Should You Try To Change Your Partner?

by Karen Karbo

I thought he was being self-deprecating (a word CB would never use in a million years). I thought it was adorable. I thought that phrase “video games and sex” was edgy and rock-lyric-like. I was a complete idiot. In the six years I knew him, CB had never said anything truer. This was who he was. And I did not believe him.

It is an old lesson we women continually fail to learn: you cannot make a person something he is not. CB was disappointing in many astonishing ways. But I refused to think it mattered, and that is my own damned fault.

Let me be clear, here: I like sex, too. But I also like the Russian novelists, particularly Dostoevsky and Nabokov. I like Dorothy Parker’s poetry. I like The New Yorker, especially the impossibly long articles about the weather, or growing corn, or predicting earthquakes. I like Joan Miró and Chagall and the photographs of Lee Friedlander. I could go on, but you get the point.

Many Americans shrink at the idea of discussing class, and I am no different. To this day, even having learned the difficult and inescapable lesson I learned in my marriage to CB, I am somewhat ashamed to say it: I am educated and he is not. I won’t say he’s an idiot, and I won’t say he doesn’t think. But he has no use for the life of the mind. And, worse, he’s suspicious of anyone with an education. In the end, we didn’t come from the same pond at all.

In the early days of our courtship and cohabitation, I was happy with CB. Only my oldest friend had doubts. Kiki and I been roommates in film school; she’d introduced to me the concept of the “greaser-poet” (being immune to the allure of the surfer with a Fender Stratocaster). I said, “I don’t have to talk about literature with him. I can talk about it with you.”