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People easily delude themselves to protect their opinions and desires.
By centering the narrative on Margot’s thoughts and guesses, Roupenian chronicles Margot’s propensity to fool herself about reality, usually to protect her self-image, from the moment she meets Robert. She is pretty sure that he is a college graduate in his late twenties. He has a tattoo and a beard. From these details Margot decides that she could have “drummed up an imaginary crush” on Robert if he were her age. Yet Margot has to talk herself into her unsupported claims about Robert. She manufactures a potential crush on someone she has essentially made up from a few superficial details.
Margot continues to imagine Robert based on carefully crafted texts. She admits that “they never talked about anything personal,” so she knows that the Robert about whom she teases her stepfather is a construction. As Margot spends time with Robert during the movie date, she constantly reconfigures her assumptions as she observes his silent detachment and how he winces at certain things she says. Is he intimidated by her or ashamed of her? Margot’s interpretations tend to show her in the best light. She’s young, desirable, beautiful—of course he wants to be with her. She interprets Robert’s protective gestures after she is bounced from the club as conferring value on her, and she downplays what happens next: he “came for her in a kind of lunging motion,” kissing her aggressively, and then “took her hand firmly and led her” to a different bar. His possessive actions foreshadow the way he treats her during sex, yet Margot chooses to read them as vulnerable and to respond tenderly. Her delusions cause her to miss red flags long before she finds herself in Robert’s bedroom.
Communication via social media can be both limiting and revealing.
Roupenian says the idea for “Cat Person” occurred to her after a “nasty encounter” with someone online led her to think about how social media can convince people they know each other when in fact they know only mediated personas shared on various platforms. It’s not that this way of getting to know someone is intrinsically false but that it is limited and performative. While in many cases, like the “elaborate scaffolding of jokes” that Robert and Margot create, the result is benign and entertaining, it can be personally devastating, as readers see when Margot waits fearfully for Robert’s reply to the break-up text.
During her semester break, Margot and Robert text so often that Margot’s stepfather asks her about it. In addition to funny texts about cats, they share bits of information about their days. Yet even after this period of “nearly nonstop” texting, when Robert is withdrawn during their date, Margot becomes unnerved, realizing that she knows little about him. Robert draws on their texts to try to smooth out the face-to-face encounter as he jokes with the clueless cashier about Red Vines. How incompletely Margot and Robert know each other is clear when he insists that she is twenty-one; she doesn’t learn that he is thirty-four until after sex. He has hidden this fact intentionally and is “vibrating with fear” when he admits it. It is possible that the increasingly angry texts that end the story, however, authentically reveal who Robert is. Gone are the cute cat stories and clever Red Vines jokes. And when Margot doesn’t reply to Robert’s first, somewhat friendly text, with its acknowledgement that she asked him not to text her, he quickly drops any pretense of friendship. His abrupt texts suddenly have typos, lack punctuation, and quickly devolve from flirty to frustrated.
A need to feel desired can lead to the exact opposite.
“Cat Person” is like a romance story gone wrong. A pretty, somewhat naive young woman meets a tall stranger, often a slightly older, more experienced man. The two overcome barriers as their attraction grows until, finally, they consummate their desire. Romances employ stereotypical characters who follow well-worn tropes to reach a happy ending. “Cat Person” unravels and exposes this romance fantasy as ungrounded in reality.
Margot wants to be desired, especially by an older man who is likely more sexually experienced and can compare her to other women. She imagines him thinking, “I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else,” and only with this thought in mind can she enjoy sex with him. She wants to feel treasured and affirmed in her youthful beauty. She also fears rejection and judgment if she admits that she has changed her mind about sex and, later, when she feels guilty about breaking up. Being polite and accommodating matters so much to Margot that she ignores her intuitions about Robert—that he could, for example, be both witty and dangerous.
Margot copes with feeling like “a prop for the movie” in Robert’s mind during sex by engaging in her own romantic fantasy, in which “out there in the universe” is a boy who will desire and know her. He will understand why the “bizarre” night with Robert happened, and they will laugh about it. But as soon as she dreams him up, she knows that “no such boy existed, and never would.” What does exist is the reality of how her need to feel desired has landed her in Robert’s bed, being used as little more than a sex doll and feeling anything but desired.
