his failing marriage: "I was disappearing into the music for a different reason. It was a refuge in a way. That approach didn't completely work. You know, I wasn't really... in a good positive headspace. I was running away, I suppose." Hot Press editor Niall Stokes noted that in the lyrics, "Bono is clearly drawing on the experiences of those close to him, and particularly on the emotional turmoil that the Edge and Aislinn had been going through." Bono said "that's in there, but it's unfair to lump it all on the Edge and Aislinn splitting up. That was one of the saddest things... But that was only one part of it. There were lots of other things going on internally within the band and outside it, and I was working through all of that. People are desperately trying to hold onto each other in a time when that's very difficult. Looking around, you see how unprepared for it all people are, and the deals they make." Thematically, "So Cruel" also deals with unrequited love, jealousy, obsession, and possessiveness. Stokes described it as "the desolate complaint of a lover who has been spurned but who remains in love with his tormentor." Uncut contributor Gavin Martin said "the lyrics of the song reinforce the idea of Achtung Baby as a kind of romantic masque, where images of love, debased or abandoned, abound." Elizabeth Wurtzel of The New Yorker noted "with its lovely string arrangements, winding keyboards, and frothy, hypnotic melodies, is reminiscent of Tommy James's "Crimson and Clover", except that every lovingly sweet line is contrasted with a bitterly ironic counter line", citing the lyric "I disappeared in you / You disappeared from me / I gave you everything you wanted / It wasn't what you wanted" as an example. Hubert Dreyfuss, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and Mark Wrathall, a humanities professor at Brigham Young University, believed that the song was an exploration into philosophical dualism. Quoting the lyric "Head of heaven, fingers in the mire", they said "if we are essentially dual in this way, then any attempt to overcome one side in favour of the other inevitably ends in despair", comparing the underlying philosophy to Blaise Pascal's Pensées. Author Višnja Cogan wrote "Women... never get treated badly in U2 songs... Women are put on a pedestal by Bono, his mother's untimely death being