Should You Try To Change Your Partner?

by Karen Karbo

Kiki said that was ridiculous. She reminded me of the Tolstoy Test, a personality assessment we’d only half-jokingly devised back in college. We’d ask our dates which character they preferred in War and Peace: Pierre (passionate, impulsive outsider) or Prince Andrei (disciplined, emotionally-aloof intellectual). Their answers, we felt, would speak volumes.

I assured Kiki that CB had never read Tolstoy. She said she was sure he had no idea who Tolstoy was.

I wish I could say that in the end, this didn’t matter. I told myself that we were opposites, but opposites attract, right? I was an uptown girl and he was a downtown boy. I was Hepburn–bookish and clever—and he was Tracy— a working class hunk who knew the true worth of things. Letting go of this fantasy was sadder than letting go of CB.

One difficult winter, during the second year of our three-year marriage, I found myself jonesing for biographies of Henry Tudor and his many wives. I must have read 10 of them, just to pass the time. Meanwhile, in the other room, CB watched Star Wars, which he’d seen over a dozen times. I don’t know if he felt lonely, but I did.

In any tortured relationship there are more than a few last straws. Most of them are Springer-worthy acts of stalking, lying, and crockery hurling (and in that department, CB and I certainly did our part to contribute to the tradition). But what I think of as the real end—the thing from which we could never recover, even if we wanted to—occurred a few weeks before we separated. Kiki and I were going to the movies, to see Pollack.