This is honestly actively anti-helpful, given that this was effectively her current plan anyway, and hearing this stupid book advocate it for ordinary marriages that do not contain any pharaohs or helms of opposite alignment makes her want to abandon her plan out of spite. It doesn't help that the thought of being pasted to an alcoholic you barely know at nineteen years old and then being told that the thing you need to do to solve this is pray and submit harder kind of makes her want to cry. Not even for herself, just out of sheer overactive sympathy for everyone who's stuck in horrible situations.
She shuts the book and closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
She's not doing what she's doing because some book of painfully sexist Osirian marital advice told her to. She's not doing what she's doing because she thinks it's how ordinary marriages should be, or really how almost any marriages should be. She's doing this because - because she can't really defend herself, and because Hagan needs it, or maybe needs it, maybe just cannot minimally function unless she doesn't need anything from him and doesn't ever let on to having negative emotions about him and he doesn't have to worry about her doing anything he dislikes over his protests, ever, because maybe he is just so utterly and completely overwhelmed by everything all the time that he lacks all ability to manage both his nation and his marriage.
She's not doing it because it's the right thing to do. She's doing it because she loves him. That's it. That's all. Because she's out of ideas, and accepting that you need to be prepared to give everything and receive nothing from your spouse is a horrible, soul-crushing way to live (at least if your spouse is a pharaoh and not, like, an invalid), but she's tried to explain what she needs from him, and with rare exceptions - exceptions where she thinks she was prompted to explain what upset her, prompted to talk more about things - it has basically always made things worse. And there's no guarantee that she can handle this indefinitely, right, people can't actually stand up under arbitrary amounts of long-suffering submission, that's what Hell is, but - this is what she has. She can't leave, and she can't make him do more, so all there is to do is to give him what she has, even knowing that eventually she'll run out of things to give, and - hope that if that happens the sacrifice of everything she is will have placated him enough to make some real attempt at not destroying her.
It occurs to her that giving someone everything and expecting nothing in return is much more like treating someone like a child than like treating them like a man. It occurs to her that that's sort of what she's doing, modeling him as an absurdly powerful toddler, accepting that he can't be expected to help her and that she has to take care of him anyway. But she doesn't know how else she could frame it, how else she could tap her inner reserves this badly. She can't treat him like her husband. She doesn't know what it means to have a marriage - a married relationship, not some signature on a paper somewhere that mostly has to do with property rights and has nothing to do with hearts or minds - with someone who she only feels inclined to trust about a third of the time, and even then, less than she trusts everyone else she ever interacts with.
She has to do it this way because she doesn't have any other ways.
She kicks the book to the foot of her bed.
She curls up under her blankets and cries, silently.
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