Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [134]
The excesses of Raoul Felder’s workplace do not stop at the waiting room. His office, size huge, is a tchotchke museum: globes, plaques, baseball caps, photographs of the rich and famous, toys, newspaper clippings, the odd Picasso original. His desk is so big you could land a small personal aircraft on it, yet so cluttered with curios I had trouble finding a spot for my three-inch tape recorder. Nor is his penchant for indiscriminate collection and display limited to décor. In under ninety minutes with me, he quoted Yeats, Kissinger, Newton, Santayana, Churchill (twice), Casablanca, T. S. Eliot, Kipling, and a taxi driver in Berlin. He could charge by the aphorism and still make a killing. But not for him any dulcet quotes about the marriage of true minds, et cetera. Felder’s specialty is the dissolution of the bonds of love, and his speech is accordingly acid. You wouldn’t go to him for romantic inspiration, and you wouldn’t go to him for marriage counseling. But you would go to him, as I did, for a vivid picture of what it looks like when our sentimental notion of love collapses.
People walk into his office, Felder says, with two predominant emotions. First, they feel deeply wronged. “If your lumber wasn’t delivered on time and you had to sue for it, it’s not a great moral cause,” Felder says. “But when people come in here, you’d think they were talking about the decline of Western Civilization, or Genghis Kahn pillaging villages, rather than some little thing that happened on the third floor on Park Ave.” Second, they feel incredibly righteous. “People come in here saying, ‘You can’t believe what happened to me; you’ve never heard anything like this before’”—although Felder has heard it all before. “And then,” he continues, “you get this story where she’s blameless and he’s a jerk, or, if it’s the guy, he’s Prince Charming and she’s the Wicked Witch of the West. When you finally get both people in the same room, it’s like they’re talking about two different marriages. But each person believes passionately in the truth of what they’re saying.”
In Felder’s view, his clients’ egos can’t tolerate anything short of this absolute rightness. “People don’t want to believe they’re wrong about anything,” he says, “but particularly not about love. For starters, it’s supposed to be our wisest decision. It’s not; it’s probably the stupidest. What other important choice do we make on the basis of hormones? But anyway, it’s definitely the most momentous. Given the present state of civil law, marriage is probably the biggest financial deal you’ll ever make, and obviously it’s one of your biggest personal decisions.”
Given those stakes, Felder says, “it’s a terrible shock when you have to accept your own fallibility.” (This is all the more true, he notes, for his A-list clients, the ones who are accustomed to authority and control. “People believe in their own infallibility in a ratio that’s consistent with their power in life,” he says. “As you get higher, you get more and more people around you saying you’re right, and you get less and less used to being contradicted or being wrong.”) Even if you can accept your fallibility in general, the specific crisis of a failed marriage is a stunningly hard pill to swallow. “With divorce, you’re losing a validation of yourself. It’s like: ‘I trusted this girl, I told her my innermost secrets and this was going to be my companion through life and I made a mistake, I’m no judge of people.’ That’s got to shake you on a pretty deep level.”
At least, it has to shake you if you face it. But many of us don’t. Instead, as with so many of our mistakes, we opt for denial. Even as our relationship is disintegrating around us, we refuse to accept that our beliefs about