Reply #37: Poignant and revealing, with a touch of irony

[Orrex]

She states that he's done her a favor, and it soon becomes apparent that the "favor" was that he left her. As a piece of narrative, this is a nicely conceived and nicely executed moment of irony, since you don't spell it out for the reader.

But there's an air of the unhealthy here, too; an uneven relationship in which only one person is "good for" the other is flawed from the outset. Her repetition of the sentiment suggests that she enjoyed the role, even if it was ultimately damaging to her.

Her pain at the loss of a doomed relationship is very human, very real, and very vulnerable. Her tone here suggests that she's intellectualizing about the loss, recounting why, exactly, she's better off without him and how, exactly, he's generally a screw-up. Yet still she grieves for the loss.

What's most interesting is that she herself has explicitly identified the fatal weakness in the relationship ("when I start to pity a man, I have paradoxically lost respect for the man"), but her protracted lingering over the failed affair suggests that a part of her still longs for what they shared (or might have shared).

She's therefore a more complicated character than was initially evident in her first passages. Rationally, she knows that she's better off now, but emotionally she takes little consolation from that fact. The simultaneous interplay between these two warring motivations makes her much more interesting than simply a heartsick woman scorned.

Interesting, indeed!