EDINBURGH 2023: Fielding Edlow Guest Blog

Fielding Edlow: Gaslighting Is My Love Language - finding the humour in the negative aspects of a relationship.

I never wanted to be married. I postponed my wedding twice and I knew it wasn’t a good sign. I knew my husband missing the rehearsal dinner to shoot a Soderbergh movie, not having sex on our wedding night and our wedding photographer getting so wasted we didn’t have pictures after the first 35 minutes were all not the best signs… but I married a guy named Larry who became the linchpin of my entire stand-up career.

One of the very best things about Larry besides always being game to rewatch a Netflix series because “he studies behaviour” is that he didn’t mind my publicly lacerating him on stage AND came to almost every single one of my shows. I would say to friends “well, I can’t leave Larry because I don’t want to leave my joke generator…”

And then in January 2021, we had the divorce conversation, and nobody made a joke for the entire day. That was a first for us in thirteen and a half years.

I had finally realized that we were stuck in a deeply unhealthy pattern of co-dependent gaslighting... I remember the day my middle-aged show pony husband started packing a bag like there was a barrelling monsoon outside and I was like, “What are you doing skippy? Nobody banged their spin instructor. CALM IT DOWN.” And when we told our 10-year-old we were getting divorced she says, “I knew this day would come. I have some demands. I want snap chat, an iPhone 6000, and Taylor Swift front row seats.”

The humour didn’t go away simply because we called “cut” on our marriage. In fact, we were still the same slightly mistrustful, sardonic couple with our perfectly polished divorce mediator as we were with all eight of our couples therapists. I would notice that Larry started using a ring light for our mediation zoom sessions and I would joke, “Wow, Larry is using MY leave-in conditioner and is trying to look “boyishly charming” for you, even though he mostly looks like a lactose-intolerant minion with psoriasis.”

I loved acting with my wasband in our dark-comedy web series Bitter Homes and Gardens but I needed to carve out a creative silo for myself. One that was just mine. So I wrote (almost channelled) Gaslighting is My Love Language to both entertain and put a microscope on the light hostage situation/gentle gray-out I had been marinating in for the last 14 years… and then I realized OH I HAVE to talk about gaslighting and the more I unearthed the more I realized that we had been mutually gaslighting each other since day one

I would secretly throw his James Perse XL hoodies into the dryer to shrink them and watch him try to squeeze his tree trunk arm into a sleeve and exclaim, “this is weird I’ve been doing intermittent fasting!” And I’d be like, umm is it more like intermittent binging??

We are both the self-propelled outlaws here in a creatively sparring reactionship… we would both rather launch a complex gaslight-y subterfuge than say “you hurt my feelings when you told me my first solo show sucked.”

“Gaslighting” is the first project I’ve worked on where I haven’t gone to my wasband for notes, thoughts, feedback… and it would be highly inappropriate. It’s also the first project where I’ve felt the most confident, excited and things have just fallen into place like a seamless sprinkling of sesame seeds on a perfectly warmed pumpkin soup. Doing the premiere at the Edinburgh Festival is like waking up in the middle of a non-naked flying dream. Our humour gave us both a safe landing pad in our dysfunctional home, carried us through our marriage but now we can siphon it into the exact right channels in this next terra incognita, as amicable co-parents and creative collaborators. We are having a better divorce than our marriage.

Fielding Edlow: Gaslighting Is My Love Language will be performed at 7.10pm in Just the Tonic at the Grassmarket (The Meeting Room) from 3rd – 13th August

Booking link: https://edinburgh.justthetonic.com/event/88:3283/

Photo credit: Troy Conrad

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