In the 1970s there was an awful song "Caught Between Two Lovers" about a love triangle. More commonly there is a triangle, or many sided figure of loves that encompass the complex of feelings, thoughts, words and deeds between two people in a romantic couple.
From the time in which I genuinely believed that babies appeared miraculously when mommies and daddies loved (or felt gooey feelings toward) each other, I developed a view of love that was traditional among the celibate men and women who were my role models.
Love, as I came to conceive of it in my monastic and overeducated way, was the enmeshment of the physicality of sex into the gospel's agape of Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmic Omega.* It was a pseudo-trinitarian thing, in which the love of two persons was so real that it became an actual third person.
Hence procreation, meaning the human collaboration in the continuing divine act of creation, that is, the making of something from nothing. The carnal partnership in creation was always directed to a kind of love that had a moral and other-oriented dimension: an aspect of that oh, so difficult "love your neighbor as yourself."
One loved to see the other person happy on their own terms. If you truly loved someone else, you were happy for that person's happiness even if it came with someone other than you.
I only began to grasp what loving another as much as, or even more than, oneself was about when I had children, the first human beings for whom I would have given my life without question or hesitation. The human beings to whom I gave a sizable portion of my life and what I earned, without question or conditions, until I knew they could take care of themselves and lead their lives without giving much thought to Old Dad. The human beings who despite all I have given truly owe me nothing.
I haven't really loved that way in any other context. If I had, I might have done more for many others. Given more of myself and my belongings, and so forth.
When I fell in love there was always the dimension of caring and responsibility, of giving. I did not fool myself that I loved every woman to whom I was ever attracted; nor did I fool myself that I was the most unselfish of lovers in the real love. There was lust, pure and simple; even in marriage, especially in marriage up to the late 19th century, there has always been a measure of social pressure plus convenience mixed in with the dash of romantic, other-caring love.
All these get mixed up. Toward the end in Hermann Hesse's novel "Narcissus and Goldmund," two childhood friends are reunited after having spent, on one hand a life of prayer and total giving, and on the other one of pleasure-seeking wanderlust. The monk does not shrink back when he recognizes that his friend has carved a statue of the Virgin Mary in the likeness of the first girl with whom the wanderer fell in passionate love.
In the world outside the monastery it is different.
Absent gods or a moral structure from above, knowledge or trust in anything or anyone but myself, I am an animal seeking to survive. Sex is good: it makes the heart race, the circulation improve, the attitude rise, the species continue. I have been hungry for it from every flower that offered it to me.
Wandering this world one lives are amoral little animals to whom everything is possible if it feels good. Indeed, if it feels good, it must be love. Or perhaps love is a potion to draw spouses who fit shopping lists, so that they satisfy all wants and all self-seeking.
People have an entrenched love of coupling. They have second, third and fourth spouses if they live long enough or are rich enough. Yet perhaps there is a different kind of love possible.
One that goes through lust and glückenfreude into a kind of cinematic love that is carnal yet kind, polite, educated and capable of uniting reciprocally two little bubbles into one. A love that has its element of selfishness in its survival seeking with someone who at core grasps me, my sense of being lost, of not belonging anywhere, of wanting desperately someone to clutch and witness my life and pleasure and despair.
That's very fine and good, but it is not the love conceived of in the monastery. It can't be. Love dreamed of in Hollywood is mostly makeup and sets and special effects — such as fadeouts.
After the credit rolls and the score is reprised, real life begins in the full glare of sunlight, where love is so elusive you will be forgiven for thinking it doesn't exist at all.
* Google it.
Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Monday, May 09, 2011
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Notes from a Bisexual Ax Murderer
A woman I've been spared meeting face to face began an e-mail exchange by interrogating a male acquaintance of a friend of hers as if the man was guilty until proven innocent. This began with whether he was "bisexual" and cascaded downwards. A woman who hates men that much should try women.
Indeed, an increasing number of women could use some finesse in the way they approach men in whom they might have an interest. Especially when the person in question is not a total, absolute stranger, but someone who comes recommended or is in some way a known quantity.
Women seem to feel that their negative past experiences with men entitle them to be rude.
One woman I know asks men she might date whether they have ever declared bankruptcy. Another asked whether the Mercedes in which she was being driven had been bought new or used.
Honey, if you're that interested in my bank account, good-bye.
Sure, some women are preternaturally stupid about money in a romantic context. One story of woe included moving in with and co-signing the purchase of a house with a man she'd known only three months: yes, he was interested in her money.
Still, not all men are cads, prefer men and have the law after them. Indeed, men weed out women by observing discreetly; a little discretion in sizing up other people would go a long way. Espy subtly, without implying the man is a criminal before you've met him (even as a "joke").
Besides, in all my ax murdering I have always had to catch the victim unaware. For some reason, women don't want a date once I tell them I am an ax murderer. Women!
Indeed, an increasing number of women could use some finesse in the way they approach men in whom they might have an interest. Especially when the person in question is not a total, absolute stranger, but someone who comes recommended or is in some way a known quantity.
Women seem to feel that their negative past experiences with men entitle them to be rude.
One woman I know asks men she might date whether they have ever declared bankruptcy. Another asked whether the Mercedes in which she was being driven had been bought new or used.
Honey, if you're that interested in my bank account, good-bye.
Sure, some women are preternaturally stupid about money in a romantic context. One story of woe included moving in with and co-signing the purchase of a house with a man she'd known only three months: yes, he was interested in her money.
Still, not all men are cads, prefer men and have the law after them. Indeed, men weed out women by observing discreetly; a little discretion in sizing up other people would go a long way. Espy subtly, without implying the man is a criminal before you've met him (even as a "joke").
Besides, in all my ax murdering I have always had to catch the victim unaware. For some reason, women don't want a date once I tell them I am an ax murderer. Women!
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
To love is to bug
This is a new insight that comes courtesy of my special friend, who is prone to flashes of affection, followed by retreats assuring me she won't “bug” me any more. I've come to realize I like being “bugged” that way.
My mother was very affectionate and no one has, or likely will, ever quite match that warmth that comes from the one person to whom you are perfectly beloved, no matter what, for as long as she lives. I lost that when I was 17 and moved away, later irretrievably when she died.
Yet I was not a mama's child. I even complained to her about the sheer arrogance of mothers on Mother's Day.
This was a variation on the critique raised by a classmate to baffle our religion teacher. My classmate had argued that, given all the insistence on worship and obedience attributed to the Supreme Being, God must surely be a preening narcissist.
And, hey, weren't mothers next to God in authority, pomp and circumstance on their day — as well as in and sheer guilt-inducing power if their desires were somehow ignored? And, boy! Mothers could surely bug you with embarrassing displays of affection in front of your peers!
Some people — especially North Americans — react to affection with the horror reserved for strangers' accidental brushes with one's shoulder or arm on the subway or bus. All right, so the Parisian lovers — I have seen this with my own eyes — go to the other extreme with their ... um ... French kissing and embracing on busy corners.
In the end, though, love involves a bit of “bugging” the loved one who is reading The New York Times' book review. You might get carried away by your affection to kiss and caress the reader's arm. For no reason. Even if no one sees.
My mother was very affectionate and no one has, or likely will, ever quite match that warmth that comes from the one person to whom you are perfectly beloved, no matter what, for as long as she lives. I lost that when I was 17 and moved away, later irretrievably when she died.
Yet I was not a mama's child. I even complained to her about the sheer arrogance of mothers on Mother's Day.
This was a variation on the critique raised by a classmate to baffle our religion teacher. My classmate had argued that, given all the insistence on worship and obedience attributed to the Supreme Being, God must surely be a preening narcissist.
And, hey, weren't mothers next to God in authority, pomp and circumstance on their day — as well as in and sheer guilt-inducing power if their desires were somehow ignored? And, boy! Mothers could surely bug you with embarrassing displays of affection in front of your peers!
Some people — especially North Americans — react to affection with the horror reserved for strangers' accidental brushes with one's shoulder or arm on the subway or bus. All right, so the Parisian lovers — I have seen this with my own eyes — go to the other extreme with their ... um ... French kissing and embracing on busy corners.
In the end, though, love involves a bit of “bugging” the loved one who is reading The New York Times' book review. You might get carried away by your affection to kiss and caress the reader's arm. For no reason. Even if no one sees.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Whither Romance
Playing with etymology I chanced upon the origin of the English word romance: it comes from the Old French romanz ("verse narrative"), related also to the modern French roman ("novel"), gaining its modern sense only in the 17th century. So is everything romantic at the core a fiction?
Did the relatively modern sense related to matters of the metaphoric heart, come to be accepted just in time for the industrial revolution to turn romance into prosaic mating?
Indeed, it strikes me that the industrial age brought about the most intense denial of such a scientific development in the form of something known as Victorian mores or customs, the Manicheism of the 19th century that survived into the 20th. The major change brought about by the sexual revolution, in whose ramparts I valiantly fought, was the beginning of an admission that a lot that happens with regards to romance is actually biological.
Romance involves a temporary suspension of the brain's critical functions, induced by what must no doubt be a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals, so that we become convinced that this one other person, suddenly encompassed within our ego's expanding boundary, is astoundingly special and even necessary to our survival.
Thus, I would argue, the claim that certain public figures whose sexuality has become known are "sex addicts" is absurd. Once we have experienced it, we are all to some extent "addicted," or uncommonly willing to seek, the pleasure of romance.
The label gets flung at men -- Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, etc. -- largely because women have different biological goals.
