What makes you come alive?

Towards the end of Sex at Dawn (I have a note that says "page 291," but D has my copy right now so I can't check), Ryan and Jetha tell the story of a man they call Phil. Phil was married; Phil had an affair; Phil's marriage came caving in around his head. Untold destruction. A very bad scene. And Phil was upset. He didn't hate his wife. He didn't want to lose the marriage. But he had not been able to keep from having the affair. What he said about it (as near as I can quote without the book handy) was that the affair "made him come alive again." He had not realized how dead his life had gotten until his affair made everything bloom and blossom for him again. And he craved that coming alive so much that he couldn't stop himself.

When I read those words, I couldn't help but think of another post, a little over a year ago, where I quoted John Eldredge from his book Wild at Heart, saying, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Really? So what the world needs is more adultery? Maybe so -- sometimes it sounds like Ryan and Jetha are making exactly that case -- but I think Eldredge would be shocked to hear it. (If you check out his website, their current mission is fighting to save marriages.)

You know, when I first heard of Eldredge -- when a friend of mine first passed me a copy of Wild at Heart -- I found him exciting to read, absolutely thrilling, one of the best things to happen to the all-too-tepidly-communicated Christian message in decades. Looking over his website just now (as I went to find the links I have embedded here) I remember why I felt that way. Only, ... is he really telling me that I'll have a better, fuller, more joyous life yoked to Wife than I could have exulting with D? I'll have to think about that.


Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Faith and insecurity

I haven't heard from D in a couple of days. She has told me she is so busy with work that I should just call instead; but I called this evening at the time we set up and got no answer. I am sure that she is just crazy-busy working, and I'll be able to get a hold of her later. But of course I noticed that she set up the time, and then she was the one who couldn't make it. (In her defense, her job really is all-consuming.)

In the last letter I got from D, sent Saturday, she told me she had recently gotten a letter from her daughter. Her daughter graduated from college some years ago and has been working; but she [the daughter, call her "D Jr" for the moment] recently quit her job so that she and her boyfriend (who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam) could travel through Europe and the Near East for some extended period of time. [Note added in early 2012: I talk about this daughter often enough that I have to do better than "D Jr," so in the future I'll call her "Brittany".]

Apparently part of what D Jr wrote about was a criticism of how D has been handling her professional life -- not some kind of post-adolescent whine, but an independent evaluation by someone not wrapped up in the hear-and-now of it all. D told me she appreciated this criticism; I think she sees it as a contributing factor to the question, What is her story now? What is she to be doing? In any event, she wrote me as follows:

[My daughter's] letter was long and very newsy; she loves her travels and is learning and growing before my eyes. However, she has little patience with me and I appreciate her direct comments, although they also sting. I'll copy the first paragraph to give you a sense of her critique of my choice to remain at [the school where D teaches today]. I'll be interested in your response.

I got your letter and was quite saddened by it.... I feel very
distressed at this time to be so far away from you -- its hard to say as much as
I want in a letter. Here I am in Europe; I go from house to house, city to city,
looking at how people live, what brings meaning to their lives -- or
alternatively, what seems completely empty and meaningless about their lives --
and I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I
would like to live when I return. And I wish you could do something similar,
because I am sure that would not structure your life the way it is now, if you
had space to reflect more on it. If you were one of the people I visited along
this road, I would be shocked to see such an intelligent woman enslaved to this
job that doesn't treat you right, that serves a mission you've lost faith in,
and that saps all your time so you can't do anything else. I hope that maybe you
can write me next about what keeps you from quitting tomorrow. I know that there
are financial pressures, but surely they can be dealt with, especially now that
[my younger brother] is almost graduating [from college, and therefore won't be
your financial responsibility any longer]. I think a really important thing I am
learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life. Every
time I move, which is almost every other day right now, my surroundings change,
my schedule, everything is changed, and it can be difficult to adapt. Sometimes
we get stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no clue how we are going to
get to the next place but something always happens and brings us back around. I
think of all the people at my office who couldn't even imagine quitting their
job, their safety, let alone go and do what I'm doing, and I remember that it's
difficult for everyone, but the rewards are very great. The problem,
psychologically, is not being able to imagine what might come next, that life
continues, you keep living and acting, but you are not able to picture how or to
what end. Like, we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow. I have no idea
how. I don't know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will
happen, I have learned that much by now.

My reply to D grew as I wrote it, and ended up wandering in directions I had never anticipated before I put my fingers on the keyboard. (Have you ever had that happen? It can be disoncerting.)

D Jr's comments are fascinating, and I find my thoughts heading off in a lot of different directions as I read them. My comments may be correspondingly scattered. I guess the first thing I observe, because it really is overpowering to me, is how much she writes like you. No surprise, of course. But phrases like, "I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I would like to live when I return," sound like they could have come directly from your pen. It makes me wonder who I sound like. (smile)

A second thing I notice is that her critique is almost identical to your own. This may be why it made you squirm so much ... that you yourself have written exactly the same thing, expressed in only slightly different words, in any number of letters to me.

One difference between her critique and your own, though -- and this is a third thing that I noticed right away -- is that hers is obviously written by somebody young. She writes with a simplicity which is honestly more difficult for people our age, at least if they are self-reflective. I recognize it because I used to write that way too. But I also know that it takes a lot more courage now for me to simplify any issue quite so far.

Note that while simplicity is in some respects a virtue -- and particularly an intellectual virtue -- I do not say that her critique is thereby more accurate than it would be if it were more complicated. There are elements of the picture that I think she misses. Most basically, she identifies (implicitly) four reasons why you might work at [your school]: that the work might engage your creative intellect, that the people might treat you well, that you might believe in the mission of the place, or that you might need the money. She then dismisses the first three out of hand (unsurprisingly, as I assume you have told her stories of the place similar to the ones you have told me), and suggests that you have allowed the fourth to frighten you more than it should. But I can think of a couple of other reasons why you might not "quit tomorrow." One is that you did, after all, agree to teach this year, and I agree that at some level it is important to honor our commitments even when we have made those commitments to jerks. What's more, quitting a teaching job mid-year is not exactly like quitting a job at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble. It is a major problem for any school to replace any teacher mid-year; for [your school] to replace you teaching the classes you are currently teaching would be a catastrophic impossibility. It would be easier to replace a principal than that. And I am certain that your awareness of this fact is part of what will keep you there through June 2011. In addition, I know that you feel a certain commitment to (and even fondness for) a number of your students .... It is only natural that you would feel reluctant to turn your back on them. Nor is it true that you get nothing out of the job; it may not engage your creative or critical intellect, but I do think that it challenges your spirit in ways that demand a creative emotional response on a daily basis. How do you respond to the student scratching his pubic hair? What will you say to your classes to keep them on track when nine of their classmates are in jail? These are problems that you have to solve on the fly, and none of them is easy. Say what you will about this job, but it's never dull. And whatever you may say about it intellectually, at the level of spiritual warfare it is never stultifying.

