Easier to Let You Win
I sat with the essay for weeks before I sent it to lit mags. A Google doc with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. A mirror. A confession. A truth that made me feel exposed.
I was terrified.
Not of the writing itself, but of what it would cost to send it out into the world. There’s always someone else in the frame when you write about marriage—someone who didn’t choose to be on the page. And “Easier to Let You Win,” published this week at The Manifest-Station, doesn’t just put my husband in that frame.
It puts my parents there, too. Their 48-year marriage. My mother’s hammer of control. My father’s slow disappearance.
And me.
Recognizing myself in both of them.
The essay is about the moment my husband—confined to stillness after back surgery—finally told me what he’d been too tired to say: that it was easier to let me win than to keep trying.
Writing about marriage is never easy.
It means examining the relationship that holds the closest mirror. It means sitting in the discomfort of being seen—as someone who sometimes creates damage without even knowing she’s wielding a weapon.
I wrote it in March, sent it off in April, learned it was accepted in September and it was finally published this week. Nine months of wondering if the rawness was too much, if the vulnerability too exposed, if the truth too honest.
An acceptance is a kind of validation—it says this resonated, that someone found it worthy of sharing with a wider audience. That the cost of choosing to write it, to send it, to let it be seen, was worth it.
This essay was originally published at The Manifest-Station on December 7, 2025.
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
The words cut through the hum of the dishwasher, somewhere between challenge and plea.
For weeks, my husband has been confined to a space he rarely occupies—worried about losing his United Airlines global service tier, his inability to be the “always-on” startup CEO, and the sagging awning that needs fixing.
The forced stillness—a result of back surgery—has transformed his status from high flyer to dad and husband. Instead of being a blur, he’s present, watching how I move through rooms, how I speak to our daughter, how I rearrange things he’s done.
“The surgery made me invisible in a different way,” he would tell me later. “Before, I was too busy to notice. Now, I can’t escape knowing how non-existent I am in this house, this life you’ve built.”
Our anniversary has passed without celebration during his recovery. There has been no fight, no decision to let it slip by—just the slow seep of distance neither of us tried to close.
And now, here he is, hovering over me after another quiet lunch as I write an email.
“What?” I ask, confused.
“You talk to me like I’m stupid. Like I don’t know anything. Like I’ve never done a single thing right in 24 years.“
The word stupid lands like an open palm to the chest. I never call him that. I don’t think that.
I open my mouth, but he is already cataloging evidence. The dishwasher—bowls he stacked in the upper rack, ones I moved immediately after. The puppy’s bath schedule—how I cut him off about skin sensitivities, insisting I knew better. The trigonometry theorem—how his eyes lit up explaining something to our daughter, until I interjected with a “simpler” explanation, watching his enthusiasm deflate.
I want to argue. To say, “That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I do.”
Instead, I hear myself through his ears. The constant corrections. The sighs. The dismissals. Each insignificant alone, but together forming a chorus of disapproval.
“You’ve turned into your mom,” he says.
It’s almost as if he has slapped me across my face.
“Here’s your reminder: Time for school pickup,” Alexa chimes in.
I grab my keys and leave. “Turned into your mom” on repeat in my head.
Driving through heaving sobs, I shout: “I don’t want to be her! I have spent my whole life trying to be anything but her! I am not her.”
Only to realize, I have become her.
That night, I barely sleep, his words pressing on my chest. I have spent years thinking I was just being efficient. But maybe efficiency was a mask? Maybe I correct and manage because it gives me proof that I still matter, even after leaving my journalism career to become a homemaker, a child-carer? Proof that I am still valuable, even without a paycheck.
The next morning, when we have the house to ourselves, we talk. For the first time in years, I don’t interrupt. I don’t argue. I don’t try to explain, deflect, or defend. I simply listen. He fades in and out of sight as I turn to hide my pain, looking at the swaying oaks outside, the blustery sky.
When he finishes, there’s a long, uncomfortable silence. I wipe my tears and hear myself say: “I’m sorry…I never meant to disrespect you or make you feel less than.”
He looks at me, and I see the veil of guardedness soften in his eyes. He walks over and hugs me. I swallow my tears, “You know that I love you, right?”
His embrace tightens. “I love you, too.”
Relief, vindication, tentative fragile hope, perhaps?
Growing up in Lucknow, I watched my mother reduce my father by centimeters—through a thousand paper cuts of correction. She wielded control like a hammer, each blow direct, blunt, undisguised and unmistakable.
“This is not where it goes,” she would say, moving a spoon from one drawer to another. “That’s not how you pronounce it,” she would announce at dinner parties, her voice sharp with authority. “Let me tell you the real story,” as she cut him mid-sentence.