Men are biologically set to impregnate as many women as possible, a goal that is fulfilled in sexual consummation. Women are biologically set to become impregnated, carry the potential human being to birth and then provide at least the indispensable nurture needed for the infant's survival, a goal that is best fulfilled in marriage or some form of long-term commitment.
Such a set of mechanisms explains why men move on quickly and women hang on.
Similarly, the pattern explains why men are eager to call a taxi right after orgasm, while women keep up the romance until they get a ring around their fingers. Biology also explain why the romance ends early in courtship for men and on the honeymoon's first night for women.
Women are just as "addicted" as men. Except ... can one really call what seems to me a natural process an "addiction"?
A therapist I know, who has no direct personal knowledge of either Clinton or Woods, claims that not only is there such a thing, but that the former president and the golfer are prime addicts. Funny, no women ever get mentioned, even though if there were such a thing as sex addiction, I might have postulated my friend, who is of the female persuasion, as an exemplar.
All of which is apropos of nothing more than writing a new post finally giving expression to an idea I have been mulling for some time. You may disagree. Of course, you would be wrong.
Did the relatively modern sense related to matters of the metaphoric heart, come to be accepted just in time for the industrial revolution to turn romance into prosaic mating?
Indeed, it strikes me that the industrial age brought about the most intense denial of such a scientific development in the form of something known as Victorian mores or customs, the Manicheism of the 19th century that survived into the 20th. The major change brought about by the sexual revolution, in whose ramparts I valiantly fought, was the beginning of an admission that a lot that happens with regards to romance is actually biological.
Romance involves a temporary suspension of the brain's critical functions, induced by what must no doubt be a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals, so that we become convinced that this one other person, suddenly encompassed within our ego's expanding boundary, is astoundingly special and even necessary to our survival.
Thus, I would argue, the claim that certain public figures whose sexuality has become known are "sex addicts" is absurd. Once we have experienced it, we are all to some extent "addicted," or uncommonly willing to seek, the pleasure of romance.
The label gets flung at men -- Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, etc. -- largely because women have different biological goals.
Men are biologically set to impregnate as many women as possible, a goal that is fulfilled in sexual consummation. Women are biologically set to become impregnated, carry the potential human being to birth and then provide at least the indispensable nurture needed for the infant's survival, a goal that is best fulfilled in marriage or some form of long-term commitment.
Such a set of mechanisms explains why men move on quickly and women hang on.
Similarly, the pattern explains why men are eager to call a taxi right after orgasm, while women keep up the romance until they get a ring around their fingers. Biology also explain why the romance ends early in courtship for men and on the honeymoon's first night for women.
Women are just as "addicted" as men. Except ... can one really call what seems to me a natural process an "addiction"?
A therapist I know, who has no direct personal knowledge of either Clinton or Woods, claims that not only is there such a thing, but that the former president and the golfer are prime addicts. Funny, no women ever get mentioned, even though if there were such a thing as sex addiction, I might have postulated my friend, who is of the female persuasion, as an exemplar.
All of which is apropos of nothing more than writing a new post finally giving expression to an idea I have been mulling for some time. You may disagree. Of course, you would be wrong.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Romance as Estrangement
Sunday, reading The New York Times I came across a gem of an epigram, within a question, quoted in a book review, from what seems to be a very experimental, deeply philosophical novel. This gem follows:
Ok, so this is not my idea. But wouldn't you agree with its profound truth?
We become intimate in the flush of infatuation and lust that we call "falling in love." For a time we are in paradise and there has never been another person or another state like it in the entire history of humanity remotely similar to our beloved, our love, our lovemaking.
Who cannot recall becoming inflamed in languorous multilingual conversation over a glass of red wine, then waking up next morning by a pale white body, a naked Greek statue enfleshed, at rest after crests of passion uncommon to the species in their depth and palpitating frequency?
Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, speaks of men at the point of orgasm declaring love to a prostitute -- or more commonly, a one-night stand -- as a phenomenon having to do with a temporary collapse of ego boundaries that, absent the spike of brain chemistry, keep our emotions within certain prescribed social limits.
Intimacy. Fused inside and out. Then confidences. Then the slow unpeeling of the knight's armor and the lady's veil. I drink too much. I nag. I have this teensy-weensy habit ... but it's OK, because you love me, no?
No.
No, it's not OK, and it gets worse when, without thinking, you say or do something the knight or the lady would never do. The cat's out of the bag: I am me, you are you. The bag is slowly emptied of all the psychic detritus lying there, sometimes causing unspeakable pain in the other and unfathomable guilt of one's own.
Eventually, it is better to be apart, to erase every last vestige of the other until things are back ... no, until you are in a new primordial universe in which the other person never existed and you never met. Of course, we are as if made of wood: the nail's been taken out but the hole remains.
So we try to fill it again with a new shining lover on a hill. A new rush of what we think is love.
We are doomed.
Wouldn't you agree?
‘Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met,’Notice the comma at the end? That's because it is sandwiched inside the question “If the observation were made to you that [epigram quoted above] would you be inclined to agree?” The full quote is from The Interrogative Mood - A Novel? By Padgett Powell, as reviewed by Josh Emmons.
Ok, so this is not my idea. But wouldn't you agree with its profound truth?
We become intimate in the flush of infatuation and lust that we call "falling in love." For a time we are in paradise and there has never been another person or another state like it in the entire history of humanity remotely similar to our beloved, our love, our lovemaking.
Who cannot recall becoming inflamed in languorous multilingual conversation over a glass of red wine, then waking up next morning by a pale white body, a naked Greek statue enfleshed, at rest after crests of passion uncommon to the species in their depth and palpitating frequency?
Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, speaks of men at the point of orgasm declaring love to a prostitute -- or more commonly, a one-night stand -- as a phenomenon having to do with a temporary collapse of ego boundaries that, absent the spike of brain chemistry, keep our emotions within certain prescribed social limits.
Intimacy. Fused inside and out. Then confidences. Then the slow unpeeling of the knight's armor and the lady's veil. I drink too much. I nag. I have this teensy-weensy habit ... but it's OK, because you love me, no?
No.
No, it's not OK, and it gets worse when, without thinking, you say or do something the knight or the lady would never do. The cat's out of the bag: I am me, you are you. The bag is slowly emptied of all the psychic detritus lying there, sometimes causing unspeakable pain in the other and unfathomable guilt of one's own.
Eventually, it is better to be apart, to erase every last vestige of the other until things are back ... no, until you are in a new primordial universe in which the other person never existed and you never met. Of course, we are as if made of wood: the nail's been taken out but the hole remains.
So we try to fill it again with a new shining lover on a hill. A new rush of what we think is love.
We are doomed.
Wouldn't you agree?
Thursday, September 04, 2008
"The Laptop Rule" vs What?
A young man I know has passed on to me what some in his generation regard as a humorous epigram called "the laptop rule." This is supposedly a rule by which a male is supposed to choose girlfriends. I searched high and low for the opposite equivalent: a pithy, crassly facetious expression of how a young woman might select a boyfriend. I confess that I have failed.
Here's where the sexes fail totally to even connect! OK, by this point you're probably wondering what the laptop rule states. Here it is in its full glory:
Here's where the sexes fail totally to even connect! OK, by this point you're probably wondering what the laptop rule states. Here it is in its full glory:
Every three years get one that is thinner, faster and does more things.That's more or less an apt description of the march of laptop technology. Of course, that's because laptops are built with obsolescence in mind.
Personally, I hate laptops. I bought a desktop PC in 1991 that I managed to keep in operation until about 2001 -- by which time only the actual box and the floppy drive was original.
Similarly, my most significant relationships have tended never to end. I retain some contact with friends from infancy, second grade, high school and university, even though they are spread out through three continents.
The laptop rule might be a way to describe retrospectively a sowing-wild-oats period, but as a rule of thumb for life, it thumbsucks, if you will.
Never mind that. "Don't women have a similarly pithy rule?" I asked of several female friends. Like what, they wanted to know.
Oh, say, like the Loco Rule: never get close to a locomotive unless it hitches up. Too 20th (or 19th?) century.
Or how about the ATM Rule: get a new one when money stops being dispensed. That's a guy talking.
Or ... I give up. Anyone know one?
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Heart Market News: SLTR Dips on CZX Surge
Turns out that, as with Microsoft and Yahoo stock, relationships with folk of the male persuasion are really vehicles of investment. So, at least, says a consensus of women, often expressed in a sentence such as "I'm investing in the relationship."
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Singleton Paradox
Are you as surprised as I am to learn, as I did from the Online Etymological Dictionary, that the first documented use of the word single, in the sense of an unmarried or unattached person, dates back to no later than 1964?
Other modern variants single-parent and singles bar are attested in 1969. Back in the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh, the term was singleton, attested in 1937, per the online dictionary, a serviceable electronic alternative to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology on my bookshelf.
Clearly, there's a change of attitudes involved.
In the 1930s and earlier, the people who came to be called as singletons were regarded also as spinsters and old maids if they were women and bachelor or stag if they were men. After a certain age, perhaps the late 30s (when women face what one of my favorite singing folkies, Christine Lavin, called the "biological time-bomb"), they were both regarded as odd, often deemed to be closet homosexuals, whether or not they played for the other team.
Yet here come the Boomers in the 1960s and their single years, and -- kazaam! -- it's suddenly a new state associated with the setting of seduction in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
In search of a new word, the older one serves best. The purpose of the search is to define a concept a friend brought up, the notion of singlehood (attested here on 2007?) as a positive, as a circumstance defined by other than un-something.
My friend declares that she is a happy singleton. At middle age she confesses she never had a boyfriend. Considered entering a convent until she decided that she could be single without having someone bossing her around.
