.

In 4000 Weeks, a real trickster of a book, the author Oliver Burkeman puts forward that in our productivity culture, we’re almost always maneuvering to outwit our mortality by seeking out living in the present only to have said we did when in reality all we can actually factually do is live in the present anyway. What we’re trying to get at is A Good Life the same way we’re trying to be The Best. Both of these kind of don’t exist, or at least not in any real way. We’re trying to apply order to chaos, whether it’s our limited lifespan or the realities of romantic love. We want to think we did well, in life, and in love, rather than accept we can’t, or at least not always. We will try, not try, be The Worst, be The Best, make the most of our time on this spinning rock, and squander it all at the same time. And then, like in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we’ll lie entangled in the consequences of our choices, with no choice but to face the truth, and we’ll have to decide: do we want to get divorced at the same time?

1. I really recommend the author of this article’s Substack

Blackbird Spyplane

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