Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses emotional abuse.

“When I’m finishing my coffee, my husband leans towards me and whispers into my ear ‘We need to find a moment to talk.’ Then after a short pause, he adds, ‘It’s important.’

I’m frozen, unable to say a word.

It’s over.”

This opening exchange between Ariane and her husband suggests both Ariane’s heightened emotional state and the underlying tension in her marriage. In narrative terms, the husband’s comment is a catalyst, or inciting incident, which spurs the plot in action. It is because of this comment that Ariane recounts and scrutinizes the events of the previous week.

“I don’t know of any fictional heroine who can show me how to behave. There are plenty of despairing lovers who sing about loss or rejection. But I don’t know of any novel, any film, any poem that can serve as my example, show me how to love better, less intensely.”

As these lines show, Ariane’s narrative is frank and emotionally raw, revealing her intimate highs and lows. The fact that Ariane does not have any role models for her peculiar kind of love—a long-married woman yearning for the husband she lives with—is an early clue about the toxicity of her marriage. Ariane does not see it, but her yearning for her husband is mixed up with her insecurity about her own inferior position in their power dynamics, introducing The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession.

“I wonder whether I’m the only one to notice the universal women’s waiting room.”

Ariane’s views on marriage and womanhood are often conventional and stereotypical, reflecting The Oppressive Nature of Gendered Expectations. Though Ariane is a contemporary woman with a meaningful career, she casts herself in the role of a passive figure, always awaiting her husband. She sees the world as divided between active men who go to work and the breathless women who yearn for their return.