This is why we can't halve nice things.
We shared fairly. Sometimes this worked: half a cake; half an hour; half a house. But sometimes we could not agree how to split something down the middle, half-and-half: half a relationship; half a thought; half an idea; half an accident; half an experience. Some things lost all value when cut in half — a double bed, a dog or a computer, for example. The half-bed fell over; the half-dog was dead; the half-computer did nothing at all. Neither dog nor computer responded to commands. The bed had never responded to commands.
We learned that we could need a new system of halving things – a dissection beyond bisection. A system of time-sharing would work. Having a whole dog for half an hour each was fine; having half a dog for a whole hour was strange and upsetting.
The time did not even need to be divided, we found, as long as each sharer was willing to tolerate the other's presence. With the bed, this was fine. We simply lay on the bed at the same time, unimpeded.
But with the computer, we found we could not use it properly at the same time. Two half-computers hadn't worked either. We settled on purchasing a second computer, sharing two computers in half as one computer each. We could have had two half-computers each instead, but I suspected that this would work just as poorly as one half-computer apiece. It turns out that once something is halved its value can disappear. One half-computer is as good as no computer. I would rather have no dog than have half a dog.
We could have got a second dog, sharing the two in the same way – one each – but decided that half-ownership of one whole dog was less of a burden than whole ownership of one whole dog, or, for that matter, each having whole ownership of two half-dogs: four half-dogs total.
And don't get me started on how to halve a heart. Or, conversely, do get me started – I don't know where to start. At first glance we appear to have one whole heart each, the way we have one computer each, but it's a little more complicated than that.
With a half-computer, you can possibly salvage parts for reuse – or parts of parts. But once you've halved a heart, good luck trying to put it back together again.