As for sex, she never felt any need for "all that." I admire what I recognize as an honest, principled stance. She said she would like to start singles clubs that weren't about meeting someone of the opposite sex.
However, as I discovered, she cheats: she lives in the bosom of an extended family, next to siblings, married and single, and nephews and nieces, all of whom apparently care for and undoubtedly express their caring in ways uniquely meaningful to one another.
The reason most singles go to dances and clubs is the absence of precisely such a community of caring, which brings on various aches and itches.
There's the obvious itch of sex; I believe she doesn't experience it, but such a situation is rare in my experience. Then there's the ache for the warmth of another human being; we are mammals, we need a touch, a hug. Lastly, and not least, there's the hankering for conversation with a peer (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).
While I earnestly appreciate my friend's view, which echoes recent comments on Thailand Gal to the effect that she is no longer interested in sexual relationships (or the other team), there remains the matter of finding the balm for what are very legitimate aches and itches.
Volunteering, for all that it does fulfill psychologically and what some call "spiritually," is not the answer. When you go out and focus on others you do forget yourself and feel exhilarated to discover that you have more to give than you imagined. Then you come home and there is no one there with whom to share your high.
The monastic communities of Christianity, the ones I know best, were -- in part -- attempts to envelop single people in the purpose of giving themselves over to others and Someone. On the whole, my experience tells me that they largely failed. In place of affection and touching, they put prayer and states of "spiritual ecstasy" -- forcefully banning "particular friendships" in the convent or monastery.
One need not read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to know that monasteries are beehives replete with the capital vices -- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Hell knows little that is worse than a monk wronged.
As a modern alternative, a number of people I know have also evolved long-term relationships in which neither moves in with the other, yet each remain available to one another. This is becoming quite common.
Others have developed a family of friends. This is not my forte.
Still others claim -- note my skepticism -- that there really are such things as cybernetic "communities."
All in all, not a single satisfying one (pun intended). There needs to be a positive restatement of the singleton state as a way of living that need not be merely not something else.
Here I get stuck.
Why? Because it comes down to the essence of who we are as individuals, which is the paradox stated earlier in developing my ethics of survival: we are utterly alone, yet we cannot survive by ourselves. (See here and here, among others; or click on the "ethics" topic.)
The Irish rebels known as Sinn Fein (literally "we ourselves, often translated as "ourselves alone") are themselves now trapped in the maws of the human paradox as they engage in power sharing with the Unionists.
Perhaps that is the singleton paradox: to be alone with others. Or not.
Other modern variants single-parent and singles bar are attested in 1969. Back in the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh, the term was singleton, attested in 1937, per the online dictionary, a serviceable electronic alternative to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology on my bookshelf.
Clearly, there's a change of attitudes involved.
In the 1930s and earlier, the people who came to be called as singletons were regarded also as spinsters and old maids if they were women and bachelor or stag if they were men. After a certain age, perhaps the late 30s (when women face what one of my favorite singing folkies, Christine Lavin, called the "biological time-bomb"), they were both regarded as odd, often deemed to be closet homosexuals, whether or not they played for the other team.
Yet here come the Boomers in the 1960s and their single years, and -- kazaam! -- it's suddenly a new state associated with the setting of seduction in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
In search of a new word, the older one serves best. The purpose of the search is to define a concept a friend brought up, the notion of singlehood (attested here on 2007?) as a positive, as a circumstance defined by other than un-something.
My friend declares that she is a happy singleton. At middle age she confesses she never had a boyfriend. Considered entering a convent until she decided that she could be single without having someone bossing her around.
As for sex, she never felt any need for "all that." I admire what I recognize as an honest, principled stance. She said she would like to start singles clubs that weren't about meeting someone of the opposite sex.
However, as I discovered, she cheats: she lives in the bosom of an extended family, next to siblings, married and single, and nephews and nieces, all of whom apparently care for and undoubtedly express their caring in ways uniquely meaningful to one another.
The reason most singles go to dances and clubs is the absence of precisely such a community of caring, which brings on various aches and itches.
There's the obvious itch of sex; I believe she doesn't experience it, but such a situation is rare in my experience. Then there's the ache for the warmth of another human being; we are mammals, we need a touch, a hug. Lastly, and not least, there's the hankering for conversation with a peer (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).
While I earnestly appreciate my friend's view, which echoes recent comments on Thailand Gal to the effect that she is no longer interested in sexual relationships (or the other team), there remains the matter of finding the balm for what are very legitimate aches and itches.
Volunteering, for all that it does fulfill psychologically and what some call "spiritually," is not the answer. When you go out and focus on others you do forget yourself and feel exhilarated to discover that you have more to give than you imagined. Then you come home and there is no one there with whom to share your high.
The monastic communities of Christianity, the ones I know best, were -- in part -- attempts to envelop single people in the purpose of giving themselves over to others and Someone. On the whole, my experience tells me that they largely failed. In place of affection and touching, they put prayer and states of "spiritual ecstasy" -- forcefully banning "particular friendships" in the convent or monastery.
One need not read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to know that monasteries are beehives replete with the capital vices -- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Hell knows little that is worse than a monk wronged.
As a modern alternative, a number of people I know have also evolved long-term relationships in which neither moves in with the other, yet each remain available to one another. This is becoming quite common.
Others have developed a family of friends. This is not my forte.
Still others claim -- note my skepticism -- that there really are such things as cybernetic "communities."
All in all, not a single satisfying one (pun intended). There needs to be a positive restatement of the singleton state as a way of living that need not be merely not something else.
Here I get stuck.
Why? Because it comes down to the essence of who we are as individuals, which is the paradox stated earlier in developing my ethics of survival: we are utterly alone, yet we cannot survive by ourselves. (See here and here, among others; or click on the "ethics" topic.)
The Irish rebels known as Sinn Fein (literally "we ourselves, often translated as "ourselves alone") are themselves now trapped in the maws of the human paradox as they engage in power sharing with the Unionists.
Perhaps that is the singleton paradox: to be alone with others. Or not.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Predatory Men, Predatory Women
Chani's use of the phrase "predatory sex," referring to propositions of admittedly questionable taste, brought to mind recent comments in a post-marriage support group in which I serve as a discussion facilitator.
We were talking about dating and three women told of similar approaches by men. "I have never been asked for a date [since the marriage breakup]," said the one who expressed it best, "but I have been asked for sex several times."
What I found most appalling about this was the manner in which the approach was made. One man told the woman he was approaching that she was "so hot" he was already masturbating about her!
In what barn have these guys learned their etiquette?
Of course, men and women alike are drawn to sex with one another. Both fantasize about it and now and then do something about fantasies privately. (See here if you don't believe that, yes, Virginia, women do, too.) But there's an invisible boundary between what is private and public.
Many American men have given the rest of us a bad name by stepping over that line.
Similarly, less talked about because ... I don't know why, women are perfectly capable of stepping over boundaries in ways that are predatory, sometimes even over the felony line. Trust me on this.
Granted, most women do not mix up violence with sex, most women derive power more surreptitiously than men (millennia on the slave side of the master-slave relationship, Hegel might have said), but just like men, women can objectify, exploit, use and abuse other people in relation to sex.
The same three women who complained about being asked for sex, for example, did not think it even necessary to offer to pay half for dinner (even though refusal is almost certainly guaranteed). They assumed that -- by virtue of what, other than their sex? --they had an automatic entry to a man's wallet. Yet all of them would have assumed that they had the right to decide if and when they would kiss the man.
Let's take this off the table so there is no confusion: I am not proposing for an instant that a dinner buys sex (kissing to whatever).
However, anyone who thinks that the mere act of dressing up tantalizingly and putting on cosmetics (many purchased for their romantically suggestive brand names) deserves a free meal needs to think about what kind of reasoning would justify such a conclusion. It looks to me like sex buying dinner, although I'm open to alternatives.
The point is that both men and women are predatory in that we search for mates like hawks.
Traditionally, men have taken the active part of the hunt and women have tried to draw circles and arrows around themselves to be "found." The distinction between active and passive roles does not erase the mutual desire to find one another and mate.
Of course, there remain boundaries that neither one should cross. Some of these boundaries are clear and spelled out in codes of law, others are unwritten (yet not immutable) social norms.
Less explicit customary limits attach to groups within society (caste, class, ethnicity, etc.). In a society with such a large variety of subgroups and such ease of travel from one to the other, inevitably some misunderstandings will arise.
If the people of the opposite sex you encounter are all crossing your boundaries, I would suggest that you are simply in the wrong circles.
We were talking about dating and three women told of similar approaches by men. "I have never been asked for a date [since the marriage breakup]," said the one who expressed it best, "but I have been asked for sex several times."
What I found most appalling about this was the manner in which the approach was made. One man told the woman he was approaching that she was "so hot" he was already masturbating about her!
In what barn have these guys learned their etiquette?
Of course, men and women alike are drawn to sex with one another. Both fantasize about it and now and then do something about fantasies privately. (See here if you don't believe that, yes, Virginia, women do, too.) But there's an invisible boundary between what is private and public.
Many American men have given the rest of us a bad name by stepping over that line.
Similarly, less talked about because ... I don't know why, women are perfectly capable of stepping over boundaries in ways that are predatory, sometimes even over the felony line. Trust me on this.
Granted, most women do not mix up violence with sex, most women derive power more surreptitiously than men (millennia on the slave side of the master-slave relationship, Hegel might have said), but just like men, women can objectify, exploit, use and abuse other people in relation to sex.
