#mary responds mostly well and then assigns motive and falls into fallacy ditch herself so GOOD so REAL

[knowlesian]

quick thought because rewatching the finale for ed means rewatching for stede: god, the ‘is there anything you want to tell me about doug’ / ‘on a whim’ scene with mary and stede kills me every single time and is just... such a perfect and human example of bad communication.

stede enters that exchange wanting mary to confess she’s sleeping with doug, and given his followup doozy of ‘i forgive you’ later in the episode he wants an apology for it.

he does not say: i know you’re sleeping with doug, and knowing that bothers me.

which would be a good thing to say! mary could reply (as i would reply) something along the lines of ‘you thinking you have the right to be bothered by this in a way that ends in you trying to tell me what to do with my body is the kind of shit i am not gonna put up with, so you should quit while you’re behind’.

he does not do that.

instead he goes on a fishing expedition. he doesn’t even just start a conversation: he starts with purposefully clearing his throat, doing it again when the first time fails, loud enough mary has to answer. 

then he comments that she came in late last night (subtext: i know why you came in late) and mary confirms it then tries once again to go back to her newspaper and head off this on-coming train.

then stede does the thing that makes me want to claw my face off, and says "is there anything you want to tell me". (with the follow-up that makes it clear what he means, without him having to say what he means: “say... about doug?”)

for personal reasons i have a lot of trouble dealing with people who do this; outside a few exceptions, that sentence usually translates to ‘i have a problem i want to air, but i’m certainly not going to approach this like a healthy adult in a no-bullshit manner’. and without exception, it always makes me want to snap back ‘NOPE but it sure seems like you fucking do, so why don’t you quit trying to force me to start this conversation for you and say what you gotta say’.

mary apparently feels the same way, and she reads him to hell and back: then she ends on ascribing his actions to whims and it veers left into noooo, don’t do that-ville. her saying that instead of what she actually means (which is: i don’t know why the hell you did this, and i do not know because you never told me why) is understandable, but not the road to take if having a productive discussion is the goal. assigning motive instead of assessing behavior in these situations is a bad call, if only because it allows people to jump on that moment of editorialization and evade your actual point.

(this is also one of those things where how much weight a person puts on the generally accepted implications of the word whim— aka: that there was no reason behind it at all— is gonna change the use of the word, but for now i’ll take whim = he did it for no reason and/or no good reason.)

stede does not factually object to anything mary said. he acknowledges: yeah i did all that, i just object to the word whim re: why i did everything i absolutely did.

and that’s just... oof. now: this is a super human dynamic. when people say to us ‘but i didn’t mean to’ it feels like an excuse; when we say it to others, it feels like context.

mary’s point is not the whim part; assigning motivation is her frustration speaking. (alongside her simple lack of anything else to think, given stede left and then showed back up in fairly short succession, and he did not give her a reason why he did it either time.)

her point is: you left. you came back. you have no right to blow up my life once again, especially not this second time.

stede doesn’t actually engage with that part of what she says. he only quibbles over her use of the word whim.

that’s the point where he reeeally goes wrong. if he had said ‘i swear that it wasn’t on a whim, mary, but you’re right and i’m sorry’ and then explained his reasoning during the resulting conversation that could open up, that engages with the actual point and allows him to explain himself and admit his own pain while also owning that pain we cause is not mitigated by the motivations behind it, only contextualized.

it’s just such a believably bad conversation, where stede sets the tone and mary ends up falling back on bad argument habits herself instead of just focusing on addressing the issues at hand. 

love it, ngl. so good.