Lastly, and perhaps most prosaically, it's not as easy as it sounds to find a job. I've been there, and I can vouch for this. You would not be the first person to stay at a job that makes you crazy because the prospect of finding another is so daunting.

I think this last point introduces another respect in which D Jr's letter sounds like the thought of someone young. You remember that Miss Giardino says it is important for the young to be cautious and conservative, because they have their whole lives to live with the consequences of their actions; but the old can afford to be impetuous, because how much difference can it make anyway? What is so striking about this opinion is that it is simultaneously so logical and so contrary to all our experience. What we see when we look around us is older people who become terrified of change because they have had time to see -- far more than the young -- just how badly wrong things can go. The young who have grown up under trying circumstances can know this too, of course; but for those who have grown up safely it can be easy to underestimate the potential for things to end up badly. Age brings a greater awareness of this pessimistic side of things, but I think at the same time it can make us too timid. To misquote Hamlet, "Thus knowledge doth make cowards of us all."

D Jr's letter shows an abundant faith in things working themselves out; I might almost say that it shows an abiding faith in special Providence: "we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow, I have no idea how. I dont know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will happen, I have learned that much by now." This is what I used to say about finding a job, during the year and a half that I was unemployed. I didn't know where I would find work, or doing what, but I knew for a fact that there was a road marked out for me and sooner or later I would stumble upon it. And, sure enough, I did. It is easy -- and probably not altogether wrong -- to attribute this faith in part to youth, as I suggest above. I think it is also, paradoxically, a faith that it is easier to have when you are insecure. D Jr says as much when she says, "I think a really important thing I am learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life." And I know for myself that it is a lot harder for me to have this faith now -- when my life is comparatively stable (because I have a job and I have reached a tenuous modus vivendi with Wife) -- than it was back in 2004 (when more or less everything was in question). It is strange. But I can vouch that the times in my life when I have felt most palpably the faith that things would turn out OK have been the times when everything was the most uncertain.

This insight, about faith in things to come as a concomitant of radical uncertainty, is something I hadn't thought of when I sat down to write this letter. I didn't realize I was going to say it. But as I started to write, I realized that my earlier theme -- harping on how easy it is for young whippersnappers to lecture us old geezers like this -- was false in an important way. Not entirely false, of course. There is a level at which is preserves some truth. But there is this other level too. From where I sit today -- where I have a job and a mortgage and my life is largely predictable -- I am particularly sensitive to the risks in what D Jr says. What if you quit and then can't find something else? What if you throw yourself on the beneficence of Chance, and then there is nobody to catch you? For that matter, what happens if D Jr herself decides finally that she wants This or That Kind of Life ... only she can't get it because her travels have caused her to miss the window? What happens if she decides she wants such-and-such a career, but the hiring authorities who guard the gates decide that someone who quits her job to go travelling like this is too unreliable to take on? The thing is, I even know the answers to all these fears. To take only the last one, the answer is obviously that any employer who is so rigid and unimaginative that he lets D Jr's travels constitute an insuperable barrier to hiring her is somebody she never wants to work for anyway. There will always be somebody else, somewhere, who can see the value she brings and will snap her up. And even if there is only one such employer in a hundred with a spark of imagination, it only takes one. Or she may choose not to work for somebody else at all, but to make her own way in a manner that she could never have done without the wider perspective of her travelling right now. See, I know all this intellectually. I'm even persuaded that it is all true. But from where I sit today, I can't feel it. From where I sit today, all I can feel is concern at the uncertainty into which she has launched herself, fear at her walking across that wire without a net, and anxiety at her trying to persuade you to do the same thing. If I were myself unemployed and cut adrift, I would probably feel a lot more sanguine about the whole thing, because I would be able to feel the hand of Providence far more palpably than I can right now.

What am I recommending? I don't know. On the one hand, I think of your repeated desire to live as if you really believed in God, not as a practical atheist, and I think (as I have said) that D Jr's advice shows a measure of faith in God's Providence which is denied by clinging to the Known for dear life. On the other hand, I don't think God exactly advises recklessness either. Even Jesus wouldn't throw himself off the highest spire of the Temple; is it not tempting God for us to throw ourselves blindly into the Unknown? Nelson Bolles, in his job-hunting guide, explains that you should always have a Plan B; as a counter-example he cites a family who stopped paying their rent because they thought the end of the world was at hand, and who were convinced that God would arrange a miracle to keep them from being evicted. They were evicted. So I don't know what this adds up to. Certainly I would never recommend that you quit mid-year, for all the reasons that I outlined several paragraphs above. But after June? I'm not so sure. Maybe you can get a clearer picture through prayer than I can possibly give you, because I realize I'm generating a lot more dust than light. It is also only fair to recognize that your job is merely one facet of your life, and maybe not the one that interests Providence the most right now. Certainly nobody could accuse you of "clinging to the Known" in your personal life these last two years. (small smile) Maybe that's where the focus is right now. I really don't know.

One last thing that I see in D Jr's letter, perhaps the most important point of all -- but also the most obvious, so I'm sure I hardly need to say it. But she obviously loves you very, very much. Nobody who did not care deeply about you could possibly write in such a way.

I don't know what D thinks of any of this. As I say, I haven't heard from her since. She may think it is all bullshit, for all I know. I do know that I had no idea what I was going to write before I started; so I also haven't had a lot of time to figure out if it is any good or even makes any sense. But I offer it to you all for whatever it may be worth ....

