Standing up to challenges won't ruin your life

Today I saw the most snivelling, self-centered screed in Dear Abby. I know, I know, I really shouldn't expect anything else there. And many days I don't bother to read it. But Wife was reading the column while I was trying to find the funnies in today's newspaper, so I scanned it over her shoulder. What caught my attention was that so many of the details of this whine could almost -- I say "almost" -- have been written by me, but the author takes them in a direction I can't abide.

You can find the whole piece linked here. The gist is that this guy married a woman who proved to be a major challenge in a hundred different ways; now his son wants to marry the same kind of girl and he wants to warn his son that marrying his wife (the son's mom) was his worst decision ever and ruined his life.

It's not like I can't sympathize with a lot of the specific complaints. He says his wife suffers from "severe anxiety disorders"? Check. "Chronic illnesses"? Check. "Severe mood swings"? God, yes. "Learned helplessness"? I have no idea what he means by this, but I'm feeling generous so let's pretend there's a match there too.

It's not even that I think coping with all this kind of thing is easy: I know it ain't. Most of the time -- on heavy psychological medication -- Wife keeps a pretty even keel these days. But there is a reason her depression is labelled "severe" and "treatment-resistant"; and I remember enough cyclonic tantrums ... when the boys were bawling and I was terrified and I couldn't tell how we were going to make it through the next hour ... that I'm not about to minimize the challenges this man has to face.

But marrying her "ruined his life"? Give me a break. Marrying her may have changed his life; it surely redirected his life. Apparently marrying her meant he couldn't hold the kind of job he wanted to hold, and couldn't make as much money as he wanted to make ... besides the fact that he had to look after his wife when she was dysfunctional or non-functional.

And so what? You didn't get the life you expected, the life you had talked yourself into thinking you had coming for you. That expensive "Ph.D. from a top business school" didn't end up meaning that you got to live a life full of "international travel" and "high ambitions" and hot-and-cold running secretaries to flatter your poor little ego and tell you how great you are and how much everybody else envies you. Big fuckin' deal. Nobody gets what they expect. Nobody gets what they think they "deserve" in life. Plenty of people get a lot worse than they think they deserve, because -- bad news dude! -- life is just like that. A few people get way better than they deserve, or even than they think they deserve. Some of us just get surprised by how much more imagination life has than we do, so that we get -- daily -- things we could never have conceived, much less expected. Some of these will be challenges, even really tough ones. Others will be graces we could never have earned that just drop in our laps to brighten an otherwise crummy day. And sometimes it is the very challenges themselves that turn out to be the most enduring graces.

The thing is that at the end of the day, we aren't graded on how much money we make. If you have enough money to keep your family fed and clothed and out of the rain, you're there. Medical care and education should come next. Everything else after that is just toys. I admit toys can be a nice thing to have, if you can afford them. But whining that your life has been "ruined" because you were deprived of a toy is an adolescent trick. Nobody who says that kind of thing deserves to be called a grown-up.

Nor are we graded on how easy our lives are. Lives worth the time and effort of living them frequently aren't easy at all. And easy lives -- lives in which you get what you want -- aren't the key to happiness. I know a man who for the last twenty years has been able to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Sounds like he should be happy, right? Not a bit of it. He is chronically discontent, and a day does not go by that he isn't second-guessing some decision he made half a century before. Excuse me, but isn't this a complete waste? What's done is done -- how about you focus on doing something today that you will actually enjoy, that will make you a happy man? But no. His todays are all filled, like Willy Loman's, fretting over what will make him happy later ... some day ....

None of us gets to choose what external conditions are thrown at us. Shit happens, and we're expected to cope. It may be unfair, but those are the rules of life on earth -- when we are born we get signed up for the game, and that's how this game is played. Tough luck, bubbeleh. What we can choose is how we deal with it. I don't mean something stupid and obvious, like the fact that you could have divorced this woman if it was that stinkin' bad -- although that part is true enough. I don't even mean that you could have dragged her kicking and screaming into therapy or medical treatment -- although that's what Dear Abby tells you (a little too nicely to suit me, but she's got an editor to satisfy). What I mean is that even in the worst of situations there are options, and you could open your eyes to them instead of sulking over the few that have been closed off. You could also try growing up a little, by which I mean getting over this childish notion that everything has to turn out just the way you day-dreamed it or else you'll hold your breath until your face turns blue. Best of all would be if you could bring yourself to see that, at the end of the day, we get graded on how well we bore up under the assignments we were given -- how well we held the posts that we were stationed at -- and not on how much money we made or how many countries we visited.

Why did you marry this woman in the first place? Didn't you love her? And if so, then how exactly could that change? Oh, I know you didn't know how much trouble she was going to be. When I married Wife, I didn't know that she was going to have so many affairs, nor that she was going to be sick so much of the time, nor yet that her psychological illnesses would prove scarier and more debilitating than her physical ones. I knew none of that. But I knew that I loved her. And when I discovered all the rest, it was painful and difficult and challenging, but it never made me stop loving her. How could it? Love doesn't work that way. When you first fall in love with somebody, sure, it is because there are these things about them that attract you. If you knew the uglier facts at that point, you probably would never take the first step. But once you have entangled your life with somebody else's, you no longer love her merely because of this or that fact about her. At that point, you love her because she is HER. Don't you? I mean, stop and think for a minute: if your son, whom you are now trying to warn away from his girlfriend, ever became a bank robber -- would you stop loving him? Absolutely not! You might grieve over his choice of a life of crime, but you would still love him unconditionally. Why is it any different when the wife you married -- because you loved her -- becomes a psychological basket case with "anxiety disorders" and "mood swings" and the rest of it? Isn't that the same kind of thing? And doesn't that mean that, deep down inside, you still love this woman? You claim to put on a pretty good act, and I suggest that you couldn't make your act that convincing if it weren't also at least partly true.

And of course in that case, you have no business claiming that your life has been "ruined" if you are spending it with the woman you love. Harder than you expected? Absolutely. Mine too, buddy, and I feel your pain. Agonizingly difficult some days? You bet. I'm right there with you. But "ruined"? Impossible. Hard times come to everybody. Standing up and facing them like a man doesn't ruin your life -- it makes your life.

As for your son, it is at least possible that you underestimate him. Should he make his decision about marriage with his eyes open? Well sure, I guess it's always good to have all the facts before you make a big decision. But just because you think you have been building this careful facade around your marriage all these years doen't mean you have actually fooled him. Children can be easily misled about facts, about data; but at the same time they can be profoundly insightful about emotions and character. I bet you most kids know things about their parents that the parents themselves have never understood about themselves. So don't assume that your son's feelings for his girlfriend are based purely on delusion. It is possible that he really does love her. It is also possible that he already knows everything he needs to know about his mother's problems and instabilities and loves her too, in spite of it all.