My advice has been consistent: raise it, specifically and kindly, because the committee will not improve on its own and the alternative is to either fix it without credit or to stay bothered without resolution. She has not acted on this advice yet. I think she is weighing whether the relationship cost is worth the organizational benefit. This is a legitimate calculation. I have told her that.
She has given me one piece of advice that I have found genuinely useful, in one of our October conversations. I had mentioned, obliquely, that I was finding the ongoing nature of the situation with Daniel — the sense that progress was happening but slowly and with setbacks — somewhat tiring. She listened and then she said:
“The people who raised Daniel made him who he is, including the parts that are giving you trouble. That’s not an excuse for him and it’s not something he has to stay. But you deserve to understand that you married someone whose formation is visible in his behavior, and the formation took decades. Change takes what it takes.”
I thought about that for a while. It was not what I expected from the woman who had asked me, in her kitchen, whether I had thought about finding something.
People change. The context I had for her changed. Both things are true.
## The Thing About Visibility
I have been thinking about visibility a lot this year.
There is a particular kind of invisibility that does not feel like invisibility while it is happening. It feels like pragmatism, or patience, or the reasonable decision not to make things harder than they need to be. You are not shouting to be seen. You are just not shouting, because the need to shout seems like it should not exist.