Promiscuous but choosy

One of the difficulties that Ryan and Jetha encountered in writing Sex at Dawn was the lack of a suitable word in English to describe the sexual attitude that they claim to have found in prehistoric times. What they settle on (somewhat reluctantly) is the word promiscuous. But they explain that it is not really suitable as normally used, because it implies undiscriminating sexuality. By contrast, what they wanted was a word that meant indefinitely plural but nonetheless choosy sexuality. And they couldn't find one.

If you think about it, the idea is not so strange. Ryan and Jetha talk about sex as a tool for binding together a tribe, for enhancing social relations among the members of a community. But these people already share more than just bodily fluids. A small tribe of human beings in a world of saber-toothed tigers would have to trust each other with their lives; and since food had to be hunted or gathered, everybody needed to pitch in. So the relationships among these people had to be intimate in more than the genital sense. When they fucked each other they weren't just scratching an itch, but making friends and allies on whom they would then depend in a very real way.

The same thing is true, interestingly enough, about the first fully-modern American example that Ryan and Jetha give of a similar approach to sexuality: the "swinging" lifestyle of the Air Force's "top gun" fighter pilots. These were men who faced death on every mission, and who knew implicitly that a third of them would never come back from the war. The way Ryan and Jetha describe it, they used group sex as a bonding experience, tying the men to each other through their wives; what is more, the clear but unspoken implication was that this bonding meant the survivors would take care of the wives and children of those who died. After all, they -- the surviving pilots and the widows of the dead -- had already been lovers, and some of the children carrying a dead man's name might belong to the living. In any event, more generally, they all belonged to the community of fighter pilots. Note again: highly plural sex used to tie together a small, select community ... but with nothing undiscriminating about it.

There is one more example of this kind of sex -- promiscuous but choosy -- that I can't help but think of. It's a literary example this time: the Nest established by friends and followers (water-brothers) of Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. (See also the Wikipedia entry here.) The dynamic in this story is slightly different, because Valentine Smith is willing to offer his way of understanding the world to anybody willing to put in the work to master it. But the effect is the same; as Jubal Harshaw reminds him, those who don't listen to him select themselves out by choosing to ignore him. So once again, the luxuriously plural sexuality reenforces bonds that hold together a select group in contradistinction to those outside.

I said in my last post that I never resented the sexual encounters Wife had with other lovers when I was included too. Well, it's fair to ask what about that? Did I never think to establish some kind of bond with her other lovers, so that it was somehow us against the outside world? If Ryan/Jetha and Heinlein are on to something, then why not?

The answer is that I thought about it from time to time, but it never worked out. Or almost never. The only two lovers with whom it would have been a possibility were Boyfriend 1 and Boyfriend 4, because those were the only ones who ever ended up in bed with Wife at the same time I was there. And Boyfriend 4 had been a friend of mine from high school, so he was really a special case. But I could never establish that kind of bond with Boyfriend 1 because we never trusted each other. He never trusted me because Wife kept telling him so many terrible things about me (as she did to everybody that would sit still to listen). I never trusted him because, ... well, partly because he wanted to take Wife away from me (based on all the horrible things she had said about me). And partly I just didn't think much of him. I guess he was a nice enough guy, from a distance, but he had absolutely no features that made him (in my eyes) an interesting person to talk to or be around. His tastes were boring and conventional, his conversation was shallow, and he never had a new idea. Other than the sex (and Wife complained to me about that), I couldn't tell what she ever saw in him.

I think I have mentioned that I had this trouble with most of her other lovers: they seemed like losers, at least to me, and I couldn't find anything much to recommend any of them. The exceptions were Boyfriend 4 (who was an alcoholic and recurrently unemployed, but also my friend from high school and a real mensch when sober) and Girlfriend 1 (who certainly seemed destined for better things, but who had absolutely no use for me at all). Whether this was my problem, or whether (as I suggested before) it reflected something significant about Wife's taste, I may not be objective enough to tell. But the upshot was certainly that none of these other models ever worked out for us. Of course, back then (say, when she first started fucking Boyfriend 1) I didn't know anything about the "swinging" fighter pilots; and naturally I had never heard of Ryan or Jetha. But I had read heinlein; and I remember feeling vaguely disappointed somehow that -- if she was going to fuck other men -- we couldn't turn it into some kind of Nest. I have to conclude that for Wife the whole thing was more like scratching an itch; or else that, as a narcissist, she really had no idea what to look for in other people that would constitute community-building qualities, ... nor really had any idea why they might be useful. It's sad.

There is one other conclusion from this line of thought, besides my personal moping. If the only way to make a sexual community work the way that Smith's Nest worked, or the way that prehistoric tribes may have worked, is to be choosy enough about the members that you can build a community where everyone can truly rely on everyone else -- can truly trust everyone else with his life -- then how on earth could it ever be possible to build such communities in the kind of complex and highly mobile society we have today? (I mean, outside of ultra-specialized enclaves like the Air Force in wartime.) Is this another sign that "it's strictly big boxes of bananas, all the way up Columbus Avenue"? Maybe so. But if anyone has any interesting ideas about how this could be possible, I would truly love to hear them.

Thinking through polyamory, 2: Prehistoric promiscuity

This post harks back to one of my early posts from 2008, "Thinking through polyamory." Back then I was trying to understand my marriage in light of my Wife's serial infidelities. Today, times have changed: I no longer care whom Wife fucks (although I do believe her when she says she hasn't had anybody for a long time), I myself am carrying on an affair with D, and quite recently I have been reading Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's book Sex at Dawn. So if I am honest with myself, there is a lot that I need to re-evaluate.

The developments in my marriage, and the affair with D, have gotten a lot of discussion here over the last couple of years. But the book is new, and it has been a while since I have done any re-thinking about what it would be natural to expect in the abstract (rather than just moping about what I feel here and now). So that is where I want to focus today.

Two years ago, when I wrote about polyamory, I concluded as follows:

The problem is this: it is very easy to fall in love with multiple people;
but for most of us, it is very, very hard to have our partners fall in love with
multiple people! The whole point of monogamy turns out not to be about us at
all. The whole point of monogamy is that we forego some desires that call to us
profoundly and insistently – and we swallow the pain that this causes us – in
order to avoid hurting other people.

