::excuses self while heading for some ‘alone time’::

What really got me was a moment from the scene in Six Month Leave when Betty is in her bedroom with Sara Beth. I recognized how angry she was when S.B. declared, “Don’s perfect.” But I also noticed that when Sara Beth described how easy-to-please her own husband was, Betty choked up, saying “How sweet.” All she wants is for her husband to love her!

I used the truth about my life to free myself from a bad relationship; that worked well. But my husband told the truth to his ex more than ten years ago, and now, years after the divorce, she is still angry.

All I can conclude is that some people like being angry. It suits them. In the case of these people, the truth doesn’t set them free — it takes them from one place and puts them in another. It may be that this is where Betty is now: she’s gone from not knowing what she was feeling, to being in a state that my shrink friend likes to call “flooded”.

That’s her term for feeling so overwhelmed by a stream of negative feelings that a person lashes out, gets defensive or abusive, or just withdraws. She or he is so overwhelmed by the number of negative feelings that she or he can’t separate them from each other, and stops trying. All she or he can do is respond to the feelings: cry, shut down, stay in bed, push people away, drink, etc. This is where I see Betty right now.

The Draper marriage has not been strong for some time, and I think the show is doing a good job of showing the toll that takes on Don and Betty. Don isn’t happy staying at the Roosevelt; he misses his kids and he wants Betty to take him back. But he doesn’t want to open up to her, either. He still wants to be the guy he thinks she believes he’s been, all these years. He doesn’t know that she wants something different, and she’s sure not talking.

But Betty isn’t strong. She’s kind of lost. She’s still looking for evidence of Don’s indiscretions — evidence she won’t find. The longer she looks, the worse she will feel, as time passes and she hasn’t found anything. Meanwhile, Betty is ignoring advice that can help her (get up, get out of the house, do something for yourself). She is acting less like a woman ready to stand on her own than a woman standing on her own last nerve. Even her kids are worried about her.

Will either of these people move on? Not quickly. Moving out and moving on is a very, very recent thing. I only remember the decade after the one this show depicts. What went on when real couples like this broke up was agonizing for both people and all their children. Agonizing, terribly slow, and somehow more painful for taking so much time.

Call them whatever else you want … but they weren’t the good old days.

He is waiting for the catastrophe of his personality to seem beautiful again.

Reading that, I had a new thought… I think Don knows pretty well how miserable he is. What I think is he doesn’t have a clue that it can be any other way. And of course, his misery is two-fold. On the one hand, he is struggling with a secret identity, and all those secrets. (And actually, a sub-fold, he is also struggling with a miserable background, secret or not). And he is dealing with the plain old, Is That All There Is that comes with, well, life. (And the sub-fold of that is; he went on to meet Rachel. He sure as shit has no clue that, had she not dumped him, he’d have eventually alienated her the way he has Betty. But for now, he thinks that she was the key to his happiness.)

Betty knew that her life with Don is the source of her misery. She’s right. It doesn’t mean that her pain ends; that there aren’t other issues, but she is in a big fat bad marriage.

For Don it’s a lot more complicated. The problem is him; his behavior. He really needs to do some rewiring to ever be happy. Being honest with people. Occasionally admitting he is wrong. Don will always feel alone in the world unless he genuinely includes the people he loves.