Even when factually wrong, she was always right—her certainty its own kind of truth.
He rarely pushed back. When he did, their arguments erupted like volcanoes, with a silent witness in the shadows—absorbing, sobbing, learning.
Eventually, he stopped pushing back at all.
After 48 years of marriage, they still don’t seem to like each other. They tolerate each other, not out of love, but because it’s too hard to start from scratch again. There’s a comfort in hating each other every day.
I had promised myself I would never be like her. I would never be that harsh, that critical. And I wasn’t. I was worse. I had disguised my control as care.
We met through words—a single email in 2001.
I was twenty-three when his message appeared. A poem I’d written as a teenager had landed in his inbox somehow and he responded with unexpected insight. A stranger—a hardware engineer in California—had seen something in my adolescent verses that even I had forgotten was there.
Our relationship existed in language before it existed in person. We exchanged hundreds of messages before sharing photographs, thousands of words before hearing each other’s voices. By the time we met—at an airport five months later—we already knew each other in a way few do.
The reality of him—in person—was jarring at first but then he spoke, and I recognized the man who had seen past my carefully constructed façades, who had asked questions no one had ever bothered to ask. “What do you want?” he had written once. “Not what your parents want for you. What makes you feel alive?”
And now, 24 years later, that curious, caring man had been replaced by someone who wondered if he was stupid in my eyes.
Ever since we became parents a decade ago, I had done everything in a way that felt like I was helping. And in return, I had slowly made him disappear.
While my mother’s corrections came with a slam of drawers and raised voice, mine arrived with gentle suggestions and helpful interventions. I never criticized—I improved. I never commanded—I guided. I never dismissed—I simplified.
My control wore the mask of care.
How do you push back against someone who’s “just trying to help?”
For the first time, I was seeing what my mother never could: Not fighting isn’t the same as peace. Winning isn’t the same as being loved.
That evening, as I chop tomatoes, my husband appears beside me.
“‘I’ll make juice,” he offers. “Do we have oranges?”
I respond with a nonchalant, “Second drawer in the fridge, to the left.”
We have never truly cooked together in a decade. I’d banished him from my kitchen after a series of suggestions for optimization.
Our fifth grader looks up from her book, assessing this sudden shift in weather.
“Do you even know what you’re doing, Daddy?” her voice carrying the same sharp edge I use with him.
I turn toward her. My husband’s looking at me, his eyes asking: Is this what we are passing down?
My stomach twists. I hear my mother in me. Myself in my daughter. Three generations of women who haven’t known how to let the men in their lives simply try.
“He’ll figure it out,” I say with a confident smile.
Our daughter’s eyebrows shoot up in confusion. I nod toward my husband, who is standing straighter, shoulders loosening. Moments later, orange pulp colors our spotless white marble, sticky residue everywhere, our daughter clamoring to get her dad a strainer and wipes.
I continue chopping.
This feels like glass breaking—not violently, but deliberately. In the stillness his recovery has forced upon us, we are finally seeing each other clearly.
He pours the pulpy juice in cups. I step aside.
That night, as we clear the table, my husband pauses, plate in hand. “When we eat paapdi chaat, you always give me the biggest pieces,” he says. “You take the small, broken bits.”
I smile automatically. That’s what love is.
“That’s not love. That’s you being a mom instead of a friend. You’re deciding for me.”
My smile vanishes. It hits hard. I’ve been managing him like our two-year-old Labradoodle.
“Why have you never said anything?” I ask.
He sets the plate down. “Because it’s easier to let you win.”Not “I don’t want to argue.” Not “It doesn’t matter.”
“Easier to let you win.”
His words sit between us as we load the dishwasher.
My mother’s control was honest in its brutality. Mine was insidious in its kindness.
I wonder how many marriages crumble not from cruelty, but from the accumulated weight of small corrections. How many kitchens witness the slow erosion of love through well-intended helpfulness. How many partners retreat into silence because speaking has become too costly.
The most dangerous control might be the one that doesn’t look like control at all.
The next morning, my husband makes omelets for breakfast. He hands me a plate, still steaming. I don’t push it back. I don’t insist he eat first. I take the first bite. Across our kitchen island, our daughter watches. My husband does, too. They are waiting to see if I will continue eating in silence.
I do. I sit in the discomfort of receiving.
It isn’t just breakfast. It isn’t just a two-way apology.
It is the realization that sometimes love means stepping back. Sometimes care looks like inaction. Sometimes the most generous thing I can offer is to let him take my space.
And this time, we let it be enough.
***