But now, after reading Ryan and Jethá, I have to wonder if it was always so. Did prehistoric man get jealous the way modern man often does -- the way I used to, back when I gave a shit -- or is sexual jealousy something new, a recent development?

Of course there is no way to travel back in time to answer the question for sure, so I began to think about the only data I could lay my hands on: how did I feel about Wife's infidelities? The exercise has made me think that Ryan's and Jethá's theory could be at least plausible.

In the first place, a minor consideration: I argued in this essay ...

that the meaning of sex is couplehood: fucking creates a couple
where there was none before; and ... this means a couple in which each
partner puts the other one first, in which each partner is a home or refuge for
the other from the storms of the world....

Only ... how do you feel when you come back to your home at long last,
after a day that has beaten and bruised you, and you find a total stranger at
ease in your living room, relaxing with his feet up, drinking your
beer, eating your chips, and watching your television?

Disoriented? Shocked? Violated? Betrayed?

Exactly.

This may be fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really speak to Ryan's and Jethá's picture. In the social organization they describe, both partners will likely have other partners as well. So while neither partner may be able to rely on coming back to a single "home" for refuge from troubles, the odds are very high that at least one partner will be available. What is lost in exclusivity is made up in redundancy.

There is a second point, which is more interesting. We have all read stories where one guy (usually it's the guy) tells how hard it is to hear his girl in the other room, moaning in the arms of another lover. And it makes him crazy. What about this part? Wasn't this an issue back in the Stone Age, too? It's all very well to say that you have someone else too. But at a fundamental level shouldn't it have made guys crazy back then, too, when their girls were carrying on with somebody else? Heaven knows that attitude isn't even limited to guys, as the lyrical Marianne once wrote here.

Not only do Ryan and Jethá answer this question No, but they make it more pointed. They argue that the reason women have the capacity for multiple orgasm is to keep them in the mood, because back then they could very well have routinely had sex with several men one right after the other. They argue that the reason women moan in orgasm was to announce to other men in the area that sex was going on, so that they could come join the fun. Ryan and Jethá argue, in other words, that orgies involving one woman and many men could well have been the norm back in the Old Stone Age. (I won't give the genetic argument here, but it has to do with Darwinian selection through sperm competition.) The consequence is that not only would the typical caveman know that his woman was fucking the guy in the cave next door, but he would hear her and see her -- and even be there when it happened. And if anything, you would think this would be worse than merely knowing it in the abstract.

You would think so, but you'd be wrong. Or well, ... your mileage may vary. But here, too, I went back to some of what I had written before and found that this very case isn't quite so clear as it seems. Linking the tail-end of this essay with the beginning of its sequel, I wrote: ...

I don’t care if Wife takes a friend for an afternoon of shopping for shoes
(so long as the bill isn’t too high); in fact, if she invited me, I would
actively look for an excuse not to go. Why do I care if she takes a friend for
an afternoon of rapturous sex? It’s not the same, but why not?

At the most immediate emotional level, the answer is that I don’t want to
be left out. If there is rapturous sex going on some afternoon – at any rate, if
it involves Wife – I want to be part of it.

And this was true. But notice that this is exactly what Ryan and Jethá say: that paleolithic promiscuity, so far from being hidden, was out in the open where many suitors could join. If Wife and I had lived back then, I doubtless would have been right there participating any time she was fucking one of her other boyfriends.

The punchline is that this would have been OK with me. It happened a few times, long ago with Boyfriend 1 and then more recently with Boyfriend 4, that all three of us would end up in bed together. I never had the slightest interest in her boyfriends themselves -- sorry, but no! -- but I was perfectly willing to collaborate with them in bringing Wife to as many orgasms as she could manage. And yes, sometimes two guys can just do more for one girl than one guy can. It can work out.

And I never resented those encounters. I got plenty angry at Wife for her infidelities: jealous, despairing, crazy. But never for the nights (only a few of them) when we were all together. Those I always saw as an exception. And that is part of why later I decided that what had made me so upset was not the sex itself but her skulking behind my back, her lying, and her shutting me out in the cold. In other words, her cheating.

In other words, the same things she did in the non-sexual parts of our marriage that made me so crazy.

I can't say that Ryan and Jethá have proven their thesis. But when I look at it long enough, I can see how it avoids some of the big objections I used to have years ago to promiscuous sex as a lifestyle. So it is at any rate not obviously wrong. And it is certainly interesting.

On first looking into "Sex at Dawn"

Last Friday, I finished a first reading of Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's latest book, Sex at Dawn. Then no sooner did I finish it than I left it with D while seeing her. I want her to read it because I think it will give us a lot to talk about. Anyway, I haven't thought deeply about it yet, but it is a really interesting book.

The basic thesis of the book is that humans evolved as a sexually promiscuous species. Even though we now (most of us) live in monogamous societies, our instincts haven't had time to catch up with the change yet so by and large we still want to sleep around. That's the gist of it, right there. All the rest is argument.

The arguments are interesting, and come from several directions. Ryan and Jethá spend a lot of time comparing human sexual behavior with that of our genetically-closest non-human relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (neither of which species is even remotely monogamous).* They examine sexual and social behavior (so far as it is available to us) in foraging** societies that exist today or that we know from reliable documentation. They even explain (at some length) that the erect human penis has a number of highly unusual features when you compare it to the penises of the other great apes, and they draw relevant conclusions by thinking through what the purpose of these features could possibly be. On the other side of the bed, they offer a very long discussion of multiple orgasm and "female copulatory vocalizations."

It will be no surprise to anybody to hear that we all -- men and women alike -- find it totally natural to want to fuck multiple other people. The interesting part, to me at least, is the suggestion that early communities relied on this very impulse as a way to forge a social bond that held tribes together. In the past, I have argued that yes, it is natural to fall in love (or lust) with multiple others; but that it is also natural for your partner(s) to get jealous. (See, esp. part 3 of this series.) Ryan and Jethá say no, jealousy is not "natural" in the sense of being biologically inevitable. They agree that fear of abandonment may well be genetically-programmed. But who ever said that you were about to be abandoned, just because your partner went and fucked somebody else? That part -- the connection between fucking others and being abandoned -- is a cultural assumption and not a biological imperative. And they argue that early foraging societies held exactly the opposite assumption. It is a fascinating*** treatise.

