05/16/2026
You know when someone stops seeing you. You can't always say when it started, but you know. It's the quality of attention across a dinner table, the way someone's eyes settle on you without landing, and you spend a few weeks telling yourself it's tiredness or distraction or one of those phases that long relationships go through, until one evening you hear him singing in the kitchen and you realise the singing isn't for you, and hasn't been for a while, and that you've known this for longer than you've been willing to say.
Jeanette Winterson gives this to one of the Twelve Dancing Princesses in Sexing the Cherry. The rest of the princesses murder their husbands or fall in love with women or disappear into rivers. This one just watches. Her husband had an affair. He was courteous and enjoyed being at home. But in his version of home, she'd been edited out and someone else pencilled in, and he saw no reason to leave just because his feelings had. And what she notices first, what women always notice first, is the attention. The glazed eyes at dinner, the singing that was for someone else and the garden tended with a care that had moved away from her. Iris Murdoch argued that attention is the central moral act, that truly seeing another person is what love actually is, and if she was right then this started before the affair, at the dinner table, in the moment the princess realised he was looking at her without seeing her, and that everything in the house was continuing as before while she was being quietly removed from the inside of it.
She saw it in a way that could look like paranoia to some people except that she was right. She read his eyes across a table the way some women read the eyes of the men they live with, checking whether they're still being seen in the room where they live. John Berger described this in Ways of Seeing. Women learn to watch themselves being watched, he wrote, to monitor the direction of the gaze, and over time to read the quality of male attention with an accuracy most men would find unnerving. That accuracy is the reason she knew about the affair before she knew about the affair. And how long do you go on watching before you admit what you've seen? The dinner table was all the evidence she needed, and the singing, and the garden. Decades of practising this had confirmed what she'd been trying not to see for months, that she had already been replaced.
She asks him to leave. He says he can't be expected to make himself homeless because he's in love. She invokes Medea, Ruth, Cressida, women who burned their lives down for love, and asks why she should be a heroine when he won't even be a hero. He plucks at the blanket. And then she makes a list for herself. Stay and be unhappy and humiliated. Leave and be unhappy and dignified. Beg. Die of bitterness. Every option contains "unhappy," and she was never going to beg, and for a woman who has spent decades being reasonable there was only ever one door. She takes some things and goes. It wasn't easy, she says. It was her home too. And the way she tells it afterward, measured and wry, a punchline about a fence, you can hear the refusal of heroism in the form of the telling itself. Medea would never mention the fence. The princess mentions the fence because she has turned that trained watching inward now, monitoring her own departure the way she once watched his eyes across the table, making sure she goes without giving anyone a story to tell about her.
And then the fence. She hears, months later, that he's replaced the back fence. After the affair, the glazed eyes, the whole mess she catalogued and filed and walked away from, she's still getting news about the fence. She lived in that house for years. She knew the garden by season. And the house has healed over where she'd been, and nobody thought to tell her about the new fence until after the fact. She was temporary. The fence was infrastructure. She'd poured years into a life that could seamlessly continue without her, and the proof is a piece of wood in the back garden that she heard about secondhand. You learn this once and you see it everywhere afterward. You watch a friend's husband across a table and you check the eyes. You hear someone singing in a kitchen and you listen for who it's for. And years later you hear about the fence, from someone who had no reason to think you'd care, and it shouldn't still be able to do this to you, it's only a fence, but it was yours too, and now it isn't, and nobody asked.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: University of Salford Press Office