The same three women who complained about being asked for sex, for example, did not think it even necessary to offer to pay half for dinner (even though refusal is almost certainly guaranteed). They assumed that -- by virtue of what, other than their sex? --they had an automatic entry to a man's wallet. Yet all of them would have assumed that they had the right to decide if and when they would kiss the man.
Let's take this off the table so there is no confusion: I am not proposing for an instant that a dinner buys sex (kissing to whatever).
However, anyone who thinks that the mere act of dressing up tantalizingly and putting on cosmetics (many purchased for their romantically suggestive brand names) deserves a free meal needs to think about what kind of reasoning would justify such a conclusion. It looks to me like sex buying dinner, although I'm open to alternatives.
The point is that both men and women are predatory in that we search for mates like hawks.
Traditionally, men have taken the active part of the hunt and women have tried to draw circles and arrows around themselves to be "found." The distinction between active and passive roles does not erase the mutual desire to find one another and mate.
Of course, there remain boundaries that neither one should cross. Some of these boundaries are clear and spelled out in codes of law, others are unwritten (yet not immutable) social norms.
Less explicit customary limits attach to groups within society (caste, class, ethnicity, etc.). In a society with such a large variety of subgroups and such ease of travel from one to the other, inevitably some misunderstandings will arise.
If the people of the opposite sex you encounter are all crossing your boundaries, I would suggest that you are simply in the wrong circles.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Sex as a Language
In the last half century or so, it seems, our society has swung from utter abandon in pursuit of sex of every tawdry, extreme and bizarre form, to outright rejection of sex, either with tablets of law from a mountain top or in expressions of sexual indigestion.
Chani, aka Thailand Gal, had this to say in response to my post yesterday:
A better analogy might be a special purpose computer language. Xbase. (I'm not really a techie, I just can do a reasonable imitation.) Few people still program in Xbase, although it's very sturdy and useful to handle databases.
Theoretically, you could write a compiler (a program to make programs) in Xbase and you could create a computer game. But why would you want to?
Xbase, originally dBase later Clipper and other variants, was invented in 1978 to go directly and intimately to the core of the information in a database, to build relations between sets of data, to link up what is often not obvious or easy in a deceptively simple way.
Like sex.
Technically, you could have sex with goats or design a robot to fulfill your every fantasy, but why would you want to?
Sex is a special purpose language that involves seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. (And, let's not forget, that off chance of reproduction.)
The combination of thought, word, mime and physical contact meld into a whole new dimension of contact with the core of another person. At the same time, we shed the layers of our selves. Then, at a powerful ego-barrier-destroying instant we all associate with intense pleasure, we have an exchange of being occurring that defies logical comprehension or comparison.
Sex is the language of love between two peers.
How to speak such a powerful language? In window shopping for love, look but don't touch, wrote Snoskred a few days ago. Touch and listen to the soul, responded Genevieve.
Chani reminded me that I've already expressed my dislike the idea of shopping for love (here), when I attempted to speak about love as an absolute value.
Yet my original question a week or so ago was whether love occurred one at a time, whether two or more might be touched by love. All in light of the idea that "The One" is largely a chimera (on this Chani's observations seem to match mine, although I have not quite abandoned the possibility).
One answer is to keep a certain distance. Another is to take a little nibble, as of a canape.
Yet another is the approach Leonard Cohen expressed in an interview aeons ago, in which he compared sex to a form of communication. Might we not be able to have several sexual conversations going? This would not be window shopping at all.
One is not intending to "buy" anything, but to share something of oneself and to receive from another, to practice the phrases, the verbs, the syntax of the complex language of love. If all of us could experience an all-connecting orgasm together, wouldn't wars cease, dog-eat-dog competition end, hatred dissipate?
This is not an invitation to a worldwide orgy. (Although ... what are you doing next Saturday?) No, seriously.
I repeat: Sex is the language of love between peers. We are not all peers. Sex should be an expression of equality, of similarity or complementary polarity, of abandonment and trust in another. It is often an instrument of oppression, a stand-in for power, a soft-touch leash.
In the end, sex between everyone and everyone else is not appropriate. But neither is no sex between anyone.
Chani, aka Thailand Gal, had this to say in response to my post yesterday:
I am incapable of being a slave to other people's needs, especially someone's sexual needs.By all means, give up being a slave to someone's sexual needs. But must we forget that sex is a language -- like Thai or English or French?
A better analogy might be a special purpose computer language. Xbase. (I'm not really a techie, I just can do a reasonable imitation.) Few people still program in Xbase, although it's very sturdy and useful to handle databases.
Theoretically, you could write a compiler (a program to make programs) in Xbase and you could create a computer game. But why would you want to?
Xbase, originally dBase later Clipper and other variants, was invented in 1978 to go directly and intimately to the core of the information in a database, to build relations between sets of data, to link up what is often not obvious or easy in a deceptively simple way.
Like sex.
Technically, you could have sex with goats or design a robot to fulfill your every fantasy, but why would you want to?
Sex is a special purpose language that involves seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. (And, let's not forget, that off chance of reproduction.)
The combination of thought, word, mime and physical contact meld into a whole new dimension of contact with the core of another person. At the same time, we shed the layers of our selves. Then, at a powerful ego-barrier-destroying instant we all associate with intense pleasure, we have an exchange of being occurring that defies logical comprehension or comparison.
Sex is the language of love between two peers.
How to speak such a powerful language? In window shopping for love, look but don't touch, wrote Snoskred a few days ago. Touch and listen to the soul, responded Genevieve.
Chani reminded me that I've already expressed my dislike the idea of shopping for love (here), when I attempted to speak about love as an absolute value.
Yet my original question a week or so ago was whether love occurred one at a time, whether two or more might be touched by love. All in light of the idea that "The One" is largely a chimera (on this Chani's observations seem to match mine, although I have not quite abandoned the possibility).
One answer is to keep a certain distance. Another is to take a little nibble, as of a canape.
Yet another is the approach Leonard Cohen expressed in an interview aeons ago, in which he compared sex to a form of communication. Might we not be able to have several sexual conversations going? This would not be window shopping at all.
One is not intending to "buy" anything, but to share something of oneself and to receive from another, to practice the phrases, the verbs, the syntax of the complex language of love. If all of us could experience an all-connecting orgasm together, wouldn't wars cease, dog-eat-dog competition end, hatred dissipate?
This is not an invitation to a worldwide orgy. (Although ... what are you doing next Saturday?) No, seriously.
I repeat: Sex is the language of love between peers. We are not all peers. Sex should be an expression of equality, of similarity or complementary polarity, of abandonment and trust in another. It is often an instrument of oppression, a stand-in for power, a soft-touch leash.
In the end, sex between everyone and everyone else is not appropriate. But neither is no sex between anyone.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Slouching Toward Craziness
Why is it that when you begin to slouch toward partnering things get crazy and all you want to do is head for the hills?
OK, I almost saw myself on "Sex in the City" typing on Sarah Jessica Parker's laptop. (Except I'm a guy who can't stop wondering why she uses a Mac, fer cryin' out loud.)
I'm told this is obvious and true and inevitable. Why am I the only person in the universe who doesn't know this? And don't tell me RTFM. This wasn't in the manual!
Why is it that even when you get along with someone, have great sex, enjoy similar movies, generally "get" one another, you still have rip-roaring arguments of the type you've had before with someone else who can't possibly live with you?
Why do people drive each other crazy? Why did I feel impelled to comment at the wedding I attended "If they think the wedding is difficult, wait till they get to the divorce part"? (Note: I did not say this to the couple.)
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Oh, and did I say "why"?
OK, I almost saw myself on "Sex in the City" typing on Sarah Jessica Parker's laptop. (Except I'm a guy who can't stop wondering why she uses a Mac, fer cryin' out loud.)
I'm told this is obvious and true and inevitable. Why am I the only person in the universe who doesn't know this? And don't tell me RTFM. This wasn't in the manual!
Why is it that even when you get along with someone, have great sex, enjoy similar movies, generally "get" one another, you still have rip-roaring arguments of the type you've had before with someone else who can't possibly live with you?
Why do people drive each other crazy? Why did I feel impelled to comment at the wedding I attended "If they think the wedding is difficult, wait till they get to the divorce part"? (Note: I did not say this to the couple.)
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Oh, and did I say "why"?
Friday, February 09, 2007
An Embrace for the Ages
In this cold northern hemisphere night, I am warmed by an image from a new archeological find in Italy of an unknown, 5,000-year-old couple locked in an embrace not far from the home of Romeo and Juliet. Our common humanity unites us across the millennia.
Supplied by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italian Cultural Ministry), the picture depicts the Neolithic age skeletons of a couple found in Valdaro-S.Giorgio near Mantua, about 25 miles from Verona.
As a university student, I once delighted in learning that the oldest extant manuscript, written in Sanskrit, was a recipe for making beer. Our ancestors, I then felt, had their priorities straight.
Tonight, I am touched by an ancient unknown couple. Like them, the thought of an empty bed is unappealing. They and I aspire to the warmth of another person, someone of the opposite sex, someone cuddly, someone into whose eyes one might plunge.
We are so hauntingly similar in revelry and romance.
Elena Menotti, the chief archeologist at the site, told reporters it was "extraordinary." Such a find is rare, perhaps unique. They are really hugging and they died young, as their intact teeth show.
Perhaps they were the real Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers from long, long ago. We think sometimes that we invented love to the tune of the Beatles. We didn't. Maybe they did.
