As published in CLAUDIA

November has been generous with my soap operas. Between The Gilded Age and All’s Fair, two very different series that complement each other in the pleasure I take in following them, I have found plenty to reflect on in the characters’ emotional choices. But it was a tuna noodle casserole recipe that made me stop and think.

All’s Fair is Ryan Murphy’s series created for Kim Kardashian, where absurdity meets melodrama with admirable confidence. Its tackiness is open, shameless, and thoroughly calculated. The clothes, the dishes, the saturated colors, and an exaggerated Los Angeles create a fantasy that makes no apologies for existing. It is pure escapism. And I keep watching my soap opera.

I could devote this column to the arrival of Brazilian actor Cauã Reymond in a production where men are quite deliberately objectified. But instead, I came across another character played by Margo Martindale, who had already impressed me in Dark Matter. Her appearance introduces a discussion that survives the show’s excesses.

The story follows a group of Los Angeles divorce attorneys. They usually represent the women, while their archrival, played by Sarah Paulson, defends the husbands. Between personal feuds and extravagant private lives, they try to negotiate settlements before disputes reach the courtroom.

In the third episode of the second season, Martindale plays Gloria, a woman who cared for her husband and their two sons while building a successful culinary business. She became a celebrated chef, but her family barely acknowledged that transformation. They mocked her sophisticated dishes and continued demanding the same old tuna noodle casserole.

During the divorce negotiations, amid disputes over assets, one demand is particularly revealing: her husband wants the casserole recipe. Gloria refuses. She had told him the secret ingredient countless times. He never listened. Now, she has no intention of repeating herself or sharing the recipe.

It is an irresistible metaphor.

Being needed is not the same as feeling recognized

Many women may recognize this complaint, whether in the kitchen or in the corporate world. You speak, prepare, provide, repeat. Your presence organizes other people’s lives, but that does not necessarily come with any curiosity about who you are, what you want, or how you feel. Worse still, it can leave you with the uncomfortable feeling that you are ultimately disposable.

From the psychoanalytic perspective the scene invites, Gloria’s refusal seems, at last, an attempt to change the position she occupied in that relationship, one in which her achievements were never truly acknowledged: books, restaurant chains, admirers, and success.

But the truth is that she also maintained her role as the indispensable one because it gave her a sense of belonging and importance. A bond that can become a prison when we remain trapped in the same role.

If I stop doing everything I do, will anyone still be interested in me? If I want something different, will there be room for that?

These questions run through marriages, friendships, and family relationships. We may be constantly sought after and still feel that almost nobody really knows us. Worse, when we finally reveal who we are, we may discover that others no longer want us around.

Why is it so difficult to give away a recipe?

For the attorneys, handing over the recipe seems like a minor concession compared with the emotional and financial toll of a divorce that could become far more expensive. But the emotional significance of information cannot be measured by the number of words required to communicate it.

Gloria has finally received, from her former husband, confirmation of her own importance. And now the power is in her hands.

The recipe contains years of frustration, and her refusal to reveal it may serve as a boundary. But it may also carry anger, a desire for reparation, or the hope of finally being recognized. These possibilities can coexist without automatically reducing her gesture to an act of pettiness.

The solution preserves that ambivalence: Gloria eventually agrees to prepare the dish for her ex-husband for the rest of his life, but she keeps the recipe to herself.

Is this a practical compromise, or evidence of how difficult it is to completely abandon her former role in that relationship?

She wants to leave, but perhaps she also wants her departure to matter.

Her husband, meanwhile, does not need the recipe to survive. His insistence may suggest something beyond simple indifference: an attempt to preserve access to what Gloria provided. Or perhaps a desire to keep her exactly where he had always kept her.

What exactly is being missed?

Gloria’s ex-husband always recognized something special about that dish, but his appreciation never seems to have translated into recognition of the care he received from her.

There is something perverse about that simplicity: enjoying what she provided while remaining indifferent to the woman who was transforming before his eyes.

Her refusal gives Gloria back a measure of power, but it may also prolong the conflict. The secret sustains the sense of absence and keeps them both attached to a demand neither seems willing to relinquish.

She finally possesses something he openly admits he wants. But what is the price of continuing to be needed in this way?

If I were her attorney, I might recommend sharing the recipe and moving on with her life. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, I would be more interested in understanding what makes giving it away so difficult.

What place did Gloria manage to create for herself within that marriage? What kept her there, and what does she still hope to receive from a man she has decided to leave?

None of this absolves him of responsibility for his indifference. It simply allows us to ask whether, in ending the relationship, Gloria has found a way to step outside the role she occupied, or merely discovered a new way to remain in it.

After all, keeping the recipe to herself may represent an important boundary. But it may also preserve the essential ingredient of a repetition: continuing to wait for him to recognize her worth.