It’s my fault: I was the one who started calling my future ex-wife “The Plaintiff” instead of her actual name.
In my defense, it was in my defense. Seeing official court documents with your name on them hurts. It’s that simple. The marriage may have gone sour, but to see the name of someone you love(/d), someone you thought you were going to die next to, even as that proposition became less and less attractive, listed and notarized as “Plaintiff” is a dagger. So, after the first claim came in, with the header of “[her name] Bockman, Plaintiff vs. Robert Bockman, Defendant,” I started referring to my future ex-wife as “The Plaintiff.” My family picked it up with an enthusiasm and consistency that surprised and gratified me. “Any word from The Plaintiff?” texts, etc. In the early weeks, it became a signaling bit.
I soon noticed that I stopped using her name in conversation, even when she was present. Before our child’s birth, I called her by name or “babe,” after, “Momma,” and then post-separation, I just addressed her directly by name when we spoke or texted or referred to her in conversation with third parties by that legal epithet.
This is what we, as humans, do. We categorize. We reduce each other to roles. We labor over obituaries, we reflex-swipe on dating apps, we obsess over resumes that will be autorejected by poorly-trained LLM software. We constrict or extract parts of ourselves so that we can more readily fit into someone else’s box or into the boxes that were constructed for us and given to us as though they were gifts. When someone hurts us, we sometimes reduce them to that hurt, to make both the pain and their personhood smaller.
At the same time as my marriage was ending, Reality Fracture previews were rolling out. In the story of Reality Fracture, as we know, Jace, the one-time and decades-long mascot for Magic: The Gathering, was benightedly or misguidedly trying to rewrite the entire Magic multiverse to get rid of the . Parts of his personality and rationality pushed back; in true Mindsculptor fashion, he excised these parts, fracturing himself and leaving behind just The Theorist.
The Theorist is the cruelly Blue side of Jace, the dark Blue of a midnight sky. This is the Jace who was traumatized by Alhammaret, the Jace who terrorized Standard circa 2011, the Jace of Mind Sculpt and Hedron Archive. The Theorist has created a self-enforcing panopticon of a military academy, has birthed warped tulpas of friends and lovers, has closed himself off to growth and self-expression in favor of hermetic obsession.
In a year or so, depending on the vagaries of the South Carolina court system, I will be a forty-year-old divorced dad. There is a cultural role I am supposed to embrace here. I am supposed to get my ears pierced, buy a motorcycle and rent an apartment, and start dating a twenty-seven-year-old with a pierced septum and daddy issues. Alternately, I am supposed to go putridly insular, start watching YouTube videos with titles like “The Dark Secrets of Family Court” by guys going by MenAgainstManipulation and Obscurus Machiavellius. Obviously, I’m not going in either of those directions (which is just the same direction in different guises, if we’re being honest). I’m going to Cube Draft with my friends. I’m going to take my daughter to the zoo every other weekend. I’m going to holler my throat raw at CMAT and Mountain Goats shows. I’m Rob Bockman. I’m not The Theorist, any more than my ex-wife is The Plaintiff.
We don’t have to force each other into boxes. The world—and eventually, death—will do that for us. Yet we do it anyway. When we sit down across from someone we haven’t played before, and they flip over a Surge Foil Y’shtola from the command zone, we make a series of assumptions. When our opponent cracks an Arid Mesa to find an Arabian Nights Mountain, we roll our eyes at this imitation Patrick Sullivan. It’s unfair, but it’s human. Heuristics help us sort information, just as banker’s boxes and Rubbermaid totes help us pack up the detritus of two lives spent together when those lives separate.
Jace is eventually killed by his ex, Vraska, who is affronted by Jace’s facsimile of herself, Vraska, Soul of Stone. He has taken away her agency, her self-definition, and created a smooth and seamless simulacrum of her to enact his will on the multiverse. She, as depicted in Vraska’s Final Mercy, sees her assassination as a mercy killing. When you dehumanize other people—when you take away their ability to process their traumas—you can’t be surprised when they dehumanize you back, sometimes fatally. It’s especially upsetting when someone reduces us to something we’re not.
At some point here, I’m going to have to date again, a thing I dread. Anyone who has agonized over a dating profile knows the feeling. How do you make yourself attractive in text, how do you tamp down your anxieties and flaws and shine spots on your appealing qualities? There’s no way you can fully avoid the desperation and the insecurity and the sheer hunger that is tacit to all dating profiles: notice me, love me, beat the algorithm and find me. You start writing about yourself like you’re the subject of a #sponcon BookTok video: “Enjoyer of witty banter and dark humor. Flirtatious but serious when it matters.” You have reduced yourself, all your complexities and contradictions, into a wedding-date-shaped object.
One of my several therapists* tried to make me feel better about this whole situation by reminding me I could probably wring a play out of this. “Oh yeah, man,” I lobbed back, “Just what everyone wants to read: a cis forty-year-old dude writing about his divorce.” Yet here I am, writing about my divorce. I have to play my role, as we all do. I write to help myself process and to grow, and I have gotten enough generous feedback from people I respect and love to know that my writing has the capacity to help others process. I’m grateful beyond belief for that. The only way we matter as people is by communicating with each other.
Jace—or The Theorist, at least—believed he could fix the world, could erase everyone’s pain and trauma through his unilateral actions. But pain is a universal experience and without it, there’s no universe. Some pain—growth spurts, hangovers, tattoos—even reminds us of past and future joys, a realization of our more complete selves through temporary suffering. We suffer because we must, but we grow beyond pain because we are able. If we’re lucky—and this is a lesson Jace never learned—then we grow through that pain.
*Yes, I’m single, ladies, lads, and enbies.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.