Whatever the case, the secret of life seems encased in that embrace. The greatest human joy is drawn from the urge to merge, to spawn; we, their children, are alive thanks to such an entwining.
All of life, that all-too-brief moment in which we awaken to awareness, from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to upright adult maturity, seems directed toward that coupling with another, after which we slowly nod off through senescence back into the sheath of gray unknowing whence we came.
This Mantuan couple has preserved the core for the ages, a monument to being in the fullest, most human sense.
Supplied by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italian Cultural Ministry), the picture depicts the Neolithic age skeletons of a couple found in Valdaro-S.Giorgio near Mantua, about 25 miles from Verona.As a university student, I once delighted in learning that the oldest extant manuscript, written in Sanskrit, was a recipe for making beer. Our ancestors, I then felt, had their priorities straight.
Tonight, I am touched by an ancient unknown couple. Like them, the thought of an empty bed is unappealing. They and I aspire to the warmth of another person, someone of the opposite sex, someone cuddly, someone into whose eyes one might plunge.
We are so hauntingly similar in revelry and romance.
Elena Menotti, the chief archeologist at the site, told reporters it was "extraordinary." Such a find is rare, perhaps unique. They are really hugging and they died young, as their intact teeth show.
Perhaps they were the real Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers from long, long ago. We think sometimes that we invented love to the tune of the Beatles. We didn't. Maybe they did.
Whatever the case, the secret of life seems encased in that embrace. The greatest human joy is drawn from the urge to merge, to spawn; we, their children, are alive thanks to such an entwining.
All of life, that all-too-brief moment in which we awaken to awareness, from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to upright adult maturity, seems directed toward that coupling with another, after which we slowly nod off through senescence back into the sheath of gray unknowing whence we came.
This Mantuan couple has preserved the core for the ages, a monument to being in the fullest, most human sense.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Breaking Up Is Easy
A friend who is thinking of leaving her husband -- for the record, I wish she wouldn't -- asks why it is that married people in middle age split up. It seems true. Is it? If so, why?
It is true, at least in the United States, according to the Bureau of the Census.
Up through age 49, divorced men make up no more than 29.5 percent of their peers. This jumps to 40.8 percent in the ages of 50 to 59. Then it declines to 30.9 percent in the following age decade. For divorced women the same percentages are 35.4 percent, 38.9 percent, 28.4 percent. (See Kreider,Rose M., 2005. Number, Timing,and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 2001. Current Population Reports, P70-97. U.S. Census Bureau, Washington,D.C., which you can download here.)
So, Why?
A 2004 survey of matrimonial lawyers in Britain found as causes extra-marital affairs (27 percent), family strains (18 percent), emotional/physical abuse (17 percent), mid-life crisis (13 percent), addictions (6 percent), workaholism (6 percent). A study by a California State University professor based on the opinions of the individuals involved listed incompatibility, lack of emotional support, abuse, sexual problems and money.
Few surprises here for the general population.
But the Census tell us that marriages that last more than 20 years tend not to end in divorce. Yet those are the marriage breakups we're focusing on here. Married people in their first marriage by their fifties have usually been together a long time.
That's what my experience listening to stories as a volunteer discussion meeting facilitator in a support group for separated and divorced men and women (go here) tells me.
Many people, I think, want to break out of their lives at some point in middle age. Some men think that if they get a new young wife they will be young again. (Others sublimate with the purchase of a sports car or motorcycle.)
As to women, to my mind (I expect rotten tomatoes for this, but I will stand my ground), the dirty little secret no one talks about much is the M-word, menopause, which in my opinion exacerbates existing conflicts when the condition strikes and reduces the will to reconcile. When childrearing comes to an end, also, a number of changes bring about a reorientation of life.
There's also an intangible sense, I think, that if only you could get out of your marriage your life would be so much better. Something's missing that you think everyone else has.
What none of this takes into account is what happens after. Here my listening experience talks. For the first week or three there's an immediate release, for the leaver, from the affliction, real or imagined, that led to leaving.
For the leaved it's another story. One person I know attempted suicide. Many, many others fell into a deep sadness. There's an overwhelming sense of failure and doom hovers over everything when a marriage of X years (especially when X includes multiples of 10) seems to have ended for good.
When that realization hits the leaver, the same sadness seeps into his or her heart. (Unless the leaver has run off with someone ... that will happen when the infatuation fades away.)
People make it worse. Friends and family take sides. Many refuse to have anything to do with the two people breaking up, on grounds that it might be "catching." You learn how few friends you really have; how useless relatives are. Your kids have enough challenges with their own lives. If you are religious, you learn how little God intervenes.
Then comes the law to coldly divide possessions you jointly struggled to acquire.
Even if you then find a support group and go on a spree of dating, you find it doesn't ultimately solve anything. Your dates ultimately don't care about anything but themselves, just like the ex who left you or whom you left.
You are alone and you are fifty-something. You've done just about everything you put your mind to do since youth. Next stop is to become ashes in an urn ... and what a long way down that is!
Oh, you can find new friends and fill your life with busy-ness and travel and acquisition. (I have no idea what this thing about travel is: I've gone everywhere I ever want to go.)
Yet there will always remain the hole of the thing that fell apart, the other life you ended prematurely. But I stray from the topic, because that's why people don't break up. That's why people, deep down, wish they hadn't broken up.
As to breaking up, Neil Sedaka was right. It's not very easy to do.
Once it's done, all the king's horses and all the king's men will find well nigh impossible to put it together again.
It is true, at least in the United States, according to the Bureau of the Census.
Up through age 49, divorced men make up no more than 29.5 percent of their peers. This jumps to 40.8 percent in the ages of 50 to 59. Then it declines to 30.9 percent in the following age decade. For divorced women the same percentages are 35.4 percent, 38.9 percent, 28.4 percent. (See Kreider,Rose M., 2005. Number, Timing,and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 2001. Current Population Reports, P70-97. U.S. Census Bureau, Washington,D.C., which you can download here.)
So, Why?
A 2004 survey of matrimonial lawyers in Britain found as causes extra-marital affairs (27 percent), family strains (18 percent), emotional/physical abuse (17 percent), mid-life crisis (13 percent), addictions (6 percent), workaholism (6 percent). A study by a California State University professor based on the opinions of the individuals involved listed incompatibility, lack of emotional support, abuse, sexual problems and money.
Few surprises here for the general population.
But the Census tell us that marriages that last more than 20 years tend not to end in divorce. Yet those are the marriage breakups we're focusing on here. Married people in their first marriage by their fifties have usually been together a long time.
That's what my experience listening to stories as a volunteer discussion meeting facilitator in a support group for separated and divorced men and women (go here) tells me.
Many people, I think, want to break out of their lives at some point in middle age. Some men think that if they get a new young wife they will be young again. (Others sublimate with the purchase of a sports car or motorcycle.)
As to women, to my mind (I expect rotten tomatoes for this, but I will stand my ground), the dirty little secret no one talks about much is the M-word, menopause, which in my opinion exacerbates existing conflicts when the condition strikes and reduces the will to reconcile. When childrearing comes to an end, also, a number of changes bring about a reorientation of life.
There's also an intangible sense, I think, that if only you could get out of your marriage your life would be so much better. Something's missing that you think everyone else has.
What none of this takes into account is what happens after. Here my listening experience talks. For the first week or three there's an immediate release, for the leaver, from the affliction, real or imagined, that led to leaving.
For the leaved it's another story. One person I know attempted suicide. Many, many others fell into a deep sadness. There's an overwhelming sense of failure and doom hovers over everything when a marriage of X years (especially when X includes multiples of 10) seems to have ended for good.
When that realization hits the leaver, the same sadness seeps into his or her heart. (Unless the leaver has run off with someone ... that will happen when the infatuation fades away.)
People make it worse. Friends and family take sides. Many refuse to have anything to do with the two people breaking up, on grounds that it might be "catching." You learn how few friends you really have; how useless relatives are. Your kids have enough challenges with their own lives. If you are religious, you learn how little God intervenes.
Then comes the law to coldly divide possessions you jointly struggled to acquire.
Even if you then find a support group and go on a spree of dating, you find it doesn't ultimately solve anything. Your dates ultimately don't care about anything but themselves, just like the ex who left you or whom you left.
You are alone and you are fifty-something. You've done just about everything you put your mind to do since youth. Next stop is to become ashes in an urn ... and what a long way down that is!
Oh, you can find new friends and fill your life with busy-ness and travel and acquisition. (I have no idea what this thing about travel is: I've gone everywhere I ever want to go.)
Yet there will always remain the hole of the thing that fell apart, the other life you ended prematurely. But I stray from the topic, because that's why people don't break up. That's why people, deep down, wish they hadn't broken up.
As to breaking up, Neil Sedaka was right. It's not very easy to do.
Once it's done, all the king's horses and all the king's men will find well nigh impossible to put it together again.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
A Companion for Each Occasion
A French correspondent to whom I write about the nature of love and related matters assures me with feminine infallibility that "to be in love is passion."
Pour moi, la passion, c'est un amour très fort. La passion, c'est un amour déraisonné et un peu possessif. (For me, passion is a very strong love. Passion is a love without reason and a little possessive.)
This unbridled feeling is focused on the one person, she says, whom one cannot stop thinking about, dreaming about, one cannot imagine life without this person.
So far, I imagine, my correspondent has plucked every heart in the house. I hear the sighs and ever the trickling of slow tears of recognition down the cheeks of some (predominantly female) readers.
