The transatlantic marriage often founders on the oldest rock in the book: You don’t live here. You don’t get it.
It’s the impasse every long-term couple knows—most infamously posed as, “Does this make me look big?” A question where honesty is the first casualty, and diplomacy the second.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the United States and Europe.
One is the dynamic, high-metabolism superpower living the drama in real time. The other is the long-suffering ambassador stationed in the next room, tasked with decoding the moods, soothing the outbursts, and explaining the entire spectacle to a skeptical world—while privately admitting that full comprehension is forever out of reach.
The United States rightly claims her exclusives: perpetual revolutionary fever, the exhausting dream of endless self-reinvention, the eternal hunt for jeans (or policies) that can accommodate both her exceptionalist waistline and her sprawling, contradictory hips. Formidable. Exhausting. Iconic.
But Europe endures a parallel, quieter hell: permanent residency as the live-in envoy to a nation we can never truly join.
Our trials include:
- Hostage Negotiation Duty: Fielding inquiries like, “Does this foreign-policy swing make me look… imperial?” Every extraction plan ends in detonation—a trade spat, a summit sulk, or viral meme warfare.
- Emotional IT for an OS We Didn’t Code: Providing support for a chaotic system built from Puritan guilt, cowboy optimism, and reality-show spectacle. We can’t Ctrl+Alt+Del it, yet we’re blamed for every global blue screen.
- Geopolitical Flinch Response: The five-word thermonuclear alert: “We. Need. To. Talk.” (Transmission source: NATO, Fox/CNN, 3 a.m. hotline.) Fight means a lecture on burden-sharing; flight means tariffs—or a pointed, treaty-shaking silence.
- The Fix-It Fallacy: Our brains are hardwired for coalitions and quiet compromise. Yet we’re perpetually informed the real manual is Just Listen—a dialect our archives mysteriously corrupt every four to eight years.
- Retroactive Culpability: Being held responsible for American “bloating,” as if the Congress of Vienna secretly ratified supersized portions, suburban sprawl, and the monthly export of existential heartburn.
To summarize, the theatre: America occupies the frontline of constant becoming—a biological and electoral metabolism in permanent overdrive. Europe mans the diplomatic listening post outside the blast doors, parsing signals from an ally whose internal storms obey a rigid two-party hurricane season.
Are the struggles equivalent? Mon dieu, non.
Are there casualties? Ambassador, we are all collateral damage.
We share the same alliance mattress, bicker over the thermostat (Paris Accord edition), and keep the UN’s couples-counseling hotline on speed dial. The lights stay on through subsidized agriculture and bureaucratic inertia; the will to continue relies on the faint, desperate hope that tomorrow’s news cycle might feature a different global emergency.
Dispatches from the Old World Embassy.
Still standing—by which we mean: leaning perilously, but architecturally significant.
Over.
The United States’ official response was brief:
“I’m not a woman.”
She then turned, swayed her hips, and walked away—confident the conversation was over.
