Version I
The Break-Up Letter by Alisse Waterston
[Writing time: approximately 3.5 hours, maybe a little longer]
Karel,
Your letter arrived and, not surprisingly, it’s filled with your usual rants, confusions, self-absorption, and serious narcissism. I’ve had enough. Enough of you. Enough of this sorry thing called our marriage. Enough of my own delusions about what I have ever meant to you. What you mean to me. I no longer care. I’m done.
I should have seen it long ago but I let my own fantasy get in the way. The bullshit of your so-called masterpiece. God ≈ (Fine‑Tuning × Belief) ÷ Entropy. What’s that supposed to mean? You tried to trick me (trick yourself) with garbage masked as mathematical abstraction. E=mc2 actually means something. You’re no Einstein but you’ve kidded yourself for decades that you are equal to him or above. So what, that you believe in “paper”? What does believing in paper even mean? You set things up as precious but you don’t know what precious is.
The delusion has been going on for decades, while I waited, my life withering. Long ago, you seduced me. I fell for what you professed to be your genius. That you were onto something significant. I was captivated by what seemed the wide embrace of your concept.[1] I’ve finally awakened. It only took me decades. For that I am sorry (for myself, not for you). I’m no Mrs. Mallard, though. I won’t die of shock. I know you are very much alive even though I now know you are very unwell.[2]
You’ve always thought your madness the reflection of brilliance. I now know the truth of it. At best, you are the definition of academic mediocrity with enormous delusions of grandeur. I pity you.
In your own mind, you’ve set yourself apart from others. Your actions reveal it, literally and metaphorically, though you are blind to both. You wrote me about the conference, how you walked into the first session late. Did you think you were being “fashionably” late—a way to suggest you’re above it all, above them all? You sat at the back, apart from everyone else. You raised your hand—not to ask a question but to (try to) impress everyone with your depth of knowledge, some insight you thought was brilliant, to show off yourself as intellectually superior. I would bet you fooled them, with your absent-minded professor persona (your clothes, your facial hair, your spectacles—it’s all style, not substance). You wrote about the speaker, the woman publisher who seemed taken aback by your comments. I’ll give you this: she sounds like an ass what with her single minded ambition at the expense of anything human. Everyone is fucked and fucked up. I’m fucked, too.
I am the Dorothea Brooke to her Mr. Casaubon: Anneke Engel to Professor Mulder. Have you ever read Middlemarch? Dorothea, young, idealistic, naïve, thrilled at Casaubon’s marriage proposal, desiring then a husband above her in judgement and in all knowledge.[3] What a fool she was. What a fool I’ve been.
I never told you this before but now I no longer have anything to lose. Do you remember your student from way back when—Professor Sophie Vermeer? So many years ago she contacted me, wanting to know what I thought of your work. In those years, I was in a deluded state because I felt my own ignorance.[4] I encouraged her to trust in your genius, though there was no substance to my argument. She expressed doubts. I ran them over with a passion I no longer recognize. Over the years, Sophie and I became good friends. She’s the real thing, by the way. A true intellectual. And she revealed to me, gently and gingerly, the true shallowness of your grand theory.
Do you even know why I constantly interrupted you with mundane household matters—the ivy, the mould, the burst pipe? It wasn’t to alert you. It wasn’t really to ask you to do anything about it (you never did). Did you ever notice that all these things got fixed? Who do you think made that happen?
It was slow, but Dorothea Brooke came to realize the folly of her illusion about the husband she thought she had married. She never came to despise him (he died, lucky for her) though he hurt her by neglect, leaving her frustrated, lonely. For me, realization came more slowly. You know, in real life, it doesn’t come swiftly as it happens in a novel, even a long one like Eliot’s. I designed those interruptions and wrote those notes to nag you. Not to nag you to tear down the ivy, wash away the mould, take out the garbage, fix the pipe—because I knew you never would take care of those things, too mundane for a mind like yours. In my own passive-aggressive way, I was telling you (but you didn’t hear me) that what you believe is “precious, intellectual” work is not all that, and that I was (am) of the opinion that the things you thought beneath you were much more important than any of your nonsense.
So here we are. The marriage is over. I will thrive and you will shrivel. That’s my prediction. It’s not only that you are a relic, as you cried to me in that letter of yours (please stop with the hand-wringing—it’s pathetic). You will shrivel because you must now know that there is no “maths of divinity” (even that phrase of yours is ridiculous). You must realize now that you’ve devoted your entire life to pure illusion. Once upon a time, that equation of yours may have felt true—it’s what you thought was the only thing that mattered. Turns out to be foolishness.
Have I hurt you enough? I’m trying to. I’m trying to get a rise out of you. I never could while we were married.
Anneke
PS: I took 10 stamps from your desk. Also, I didn’t call the plumber. By the time I packed up and left, the water in the basement rose to—I don’t know—maybe two feet?
Version II
The Break Up Letter by Chat GPT
[Composition time: a few seconds]
Prompt submitted to Chat GPT by A Waterston: Write a marriage break up letter to husband name Karel from wife named Anneke. To know about him: He’s a professor with a theory about the mathematics of divinity. He has neglected his wife over the years. She is fed up. He has delusions of grandeur and fears the future including AI. Anneke’s letter captures her years of frustration and that she’s done with him. The marriage is over.
Karel,
I have spent years trying to understand how a man so devoted to the architecture of divinity could remain so utterly blind to the human being sitting across from him at the dinner table.
You speak endlessly about transcendence, sacred ratios, hidden mathematical structures beneath existence itself. You lecture rooms full of students about eternity while forgetting birthdays, anniversaries, conversations, promises. You have mapped the geometry of God but somehow misplaced your wife.
For years I excused it because I believed there was something noble in your obsession. I told myself genius required solitude. I defended you to friends who quietly wondered why I always arrived alone. I accepted your absences even when you were physically in the room, staring through me as though I were merely another variable in one of your endless equations.
But genius is not an exemption from decency.
You became addicted to your own importance. Every discussion turned into a sermon. Every disagreement became proof that lesser minds simply could not grasp the magnitude of your ideas. You speak about your theory as if history itself is waiting breathlessly for your revelation, while meanwhile your actual life — your marriage, your home, the people who loved you — has withered from neglect.
And lately, your fears have consumed whatever remained of you. Every conversation collapses into warnings about the future, about artificial intelligence, about civilization unraveling, about humanity surrendering itself to machines. You speak as though you alone can see the apocalypse approaching. You have become a prophet of your own anxieties.
Do you know what is exhausting, Karel?
Living with a man who believes he is responsible for saving humanity while being incapable of asking his wife how her day was.
You feared the future so intensely that you abandoned the present entirely.
I am tired of competing with your theories, your paranoia, your self-mythology. I am tired of standing beside a man who mistakes emotional absence for intellectual depth. I am tired of feeling lonely in a marriage occupied by only one person.
The cruelest part is that I stayed long after I knew better. I kept waiting for you to come back down to earth. I kept believing the man I married was still somewhere beneath the lectures and grand declarations and catastrophizing. But at some point I realized you do not actually want a partner. You want an audience.
I will not spend the rest of my life applauding while disappearing.
So this is the end.
Not dramatic. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Simply real.
I am leaving you, Karel. The marriage is over.
And despite everything, despite the years wasted trying to reach you, I feel something now that I have not felt in a very long time:
Relief.
— Anneke
[1] To give credit where credit is due: This sentence is adapted from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (p. 23): “Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this conception.”
[2] Mrs. Mallard is the main character in Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour,” in The Awakening.
[3] Middlemarch (p. 38).
[4] Ibid (p. 61).