The most important part, though, is what they do not say. I have seen reviewers write as if this book gives us all permission to run out and fuck the milkman and the dairymaid and our neighbors down the street, all because that's what they did in the Stone Age. In a way that could sound exuberant and delightful, but the authors don't say so. In fact, while they talk a good bit about the modern day, they are hesitant to make concrete recommendations of any kind. Right at the beginning they say explicitly that they do not know what to do with their findings. They do not know what direction we all ought to go, now that we know the things they tell us. The critical fact, to which they return again and again, is that Man is incredibly adaptable. Early promiscuity worked for foraging societies in the Stone Age. But everything about our lives has changed between then and now, including the special features of their communities that made promiscuity work so well. There is -- to put it gently -- very little evidence that it can work the same way today, except in a few isolated cases**** so specialized that they really don't disprove the rule. Of all the reviews they post on the book's website, I have found only one (by Stephen Snyder, M.D., a sex therapist) that truly seems to get this point. It is sobering to realize that knowing even so much can tell us so little.

But it is a fun book. By all means read it.


* I use the phrase "genetically-closest" very deliberately. I have two good friends who are both anti-Darwinians. Personally I don't understand why, but there it is. On the other hand, the genetic code is known and mapped; so regardless what you think about Darwin (or even evolution) it is indisputable that chimpanzees and bonobos have a genetic code that is closer to ours than any other animal.

** Ryan and Jethá use the term "foraging" society as a short-hand for "immediate-return hunting-and-gathering" society: i.e., a society that has no way to store food. Such societies are generally nomadic, because they have to wander to find enough to eat. They don't have much property, because too much crap is a bitch to carry around everywhere. And they probably represent what most human societies were like during most of human history.

*** The authors explain that the word "fascinating" comes from the Latin fascinum, which means an artificial phallus, often worn, e.g., as an amulet for good luck.



**** One of the most interesting to me was the "swinging" sub-culture of top-gun fighter pilots during and after World War Two.

How often do I say "I love you"?

So now that my date with D is over and I am at my conference for work, I am back to writing her e-mails. Only I really don't have much to say. After all, I was there in her house just a couple days ago, ... and it's not like this conference is exciting enough that I have a lot to say about it.

But then I started to think about it, and I realized tonight is not all that unusual. There are numerous times I don't really have much to say. Either nothing has happened that sounds remotely newsworthy, or else I do have news but nothing else. And a letter of chatty news itself sounds pretty superficial, or it can.

So I wrote to her this evening about this very conundrum, and explained that I realize "neither kind of letter [i.e., vacuous or merely newsy] ever says what I really want it to say. But then sometimes I'm not sure that what I really want to say is even expressible in a letter in the first place. Sometimes I think that the whole business of writing letters is just ever so slightly beside the point, even if it is all we've got most of the time. I write to you that I love you, but after a while that has to read like some kind of conventional formula -- surely nothing deep or gripping."

I thought about it some more, and it came out like this:


How often do I tell you "I love you"?
Sometimes I feel I never say 't at all.
Oh sure, I sign off letters thus, it's true;
But words dashed off by rote too quickly pall.

How can you know you're always by my side,
And that I talk to you throughout the day?
Or arch an eyebrow, crack a smile, confide
My fleeting, silent thoughts along the way?

Or if I steal myself a moment’s rest
Before I hurry off from Here to There,
Your spirit snuggles up within my breast,
And I can hear your whisper in the air.

How can you know you're every instant here,
If all I say is "I love you, my dear"?

Thirteenth date

This was a legitimate business trip -- two trips, in fact, back to back, so instead of flying home for the weekend (all day Saturday one direction and all day Sunday the other) I flew a much shorter distance (halfway between my two destinations) and visited D at home.

I had never been to her home before, the little duplex she rents near where she works and two hours away from the big house she owns with her husband. So I was eager to see it. She was a little apprehensive: "Will he like it?" But of course I did. Of course it was darling. And the day-and-a-half that I spent there were very sweet.

We didn't do a lot. She drove me over to see the school where she teaches. I read aloud to her. We cooked and ate and washed up. We talked endlessly. And we fucked, of course.

The sex continues to be great. Educational, even -- I mean, before this weekend I never knew it was possible for a woman to flush all the way down to her pubic hair. But it is.

I realized something else too, something that I guess I have known for a long time but I never articulated in words quite this way before. When I read salacious stories written from a guy's point of view, they are generally about what she does to him to arouse him, stimulate him, tantalize him, whatever. But that's not the kind of thing that does it for me. I realize that I am far more aroused by what I can do for D than vice versa. I don't so much care about her doing this or that to me, to spark or excite me. What I really care about intensely, what excites me more than anything else is her writhing in orgasm, ... her uncontrollable moans, ... the flush down her neck and her breasts and beyond, ... her eyes staring stabbingly straight through me and through the walls and out of this world into the face of God for all I can tell. That's why I write so often, and with such gratitude, about how deeply responsive she is -- because it is her ecstasy that resonates with me more potently than any other stimulation possibly could.

We talked about this, and D said that her ecstasy when we fuck is so intense she is convinced that there is something deeply holy about it. She doesn't pretend to understand it; after all, she still believes strongly in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and this is still adultery. There are no two ways around that. And it's not like she thinks it is central to salvation, like the bread and the wine. But she does find something deeply more-than-natural about it.

I don't understand it either. If I did, and if I thought I could take all the credit, I'd find it really flattering. But as it is, I'm just in awe. Really good sex is a wonderful blessing ....

Pig-headedness triumphant

I've been reading Ryan and Jetha's Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, and I came across a quote that set me thinking. In a chapter on various theoretical understandings (and misunderstandings) of marriage, they quote the 13th-century Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais, in his Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine), as saying, "The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections."

What interests me about this quote is that it echoes something I used to tell Wife back in the day, albeit with a twist. Whenever she would work herself up into a fit of depressive anxiety saying, "You don't love me! You don't even like me!" I would answer by saying that of course I did love her. But I would follow by making a crucial distinction. I would insist that love is not an emotion.