Let me risk rotten tomatoes from the peanut gallery, if you'll excuse the mixed vegetable kingdom metaphor (and yes, purists, peanuts are legumes but legumes are still within the vegetable kingdom), and ask:
Why can't we opt for varied companions for different occasions, instead of single mates for every season who must perforce disappoint us?
We accept that certain friends bring certain gifts and others something quite different. Yet we can't, somehow, accept that there are men or women suitable for a night at the opera and different men or women suitable for a romp in the countryside.
Is there only one for each one? If so, why do at least 50% of those who choose ecclesiastical or legal means to express such a notion end up divorced?
These are just questions. I don't claim to have an answer. My experience just tells me that the conventional, sentimental answers don't work particularly well.
There's just got to be a better way.
Pour moi, la passion, c'est un amour très fort. La passion, c'est un amour déraisonné et un peu possessif. (For me, passion is a very strong love. Passion is a love without reason and a little possessive.)
This unbridled feeling is focused on the one person, she says, whom one cannot stop thinking about, dreaming about, one cannot imagine life without this person.
So far, I imagine, my correspondent has plucked every heart in the house. I hear the sighs and ever the trickling of slow tears of recognition down the cheeks of some (predominantly female) readers.
Let me risk rotten tomatoes from the peanut gallery, if you'll excuse the mixed vegetable kingdom metaphor (and yes, purists, peanuts are legumes but legumes are still within the vegetable kingdom), and ask:
- Must one person be the be-all and end-all of one's existence?
- Is it realistic to expect one person to be the favorite conversation partner, the best dining companion, the most practical and helpful chore mate, the most leonine bed partner, the profoundest fellow philosopher of life and so on and so forth?
- Aren't such combined, overblown and unliveable expectations or fantasies the cause of all our misfortunes in love?
Why can't we opt for varied companions for different occasions, instead of single mates for every season who must perforce disappoint us?
We accept that certain friends bring certain gifts and others something quite different. Yet we can't, somehow, accept that there are men or women suitable for a night at the opera and different men or women suitable for a romp in the countryside.
Is there only one for each one? If so, why do at least 50% of those who choose ecclesiastical or legal means to express such a notion end up divorced?
These are just questions. I don't claim to have an answer. My experience just tells me that the conventional, sentimental answers don't work particularly well.
There's just got to be a better way.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
ISO 19YO BLONDE
When my marriage first fell apart, I told friends in that whistling-in-the-dark humor you develop for such occasions that now was my chance to find a 19-year-old blonde. The men leered back, the women gasped. Little did I know that I would get to fulfill my dream.
Before I go into that, let's take stock of what's involved in this dream.
Everybody knows, or has seen it on the street: a 40- or 50-something driving a red sports car. In a Volkswagen commercial, it's described as an "ego emission." Instead of Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice, Viagra, some men get the red Triumph.
I am fifty-ish, have mostly gray hair and carry what personals Web sites charitably describe as "a few extra pounds." My marriage fell apart: I knew I was screwed (or rather, not likely ever again). I am not exactly bait even for post-pregnancy Britney.
So I went to support group meetings, to dances, to various socials and uncovered that I am not exactly unattractive, that -- Deo gratias! -- women look at faces, at intelligence, at grace and charm (and, yes, some also look for hefty wallets, but we'll overlook those). So if you find yourself in a similar situation -- no, you are not dead in the water at middle age; even men look beyond the obvious.
But you're still not 17 or 22.
I was thinking such thoughts during a trip across the country. On my flight back, the plane stopped somewhere in the Midwest (Chicago? I guess, that's in the middle somewhere, no?).
That's when the plane started to fill up and next to me (I was on the two-seat side) sits down a young woman who is blonde. She needs help with this and that and I gallantly provide what help I can offer. She sits down, I go back to my book.
Drinks come and they make me feel talkative, so I start a conversation. She is 19 years old. I smile a mile wide but of course she has no idea why. She thinks I'm just being friendly.
I decide to play Dick Cavett, the friendly talk show host who encourages shameless public narcissism by figures from whom one can't fail to learn something. (I'll never forget Orson Welles talking on Cavett's show about the lawsuits after "War of the Worlds" and the one claim that they actually paid: news shoes for a woman whose heels broke in the middle of a panicked rushing crowd. Trivia to tuck that away for moments such as this one.)
A 19-year-old young woman probably wants to tell the world where she is going and why. Indeed!
My putative fountain of youth was from Lyons, Kansas.
There is such a place. Look it up: I have. Population 3,732 (2000 Census), it is a farming community near a campsite used around 1540 by the expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. (Conquistador: "Where are the Seven Cities of Gold" Indian: "Over there, yonder, can't miss them.")
She was coming to Washington on an internship, she recounted in a voice that seemed to grow squeakier by the moment. My mind computed the political implications and legal ramifications of the word "intern" in the 00's; I didn't like the outcome. But, hell, who's a little airplane flirting going to hurt?
So I asked what kinds of issues she was interested in and what organization she was coming to work for. I rapidly became ever more horrified as she detailed the entire Religious Right's political agenda, as if the entire world agreed, and as the internship sponsor she named one of those neocon organizations that I am sure have "666" carved on their headquarters' entrance.
Of course, I forgot! Nineteen-year-old blondes no longer wear flowers in their flowing tresses as they journey to San Francisco. They're more likely eager to wear jackboots in the Political Gestapo, as they seek to immolate homosexuals and "baby-killers."
And their history! I got a lecture on how conservative John F. Kennedy really was -- never mind that I had actually been alive the day he was shot.
Those blue eyes began to look beady. That smile to seem sinister as I pretended -- oh, how I pretended! -- to be amused. She flicked her hair back, she made eye contact; she was clearly flirting. I was clearly horrified.
Once I managed to steer matters to more neutral topics I found there was little common ground. Neither music, nor literature, nor movies nor even TV (I had a TV then) drew a single connection. Her blonde hair looked ever more bottled.
Then it was her turn. Whether she knew the tricks or was genuinely naive, she charmed with questions about Washington. Cognizant that I was with The Enemy I wasn't exactly eager to help her succeed, yet soon enough she began to remind me of my kids.
That's when the bubble burst and I simply turned into a surrogate father-figure. By the time we got to Washington I pointed her to the right Metro train and was happy to see her, her 19-year-old blonde hair, squeaky voice, beady eyes and neocon views go.
Maybe it's a 91-year-old I should be looking for ... I can talk a good game about FDR, Sinatra, the "Thin Man" series and that bestseller, "The Citadel." Or is my voice too squeaky, my eyes too beady, my views too conventional?
Before I go into that, let's take stock of what's involved in this dream.
Everybody knows, or has seen it on the street: a 40- or 50-something driving a red sports car. In a Volkswagen commercial, it's described as an "ego emission." Instead of Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice, Viagra, some men get the red Triumph.
I am fifty-ish, have mostly gray hair and carry what personals Web sites charitably describe as "a few extra pounds." My marriage fell apart: I knew I was screwed (or rather, not likely ever again). I am not exactly bait even for post-pregnancy Britney.
So I went to support group meetings, to dances, to various socials and uncovered that I am not exactly unattractive, that -- Deo gratias! -- women look at faces, at intelligence, at grace and charm (and, yes, some also look for hefty wallets, but we'll overlook those). So if you find yourself in a similar situation -- no, you are not dead in the water at middle age; even men look beyond the obvious.
But you're still not 17 or 22.
I was thinking such thoughts during a trip across the country. On my flight back, the plane stopped somewhere in the Midwest (Chicago? I guess, that's in the middle somewhere, no?).
That's when the plane started to fill up and next to me (I was on the two-seat side) sits down a young woman who is blonde. She needs help with this and that and I gallantly provide what help I can offer. She sits down, I go back to my book.
Drinks come and they make me feel talkative, so I start a conversation. She is 19 years old. I smile a mile wide but of course she has no idea why. She thinks I'm just being friendly.
I decide to play Dick Cavett, the friendly talk show host who encourages shameless public narcissism by figures from whom one can't fail to learn something. (I'll never forget Orson Welles talking on Cavett's show about the lawsuits after "War of the Worlds" and the one claim that they actually paid: news shoes for a woman whose heels broke in the middle of a panicked rushing crowd. Trivia to tuck that away for moments such as this one.)
A 19-year-old young woman probably wants to tell the world where she is going and why. Indeed!
My putative fountain of youth was from Lyons, Kansas.
There is such a place. Look it up: I have. Population 3,732 (2000 Census), it is a farming community near a campsite used around 1540 by the expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. (Conquistador: "Where are the Seven Cities of Gold" Indian: "Over there, yonder, can't miss them.")
She was coming to Washington on an internship, she recounted in a voice that seemed to grow squeakier by the moment. My mind computed the political implications and legal ramifications of the word "intern" in the 00's; I didn't like the outcome. But, hell, who's a little airplane flirting going to hurt?
So I asked what kinds of issues she was interested in and what organization she was coming to work for. I rapidly became ever more horrified as she detailed the entire Religious Right's political agenda, as if the entire world agreed, and as the internship sponsor she named one of those neocon organizations that I am sure have "666" carved on their headquarters' entrance.
Of course, I forgot! Nineteen-year-old blondes no longer wear flowers in their flowing tresses as they journey to San Francisco. They're more likely eager to wear jackboots in the Political Gestapo, as they seek to immolate homosexuals and "baby-killers."
And their history! I got a lecture on how conservative John F. Kennedy really was -- never mind that I had actually been alive the day he was shot.
Those blue eyes began to look beady. That smile to seem sinister as I pretended -- oh, how I pretended! -- to be amused. She flicked her hair back, she made eye contact; she was clearly flirting. I was clearly horrified.
