<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # So there are no high-minded lessons here for... > So there are no high-minded lessons here for either animal, only prices. Husband: your wife did not betray a vow. She ran the female program from the first date, audited you against every alternative in her range for twenty years, told you the results for a decade, and left the day her alternatives beat you and her exit became affordable, and she told you last because the male program's answer to an open ledger is, historically, violence, and she was not going to test whether you were the exception. {{Your wife did not rewrite the marriage. She ran the audit female primates have always run, and you lost it, and she was careful about how she told you because of what males do when they lose.}} Wife: the exit was not growth; it was an option exercised at a price your grandmother could not afford, and the man you left is not a monster for having guarded; he is an ape doing the thing apes do with the mate they cannot keep, and the reason you are alive to call it growth is that the enclosure charges him for the rock. {{She trades up when she can afford to. He kills her when he can afford to. Civilization's entire contribution to marriage is making both of those expensive.}} The instrument is the same for both and it is brutal: he reads the books while they are open, because the audit is loud for years and silent for months and gone in a day; she prices her exit for the animal she is actually leaving, because the ledger is safest closed and the door is safest already behind her. {{Every pair-bond contains a ledger, and the outrage begins the day one animal discovers the other has been keeping books it did not know existed.}} {{Nothing in your marriage was a mystery. Two apes priced each other for twenty years, one audited upward and one guarded downward, and the one who could afford to leave did, quietly, because the other one has hands.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “So there are no high-minded lessons here for either animal, only prices. Husband: your wife did not betray a vow. She ran the female program from the first date, audited you against every alternative in her range for twenty years, told you the results for a decade, and left the day her alternatives beat you and her exit became affordable, and she told you last because the male program's answer to an open ledger is, historically, violence, and she was not going to test whether you were the exception. Your wife did not rewrite the marriage. She ran the audit female primates have always run, and you lost it, and she was careful about how she told you because of what males do when they lose. Wife: the exit was not growth; it was an option exercised at a price your grandmother could not afford, and the man you left is not a monster for having guarded; he is an ape doing the thing apes do with the mate they cannot keep, and the reason you are alive to call it growth is that the enclosure charges him for the rock. She trades up when she can afford to. He kills her when he can afford to. Civilization's entire contribution to marriage is making both of those expensive. The instrument is the same for both and it is brutal: he reads the books while they are open, because the audit is loud for years and silent for months and gone in a day; she prices her exit for the animal she is actually leaving, because the ledger is safest closed and the door is safest already behind her. Every pair-bond contains a ledger, and the outrage begins the day one animal discovers the other has been keeping books it did not know existed. Nothing in your marriage was a mystery. Two apes priced each other for twenty years, one audited upward and one guarded downward, and the one who could afford to leave did, quietly, because the other one has hands.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-no-high-minded-leave-quietly-hands ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->