Of course that's an odd thing to say, and I didn't mean it that flatly. Naturally I know that love is (among other things) an emotion. But my point was always that love is not only an emotion. In particular, I told her, love is (also) a decision, a matter of will. And as a result, I went on, it can be a lot more stable than a "mere" emotion. After all, emotions come and go; my feelings -- insofar as they are just feelings -- can turn on a dime. But my decision to stick with her through thick and thin was something fixed. (I know, I was wrong. This is what I said then.) I always used the metaphor of the ocean, saying that love-as-emotion is as variable as the storm-toss'd surface, with waves rising and falling all the time, buffeted by winds and pelted by rain. But love-as-will, I insisted, was like the rock floor: deeper than the surface squalls, and steadier. Solid. Permanent. (I have alluded to this recurring speech in a couple of earlier posts, notably here and here.)

So when I read the quote above, I asked myself, "Did I really mean the same thing as Vincent of Beauvais? Did I really mean judgment instead of will?"

No I didn't. The way I can be sure is that for so many years I cheated my judgment, or overrode it, when it came to evaluating my marriage. My judgment told me that Wife was a liar; my will said "Stay with her." My judgment told me that Wife was irresponsible; my will said "Stay with her." My judgment told me that she would betray me at every turn, rip the flesh from my bones, and then blame me for getting blood on the carpet.

My will said "Stay with her." And I did.

So no, it wasn't my judgment, nor my affections. It was just willfulness, pure and simple. Pig-headedness elevated to the status of principle. Or damned-fool stupidity, take your pick.

And what has happened now? Well, there are multiple answers. My affections have been engaged by D -- that's for sure! I am allowing my judgment to speak the truth about Wife's faults. (At the same time, I have to admit the possibility that I may be blinding myself to any virtues she still possesses.) These are both answers that I have written about quite a lot.

But on another level, the answer may be simpler: I have made another decision. While there were doubtless reasons behind that decision, they may be immaterial, or of psychological interest only. The fundamental fact may simply be that I have decided it's over; and therefore, by virtue of all the same stubborn pig-headedness I exhibited earlier, I may have guaranteed that there is no going back. I have said more than once that I can't imagine reconciling with Wife, even if D were not part of the picture. Maybe this is just because of my mulish intransigence, that won't let me change my mind once I have really settled on something. Depressing thought ... I wish I didn't believe it.

P.S.: When I first thought of writing this post, I planned to title it "Triumph of the Will," partly because that blind willfulness is exactly what I am writing about, and partly because in the end it hasn't worked out all that well, really and truly. But at the last minute I decided that title would be in over-the-top bad taste, ... even for me. So I chickened out.

"What's my story?"

I talked with D on the phone a couple of mornings ago, and it was a useful conversation.

She started by explaining just how crazy her life has been lately. Mostly this means that her job, which is always nuts, has been nuts. But she put a bit of a finer point on it by making it clear just how alone she has been feeling. Of course she no longer has her church job, having given that up years ago because she couldn't hold it and also be involved with me. But she is feeling lonelier at her regular job, too, because most of her friends quit last year over the ridiculous administration. D herself was tempted to quit, but tries to be careful and practical; as a woman in her late fifties, she doesn't imagine that she is going to be very employable anyway -- particularly if she walks out on a "perfectly good job" because she "can't get along with management." So she stayed. And she is surrounded by new people who mean well but don't know what they are doing. So she feels isolated.

This is why she has been getting so clingy and demanding about knowing exactly when she and I are going to see each other again; because she doesn't have anyone to talk to. (Well, of course she and I write each other long e-mails almost daily, but there is something to be said for physical presence. Also, we can't fuck over e-mail. I think I have mentioned that sex is a really big deal for D.) It's also why she was insisting recently that we plan out exactly how we are going to share expenses for future visits -- as a way of nailing down the details so that the trips themselves are more likely. When I more or less refused to be pinned down on this question, she called me "commitment-phobic." "Commitment-phobic?" Really? Isn't that what you say about a young man who doesn't want to have to marry his sweetheart, but also doesn't want to give her up? What exactly is "commitment-phobia" in this -- highly non-marital -- context?

Well, "commitment-phobia" may be the wrong word, but she has been experiencing a loss of faith in her job. She used to believe that her job really mattered, in a fundamental sense; and that belief helped her face the 18-hour days and the lunatic administration. Last year she finally decided, reluctantly, that it is just a job. That is freeing in a sense, because she no longer feels compelled to be perfect every single day. But it leaves her wondering what she is doing with her life. Where is the over-arching theme or value or narrative that makes sense of where she is in life? Or as she put it at one point, "What is my story these days?" Added to the loss of her church life and her friends, this deep uncertainty has made things very difficult for her.

As a result, she was pinning more and more of her meaning and self-definition on our relationship. When I backed out of answering direct questions like "What schedule can you commit to for seeing each other?" or "What financial arrangements can you commit to, in order to pay for these visits?" what she began to feel was something akin to, "My God, isn't there anything solid in my life that I can hold onto?" That's a scary thought when everything around you seems to be melting; and once I understood it, I tried to offer some comfort. It's just that trying to pin me down to everything but a ring and a bouquet was a really counter-productive way of articulating her fear. But I'm sure she hadn't thought it out all that clearly ahead of time.

I also told her that I see the potential for going through the same kind of thing myself in a couple of years: maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, ... but maybe once Son 2 starts high school. So what would this mean? If Providence strips away from both of us all the external trappings that have defined who we are for years, ... how do we read that? Where do we go next?

I wish I knew.

Sister Failure

Some time ago I saw an article about Philip Schultz's recent book of poetry, Failure, and I knew I had to get it. Somehow the title was too evocative to miss.

I am kind of new to poetry. Some people live with poetry all their adult lives. Me, I found it strange -- modern poetry especially. Plus I had a girlfriend in college who found poetry very profound, and who was always urging me to read this or that piece ... words scattered haphazardly across the page, breaks in the damnedest places, verbs or punctuation missing. So I'd read it, and she would look at me expectantly, as if I were about to experience some shattering revelation that we could then discuss for the next three hours, and all I could say was "Huh?" It was never the right thing to say. So I shied away from the whole thing; and with only a very few exceptions -- most notably William Blake, whom I discovered in graduate school and whom I whole-heartedly love, yes, including all his bizarre prophetic visions -- I say, with only a very few exceptions I stayed away for decades.