Once I managed to steer matters to more neutral topics I found there was little common ground. Neither music, nor literature, nor movies nor even TV (I had a TV then) drew a single connection. Her blonde hair looked ever more bottled.
Then it was her turn. Whether she knew the tricks or was genuinely naive, she charmed with questions about Washington. Cognizant that I was with The Enemy I wasn't exactly eager to help her succeed, yet soon enough she began to remind me of my kids.
That's when the bubble burst and I simply turned into a surrogate father-figure. By the time we got to Washington I pointed her to the right Metro train and was happy to see her, her 19-year-old blonde hair, squeaky voice, beady eyes and neocon views go.
Maybe it's a 91-year-old I should be looking for ... I can talk a good game about FDR, Sinatra, the "Thin Man" series and that bestseller, "The Citadel." Or is my voice too squeaky, my eyes too beady, my views too conventional?
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Love as Capital
A correspondent's inquiries have sparked some thinking about the difference between "falling in love" and "love" and the possible nature of romantic love, starting from the premise that it's the glue between men and women.
To date, to kiss, to fall in love are all components of love. Sometimes it's a coup de foudre, sometimes it's gradual. But they're all one thing. Or are they?
For years I believed that, while love between a man and a woman began with passion and sex, it somehow transmuted into something else "higher," less lustful, more spiritual. Although I was not a son of Calvin or Jansenius, I found Western dualism a hard thing to shake: I'd been taught there is something relatively base (matter) and something much nobler (spirit), and that the spirit lived on long after the matter died and decayed.
The philosophical lineage of these ideas we can leave for another essay, but I will venture that, viscerally at least, they have wide currency. Certainly, children know this:
John and Mary sittin' in a tree
k -i - s -s - i - n -g ...
first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes a baby in a carriage.
Once there are diapers and schools and homework, out goes the passion, the mystery, the hormonal drive. If a man and woman survive within a marriage, you suppose it is because their love has changed from sizzle into something else entirely different. Charitably you call it companionship.
But in fact, with divorce now normal, this construct falls apart.
There is no "higher" romantic love. Eros will always involve taking leave of one's senses and doing the irrational for reasons of the heart, as Blaise Pascal wrote, that reason does not know.
So falling in love is suspending reason; while loving is, perhaps, persisting in the madness against all evidence to the contrary. Her guffaw, which irritates everyone, is to you a charming little hiccup; his flatulence does not smell.
Does love, then, exhaust itself? Could romantic love be, as my correspondent suggested, an essence stored up as a treasure in limited quantities?
If love is a substance itself, if one distributes it too freely its value drops. Or, as in some traditional cultures, love as capital is expressed in a certain status, such as virginity.
Could you run out of this capital, this essence, could you be forever devalued without a virginity of some sort? Is this what happens to marriages and love affairs? Is love spent out?
If love is capital and falling in love an expenditure of capital. Love might be a gamble -- or an investment.
My heart resists this. Love seems inexhaustible so long as people exist to be loved.
To date, to kiss, to fall in love are all components of love. Sometimes it's a coup de foudre, sometimes it's gradual. But they're all one thing. Or are they?
For years I believed that, while love between a man and a woman began with passion and sex, it somehow transmuted into something else "higher," less lustful, more spiritual. Although I was not a son of Calvin or Jansenius, I found Western dualism a hard thing to shake: I'd been taught there is something relatively base (matter) and something much nobler (spirit), and that the spirit lived on long after the matter died and decayed.
The philosophical lineage of these ideas we can leave for another essay, but I will venture that, viscerally at least, they have wide currency. Certainly, children know this:
John and Mary sittin' in a tree
k -i - s -s - i - n -g ...
first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes a baby in a carriage.
Once there are diapers and schools and homework, out goes the passion, the mystery, the hormonal drive. If a man and woman survive within a marriage, you suppose it is because their love has changed from sizzle into something else entirely different. Charitably you call it companionship.
But in fact, with divorce now normal, this construct falls apart.
There is no "higher" romantic love. Eros will always involve taking leave of one's senses and doing the irrational for reasons of the heart, as Blaise Pascal wrote, that reason does not know.
So falling in love is suspending reason; while loving is, perhaps, persisting in the madness against all evidence to the contrary. Her guffaw, which irritates everyone, is to you a charming little hiccup; his flatulence does not smell.
Does love, then, exhaust itself? Could romantic love be, as my correspondent suggested, an essence stored up as a treasure in limited quantities?
If love is a substance itself, if one distributes it too freely its value drops. Or, as in some traditional cultures, love as capital is expressed in a certain status, such as virginity.
Could you run out of this capital, this essence, could you be forever devalued without a virginity of some sort? Is this what happens to marriages and love affairs? Is love spent out?
If love is capital and falling in love an expenditure of capital. Love might be a gamble -- or an investment.
My heart resists this. Love seems inexhaustible so long as people exist to be loved.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Saying the L-word
Is there any other word in the English language so fraught with ecstasy, anxiety, depression, thrill, and even hate as the L-word? And no, I don't mean "liberal." I mean the other one, the four-letter L-word: "love," as in "I love you."
Why does it feel as perilous as the nuclear button when it sits on the tip of the tongue, about to roll off into the ether? Why is it so easy to bathe our children and families in it, yet it is so hard to say to a lover?
In its pure, laboratory form, love is great. Walking through flea markets. Repainting your place together with the inevitable dab on the tip of the nose. A trip to Paris.
In real life, love comes alloyed.
Love comes with balls and chains: she wants, he wants ... something that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. And, oh, when did you ever sign up for anything?
Should the guy always say it first? What does it mean when it is said in one of those steamy moments one can't quite describe in a family blog?
What if she doesn't say anything when he says it? Does it mean it's all over?
Some people say it all the time. In one family I know, its members always take leave of one another with the words, "Bye, I love you." The farewell seems to guarantee a warm closure. If the person departing gets hit by a truck, you don't have the angst-ridden remorse of not having declared your affection: he or she knew, at the home's portal, that there was love.
Others are afraid it will lead to legal proceedings.
And what about responding to "I love you"? From my years in newsrooms, where no conversation is private, I've heard many a co-worker's side of the following phone call:
"I love you," she says.
"Me, too," he says, hoping no one realizes what everyone does.
Me, too? OK, so it's a crowded newsroom where you might not want to broadcast your affection.
But what about rewinding to Saturday night, in the wee hours. The traffic outside has died down as has your passion. You turn to her, look in her eyes and say, "I love you." Your heart is racing, a band is playing the Coronation March in your head. You are in bliss.
Then, without skipping a beat, seconds later, she says, "I love you, too." Now you've done it!
You're both in love. Flea markets, remodelling, Paris. Or is it?
Was she too quick? Why didn't she just say, "I love you" (emphasis on "you")?
Is this merely a courtesy? Maybe it's like on those mornings when your parakeet has died, your son's run off with his high school teacher, your car's just blown up in the parking lot. Then someone says, "How are ya?" You reply, "Fine."
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
Maybe we should say "I glove you" just to test the reaction.
Why does it feel as perilous as the nuclear button when it sits on the tip of the tongue, about to roll off into the ether? Why is it so easy to bathe our children and families in it, yet it is so hard to say to a lover?
In its pure, laboratory form, love is great. Walking through flea markets. Repainting your place together with the inevitable dab on the tip of the nose. A trip to Paris.
In real life, love comes alloyed.
Love comes with balls and chains: she wants, he wants ... something that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. And, oh, when did you ever sign up for anything?
Should the guy always say it first? What does it mean when it is said in one of those steamy moments one can't quite describe in a family blog?
What if she doesn't say anything when he says it? Does it mean it's all over?
Some people say it all the time. In one family I know, its members always take leave of one another with the words, "Bye, I love you." The farewell seems to guarantee a warm closure. If the person departing gets hit by a truck, you don't have the angst-ridden remorse of not having declared your affection: he or she knew, at the home's portal, that there was love.
Others are afraid it will lead to legal proceedings.
And what about responding to "I love you"? From my years in newsrooms, where no conversation is private, I've heard many a co-worker's side of the following phone call:
"I love you," she says.
"Me, too," he says, hoping no one realizes what everyone does.
Me, too? OK, so it's a crowded newsroom where you might not want to broadcast your affection.
But what about rewinding to Saturday night, in the wee hours. The traffic outside has died down as has your passion. You turn to her, look in her eyes and say, "I love you." Your heart is racing, a band is playing the Coronation March in your head. You are in bliss.
Then, without skipping a beat, seconds later, she says, "I love you, too." Now you've done it!
You're both in love. Flea markets, remodelling, Paris. Or is it?
Was she too quick? Why didn't she just say, "I love you" (emphasis on "you")?
Is this merely a courtesy? Maybe it's like on those mornings when your parakeet has died, your son's run off with his high school teacher, your car's just blown up in the parking lot. Then someone says, "How are ya?" You reply, "Fine."
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
Maybe we should say "I glove you" just to test the reaction.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Man-time, Woman-time
Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone of the opposite sex about your relationship with this person (sigh!)? If they're talking of their future together, he is thinking of next week and she is looking to that distant time in which they'll both be rocking their chairs on a porch.
You have entered (clear throat, put on Rod Serling voice) the man-time, woman-time zone.
Time isn't an absolute. As a reporter I learned there's journalist time, for example. You're a reporter, you go interview people or you go to the scene of the fire, whatever. You go back, write the story and move on. Next morning a reader picking up the paper exclaims: "Look at that, Martha, the old train depot on the other side of town burned down!" That's the public's news; your news as a reporter is the story that will come out the following day. So journalism time is always ahead of public time.
