The Fallacy of Stoic Patience
I once told a woman whose marriage was fraying at the edges that she simply needed more “radical patience.” I was , fueled by a half-read book on stoicism and the unearned confidence of someone who lived alone in a studio apartment where the only midnight noise was the hum of a small refrigerator. I told her that if she truly loved her husband, his snoring would eventually become a “comforting rhythm,” a sign that he was alive and beside her.
It was a sentiment so profoundly stupid and privileged that I still wince when I think about the look she gave me-a mixture of pity and the kind of exhaustion that changes the actual structure of a person’s face. She didn’t need a lecture on stoicism; she needed eight hours of REM sleep without a diesel engine vibrating the pillow next to her.
Sleep is the primary currency of a stable domestic life. But it is a currency that many couples are forced to mint at the expense of their own physical comfort-an expense that usually manifests as a dull, throbbing ache in the inner ear by . We have been conditioned to believe that if we cannot tolerate the noise of the person we love, the fault lies in our temperament, not in the