I can't place what brought me around to be interested. Maybe it was my affair with D, who sends me books of poetry but doesn't act like she is giving me an exam. Maybe it was when I started trying to write poems for her -- far more structured than modern, as you have been able to see. Whatever brought it on, it has been comparatively recent. But I am enjoying it.

Anyway, I read this article about Schultz's book, and the title instantly spoke to me. I don't know why, exactly. When I told D about it, she got cross with me at first, telling me that I had no business "considering myself a failure" just because this or that hadn't worked out in my life the way I had planned.

Whoa, whoa, ... wait a minute. I never said it had anything to do with how things had turned out in my life. Nor did I say that I found anything sad or pitiful in the thought of failure. I know the word is often used as a form of condemnation or reproach, a disgrace, a cause for remorse. But I don't think it has to be any of those things; and more and more these days I feel that it isn't. Failure just means that you set out to do X, and in the end you didn't. OK fine, you didn't do it. There might be a hundred reasons why not, some of them interesting and others very prosaic. But the end result is what it is, and now you have a new configuration of circumstances facing you in the world. Next?

It seems clear to me that Schultz doesn't mean "failure" to be a reproach, either. The title poem (near the end of the book) describes his father's funeral. Somebody tells him, "Your father was always a nobody," and Schultz corrects him saying, "No, he wasn't a nobody, he was a failure." And then he goes on to describe his father, whom he plainly loved, and who was clearly a fine fellow with interesting and off-beat ideas for businesses that never worked.

The thing is that none of us ever hits 100% of what we set out to do, and that's OK. Sometimes we don't hit any of what we set out to do, either because it was out of our power to begin with, or because we went at it wrong, or because the world changed underneath us and made everything different. But it is still OK. Achieving the things you set out to do isn't really the point. At the end of the day -- at the end of our lives -- we won't be graded by how many items we have checked off of our To-Do lists, any more than we will be graded by how much money we have. Bumper stickers notwithstanding, the winner is not the one who dies with the most toys. The things that really matter are things along the way -- what kind of person I am, and you are; how we treat each other, and those close to us, and even those far away; what kind of balance we can keep our souls, and how much we love God. These kinds of things, and others beside them. They are what matter. But notice: if those are the things that matter, then one consequence has to be that Success as conventionally understood does not matter, or not so much. That is to say, Success understood as checking items off our To-Do lists, planning and setting and achieving goals -- all that manic, driven, targeted way of life -- is really not that important. It is at best what the Stoics called "an indifferent thing," neither good nor bad except in how we make use of it. (Just as a point of reference, they included money and food and health in the same category.) In fact, I might even venture to speculate that Success could turn out to be a distraction from (or a hazard to) our real job of leading the best life. And in that case, if Success is a hazard that can deflect us from leading the best life, then it is at least thinkable that Failure may not be so bad after all. I can imagine an updated St. Francis picturing Sister Failure as one of our guides along the way, in the same way that the real St. Francis spoke of Sister Poverty. Certainly in this place and time, here in today's America, any praise of Sister Failure would be about as deeply counter-cultural as it gets.

It is an odd thought. I think it came to me because for some time I have been thinking that the current chapter in my life is drawing to a close. Son 1 is out of the house, in boarding school. If Son 2 goes to a boarding school for high school, he'll be out of the house in another two years. And then Wife and I can sit down and dissolve the marriage without the boys caught in the crossfire. On this line of thought, I could find myself three years from today with no marriage and no house -- still bound to the boys, but otherwise freer and more mobile than I have been in ... well, longer than I can remember. And what will I do then? Honestly I don't know. But the autumnal sense of an approaching end has been growing in me for some time, and I see no sign of its going away. I get the same autumnal sense from Schultz's poems about failure. And I think this is why I felt the title call to me before I had ever laid my hands on the book.

It is an interesting place to be in, right now. I don't know where I will go next.
__________

Failure, by Philip Schultz

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn't belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures —
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis —
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.

Sex at Dawn

Since when have brand-new books been published with websites already set up to advertise them? Have I missed something here?

I just bought a new book that I learned about via its website. It is called Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, and you can find its website here.

The thesis looks interesting -- that we evolved under conditions of casual promiscuity, and that therefore it is this (and not monogamy) which is natural to us. There is more, and I don't think they say that it would necessarily be all that easy to get back again. But I want to read the book before I critique it.

I think I have mentioned that I have a business trip coming up soon, and I am saving it for the airplane. I'll let you know what I think of it when I am done.

Boarding school 3, Move-in

Saturday dawned. We got up, ate, and decided to get an early start. The schedule said we could start moving in at 10:00am, but that the Student Store opened at 9:00 for ordering uniforms. We decided to get there at 9:00. We arrived a little before, coming up the back way (as all new boarders were to do), and found a locked gate. Too soon? Maybe. About the time we decided to back our way down the access road, though, it swung open by itself. So we drove up, meandered a bit, and found a place to park. We figured our next stop was the Store, but no -- we met someone who told us we could go right on ahead and move Son 1 in. He signed in on a roster, got his room assignment and a key, and away we went.

The building where he lives was standing back when I attended Hogwarts (in the early Bronze Age), but it must have been refurbished. The light fixtures are all new, and there are ethernet ports in every room along with the electrical sockets. Fortunately Son 1 packed light. We unloaded the car, then I drove it down the hill to a longer-term parking space while the boys and Wife moved in all his stuff. When I got back, it was halfway done. Wife tried several times to put some of his stuff away for him, but I insisted that she let him do it so he'd know where everything was. Besides, there wasn't much.

In the process, we met briefly the dorm prefect, and also spent some time talking with the Senior in charge of the Orientation Group to which Son 1 was assigned. Turns out this latter fellow (named Chris) was also one of the football players, so he and Son 1 knew each other somewhat. They chatted about the football practices and about orientation, and then Chris said he had to go check up on some other kids but he'd be back.

Our next step was to walk down the hill towards the Student Store. When we got there, we found racks of jackets and slacks in different sizes. Here I really let Wife take over: there was no question of her going crazy with shopping, because the list of things to buy was absolutely specified and the only question was what size to order. It took her some time to coax Son 1 into a couple of different sizes of jacket and a couple different sizes of trousers before she could say definitely what size he needed, but then we just ordered the actual uniform online. There were parents there to help us, and laptops plugged in at a desk out in the open, all connected to the ordering site of the one company that provides the uniforms. Wife spent some time talking with one of the other mothers (I don't know about what, because I wandered in the other direction), and then we headed over to the dining hall for lunch.