OK, you'll say that with 24/7 Internet coverage that's a thing of the past. Still, face it, the news you're reading in the fastest news site is "olds" to the reporter who wrote it five minutes ago, who is now working on the story you'll read several hours or days from now. The reporter is always a step ahead.
Much the same happens with men and women. At that first long, warm kiss, the guy is wondering what she'll be like in bed on the third, seventh or umpteenth date; the woman is designing her future bridesmaids' outfits.
That's not just because guys tend not to think of marriage, but merely a function of how far ahead they each think.
In one group of which I am a member, women have to be told that they can't sign up for an event a month ahead, while organizers find themselves pleading with men to RSVP at least two days before.
Why is that? I'm not exactly sure.
Part of this may have to do, of course, with a difference in time pressures. A study published some time ago in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that while women and men had similar amounts of free time in 1975, by 1998 women had 30 minutes less leisure time per day than men.
However, last fall the Bureau of Labor Statistics' second annual American Time Use Survey revealed that women spend an average 42 minutes a day more than men caring for children and their households, while men spend 34 minutes a day more on the job. The net yield is that women's leisure time is, on average, 8 minutes shorter every day.
Deborah Tannen, author of several books on the differences in male and female behavior, focuses on qualitative distinctions. Women spend more energy connecting with others, men spend more energy focused on particular tasks that may or may not involve others.
We're still at sea as to why the different perception and use of time -- much less what to do about it. I suppose first comes awareness of the difference, which of course is somewhat stereotypical and need not apply to every last individual man or woman.
It helps to know that when I think future and she thinks future, we mean entirely two different things. My inclination is to deal with the immediate before the long-range.
"In the long range we're all dead," remarked John Maynard Keynes.
I may well be hit by a truck tomorrow; so if I worry too much about the day after tomorrow, what a waste of today that is!
You have entered (clear throat, put on Rod Serling voice) the man-time, woman-time zone.
Time isn't an absolute. As a reporter I learned there's journalist time, for example. You're a reporter, you go interview people or you go to the scene of the fire, whatever. You go back, write the story and move on. Next morning a reader picking up the paper exclaims: "Look at that, Martha, the old train depot on the other side of town burned down!" That's the public's news; your news as a reporter is the story that will come out the following day. So journalism time is always ahead of public time.
OK, you'll say that with 24/7 Internet coverage that's a thing of the past. Still, face it, the news you're reading in the fastest news site is "olds" to the reporter who wrote it five minutes ago, who is now working on the story you'll read several hours or days from now. The reporter is always a step ahead.
Much the same happens with men and women. At that first long, warm kiss, the guy is wondering what she'll be like in bed on the third, seventh or umpteenth date; the woman is designing her future bridesmaids' outfits.
That's not just because guys tend not to think of marriage, but merely a function of how far ahead they each think.
In one group of which I am a member, women have to be told that they can't sign up for an event a month ahead, while organizers find themselves pleading with men to RSVP at least two days before.
Why is that? I'm not exactly sure.
Part of this may have to do, of course, with a difference in time pressures. A study published some time ago in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that while women and men had similar amounts of free time in 1975, by 1998 women had 30 minutes less leisure time per day than men.
However, last fall the Bureau of Labor Statistics' second annual American Time Use Survey revealed that women spend an average 42 minutes a day more than men caring for children and their households, while men spend 34 minutes a day more on the job. The net yield is that women's leisure time is, on average, 8 minutes shorter every day.
Deborah Tannen, author of several books on the differences in male and female behavior, focuses on qualitative distinctions. Women spend more energy connecting with others, men spend more energy focused on particular tasks that may or may not involve others.
We're still at sea as to why the different perception and use of time -- much less what to do about it. I suppose first comes awareness of the difference, which of course is somewhat stereotypical and need not apply to every last individual man or woman.
It helps to know that when I think future and she thinks future, we mean entirely two different things. My inclination is to deal with the immediate before the long-range.
"In the long range we're all dead," remarked John Maynard Keynes.
I may well be hit by a truck tomorrow; so if I worry too much about the day after tomorrow, what a waste of today that is!
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Do you love me?
Spring makes even an old coot's thoughts turn to love, to the meaning of love, to what love really is. We need not even consider love for a child or a parent, a friend, or even humanity in general, all of which are self-evident, so let's focus on love of and for one person, romantic love.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
The Worst Thing You Can Do To Your Lover
What's the worst thing you can do to the person you love?
You date someone, you kiss passionately, call each other at all hours, can barely spend a moment without thinking or talking about the other person. You decide you like the same books, generally support the same political party, go to the same church. You have ideas and goals that are similar. You want to have kids. Or you want to travel the world together.
You get married. Suddenly, the other person is there effortlessly. Out come the curlers and the creams, out come the streaked briefs and burps. One person wants the bedroom window open, the other wants it closed. One person's libido is stronger than the other's, eventually it all becomes mechanical: oh, it's Friday night, time honey (which sounds like "time, referee!") or even, oh, it's been a month.
Marriage is the worst thing you could do to someone you love.
Joni Mitchell sings it well:
We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
In fact, the piece of paper fails to keep 50% of all marriages from divorce -- let alone prevent physical and emotional forms of adultery and domestic violence.
Why marry at all? Absent children, what possible reason would anyone have to remove well-known and proven incentives for two people to continue trying to be attractive, interesting, respectful of and alluring to the other?
Why not have a romance that continues forever as the perfect third date?
OK, children. Here Aldous Huxley's Brave New World struck me as more sensible than our own.
In Huxley's futuristic world children were genetically engineered massively, with talents and proclivities suitable to the proportional needs of society for manual laborers, intellectuals, artists, engineers, etc. By design everyone was made for the tasks to which they would drift naturally. Childbirth and copulation for reproduction were banned and the imperative for birth control reinforced by nightly suggestion over the course of childhood.
You may think this is a long way off -- and what do I do in the meantime?
Fair enough. Coupling to serve as parents is a human imperative that perhaps requires the presence of two parents, at least for bonding and modeling -- even though most of us aren't such great models to begin with.
There are alternatives to the nuclear family. The Kibbutz, for example. And who says that outside the Israeli communal farm a married couple can't commit to be parents without committing to living together, to seeing each other at each other's worst, or without forswearing other people if the romantic interest wanes?
Whatever. I'm not a social engineer.
My point stands. Marriage is absurd.
Companionship, romance, sex, emotional closeness -- all these things can be shared between two people who legally remain entirely unbound and physically live apart. Or ... people can live together without the tie, so that when it stops working, when it stops being the way you want to live, all you have to do is call the movers, not lawyers and accountants.
What we have right now -- marriage, children, divorce -- is a pain! And remarriage ... well, how many times can you say "till death do us part" before you know you're a consummate liar, or a fool?
Sure, breaking up hurts and dating takes effort. But there's tons of poetry about it, movies, novels, and friends can really help for free and in a fun way. And you usually learn something from the romantic skirmishes of men and women.
You date someone, you kiss passionately, call each other at all hours, can barely spend a moment without thinking or talking about the other person. You decide you like the same books, generally support the same political party, go to the same church. You have ideas and goals that are similar. You want to have kids. Or you want to travel the world together.
You get married. Suddenly, the other person is there effortlessly. Out come the curlers and the creams, out come the streaked briefs and burps. One person wants the bedroom window open, the other wants it closed. One person's libido is stronger than the other's, eventually it all becomes mechanical: oh, it's Friday night, time honey (which sounds like "time, referee!") or even, oh, it's been a month.
Marriage is the worst thing you could do to someone you love.
Joni Mitchell sings it well:
We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
In fact, the piece of paper fails to keep 50% of all marriages from divorce -- let alone prevent physical and emotional forms of adultery and domestic violence.
Why marry at all? Absent children, what possible reason would anyone have to remove well-known and proven incentives for two people to continue trying to be attractive, interesting, respectful of and alluring to the other?
Why not have a romance that continues forever as the perfect third date?
OK, children. Here Aldous Huxley's Brave New World struck me as more sensible than our own.
In Huxley's futuristic world children were genetically engineered massively, with talents and proclivities suitable to the proportional needs of society for manual laborers, intellectuals, artists, engineers, etc. By design everyone was made for the tasks to which they would drift naturally. Childbirth and copulation for reproduction were banned and the imperative for birth control reinforced by nightly suggestion over the course of childhood.
You may think this is a long way off -- and what do I do in the meantime?
Fair enough. Coupling to serve as parents is a human imperative that perhaps requires the presence of two parents, at least for bonding and modeling -- even though most of us aren't such great models to begin with.
There are alternatives to the nuclear family. The Kibbutz, for example. And who says that outside the Israeli communal farm a married couple can't commit to be parents without committing to living together, to seeing each other at each other's worst, or without forswearing other people if the romantic interest wanes?
Whatever. I'm not a social engineer.
My point stands. Marriage is absurd.
Companionship, romance, sex, emotional closeness -- all these things can be shared between two people who legally remain entirely unbound and physically live apart. Or ... people can live together without the tie, so that when it stops working, when it stops being the way you want to live, all you have to do is call the movers, not lawyers and accountants.
What we have right now -- marriage, children, divorce -- is a pain! And remarriage ... well, how many times can you say "till death do us part" before you know you're a consummate liar, or a fool?
Sure, breaking up hurts and dating takes effort. But there's tons of poetry about it, movies, novels, and friends can really help for free and in a fun way. And you usually learn something from the romantic skirmishes of men and women.
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