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If women from a young age they are taught one thing, that is to hate other women. It really is the oldest trick rulebook on misogynyone that ensures we do patriarchy for him. The conditioning is so deep, and we accept it so often, that we often don’t even realize we’re doing it.
This is how we tend to compete with a female colleague with the same job as ours. Or how we can’t help but obsess over all our partner’s ex-wives and compare them to ourselves. However, nowhere does this become more relevant than when your partner leaves you for another woman. Now imagine that woman is a global celebrity.
According to pop culture lore, that’s it the exact situation Dr. Lilly Jay found herself in last summerwhen it was found out that her ex-husband, Ethan Slaterstarted dating his Wicked teammate, Ariana Grandewho also recently separated from her husband, Dalton Gomez. The turnaround was quick: a matter of weeks, if rumors are to be believed. On top of this, you have the fact that Wicked has been inevitable over the past few months, a cinematic juggernaut that has taken over our hearts and minds.
So where does that leave Dr. Jay, who moved to London with his two-month-old baby to support Slater while he filmed Wicked? She told us exactly where, actually, in a new viral essay for The Cut, in which she recounts with great care and subtlety how her life has changed since her high-profile divorce.
Given the circumstances, some may have clicked on the essay expecting to read Dr. Jay expressing some of the internalized misogyny we were all raised on. Maybe they expected her to laugh Grandeor blame her divorce on a pop star. Maybe they were hoping for an evisceration of Wicked, or some kind of pun on witches and infidelity.
But Dr. J gave none of that. Instead, her writing offered a nuanced and compassionate look at what it’s like to have your life suddenly thrust into the spotlight when up to this point it had been based on anonymity. As a psychotherapist, dr. Jay committed to altruism in a profession that relied on her ability to leave her life at the door; her job was to help others and make herself invisible in the process. Thanks to her breakup with Slater, she was suddenly unable to do that anymore. And the examination of all that means is what takes up the bulk of her essay.
“As a therapist, part of what I could offer my patients was the experience of being in a relationship with someone else without the complexity of a personal relationship,” she writes. “I was never meant to be completely known to them.”
She says of her own waning relationship with Slater: “As a perinatal psychologist, I knew all the statistics—how vulnerable marriage is in the postpartum period, how vital community connection is in preventing depression and anxiety, how new parenthood affects entire families—but I confidently moved to another country with her two-month-old baby and husband to support his career. Absorbed in the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.”
All Dr. J says about Grande and Slater’s relationship is that the days with her son are “sunny,” while “the days when [she] I can’t avoid promoting a film associated with the saddest days [her] life is darker”. She alludes to working well with Slater, writing, “We both love our son fiercely 100 percent of the time, no matter how we parenting time is shared.”
The silent, unspoken message of the essay is clear: Dr. J will not allow her divorce to be reduced to cheesy gossip, nor will she see it as an opportunity to bring down the other woman. Society might want to pit her against Grande, but she won’t fall for it. Frankly, it’s beneath both of them. And I’m so glad to see a woman in the public eye, begrudgingly or otherwise, using her voice to say exactly that. Because, of course, it’s possible for Dr. J to speak up and for her to say without having to bring Grande into it.
If the rumors are true, Dr. Jay’s situation has nothing to do with Grande anyway. It has everything to do with Slater, who is, of course, freed from the shackles of condemnation for leaving his wife and making love to a pop star because, well, he’s a man. But that’s a whole other article. My point is that if Dr. Jay’s essay proves anything, it’s the boring futility of internalized misogyny. And that despite what we’ve been told, women don’t have to hate each other, even when the world wants them to.