Lunch was served buffet style, and for the most part was institutional "cheap and cheerful.: fried chicken, macaroni salad, bean salad, fresh fruit, and cookies. The four of us ate together, although Son 1 ate hardly anything. He said first that he wasn't hungry, and then that he didn't like fried chicken. (He did, however, make a bee-line for the table of cookies, once he saw it.) I couldn't help thinking, a little uncharitably, that the exact same reaction to one of my dinners would have inspired Wife to lecture me about how I was cruelly forcing the children into starvation by cooking food that "nobody would eat"; but when it was Hogwarts offering greasy, salty fried chicken she uttered not a peep. I know, that's a really petty and uncharitable thought. Sorry.

After lunch we split up. New students had to go to orientation activities on this lawn over here, while parents (and Son 2) went to welcoming speeches in the auditorium over there. We heard from the outgoing Head of School (who is being kept on in some public relations capacity), the incoming Head of School, the president of the PTA-equivalent organization, and the deans. They spoke on a variety of subjects. One talk was by the new Head of School, about how easy it is to keep in touch 24x7 these days, and why it is a bad idea. He urged us not to be the kind of parent who has to be obsessively in touch with our kids all the time. When he said that, Son 2 -- who was with us at the time -- turned and stared intently at Wife with deeply accusatory eyes. The other speakers all told us, in varying ways, what a fine choice we had made in sending our offspring to Hogwarts, and how well they were going to be nurtured and challenged and educated, and what amazing dedicated faculty there were here to work with them. I realize as I re-read this that I sound sarcastic, but I don't mean to. If you allow for the fact that reality is never as pretty as talk, nonetheless I am willing to believe that the things we were told are all fair enough. And even Wife -- for whom nothing is ever good enough -- said at the end that she was comfortable this school and these people were the right choice and would be good for Son 1.

We met briefly with Son 1's adviser -- mostly to get to know who he is. We were told we'd doubtless hear a lot from him in the weeks and months to come. He shook our hands, welcomed us, asked if we had any questions for him (at that point we didn't) ... and then introduced himself to the next boy's parents.

The next stop was the "New Parent Tea" over at the Admissions Office (which used to be the house of the school's founder). This was one of the events that had worried me a bit, lest Wife start button-holing someone and talking endlessly about ... well, whatever it might be. (The meeting with Son 1's adviser was another such occasion, and I was grateful it lasted so briefly.) But I needn't have worried. Wife got herself a glass of iced tea and a plate of hors d'oeuvres, and then sat down with Son 2 at an empty table. I mingled for a bit, chatting pleasantly with a number of new parents, and then joined them. And really, after about a half an hour or so, Wife and Son 2 were ready to leave. There was nothing more on the agenda, so that was fine with me. We took off -- not even seeing Son 1 to let him know we were going (but he was meanwhile following the new student agenda) -- and went back to my parents' house.

More irritation from my father because he had started dinner way too early, and so it was all done the minute we set foot inside. After our hors d'oeuvres, though, we really couldn't eat for a couple of hours. Not a tragedy in the grand scheme of things, but it contributed to his overall irritability that evening.

In fact, my father had been irritable ever since I got there the afternoon before. He was touchy and snappish, and seemed to start making his evening cocktails in the middle of the afternoon. So when he asked me for our Sunday schedule, I proposed getting the hell out of there as soon as possible so we could stop annoying him. This startled him. But then he explained that it had been a trying week. Partly my mother was -- is -- still recovering from a case of shingles, which meant that she had less energy and more pain than usual. Partly his whole sleep schedule had been seriously disoriented by getting up at 5:00 am every morning to drive Son 1 to football -- and especially ever since I explained to both him and Wife (Friday afternoon, as I described in that installment) that this venture had never been "necessary" he was pretty put out. Partly he found Son 1's constant levels of energy and motion -- all week long -- exhausting. And partly -- largely, I think -- he felt worn down by Wife's constant negativism. All week long, nothing had ever been right. Nothing was ever good enough. She complained about the food and about the school (Hogwarts? I guess) and about Son 1 and about me and about ... everything under the sun, apparently. No surprise really, because she does that all the time everywhere else, too. And it was just very, very draining, exhausting, irritating. One afternoon he had come back to the bedroom to find my mother lying on the bed in tears because it was all too much. Her pain was part of it, of course; and she had just gotten a panicked phone call from some client for whom the world was falling apart and who wanted her to fix it all. But also it had just been a very trying week. My dad said that if anything, he had been looking forward to the arrival of Son 2 and me because our respective cheerfulnesses would be a ray of light in all this gloom. And later that evening he actually apologized to everybody in the family for being so grumpy.

Saturday was another early night for all of us -- although it was a good bit quieter because of course Son 1 wasn't there. But we were still tired enough to turn in early.

Son 2 stayed with my folks Sunday morning, while Wife and I went back to Hogwarts. We had a couple things that Son 1 was missing, and there were some more talks. Most notable was a talk by a woman summarizing (or pitching) her book 7 Things Your Teenager Won't Tell You (and how to talk about them anyway). The gist of her talk was that many of the highly distinctive things people have noticed about how teenagers communicate are actually consequences of how their brains are developing ... this we have learned as we learn more about the biology if the brain in general. As a result, she went on, it's not very effective to expect teenagers to suddenly start acting and thinking exactly like we do, because in some cases they physically can't; so it actually works better to mold our expectations to what they can do, instead of demanding the reverse. What a concept.

It wasn't till after the talks that we connected with Son 1 for a few minutes -- long enough to take the extra items to his room, and then he was due elsewhere for another 15 minutes. After that we had lunch together -- sandwiches, as well as more bean salad, fruit, cookies -- and Son 1 took off. He explained he had more orientation events to get to. Actually he had a good half hour before the next event, but he was in a rush anyway. Wife insisted on a hug and got a halfway, one-arm hug. I shook his hand, and he vanished into a swirl of other kids. And that is the last we have seen of him up till now. He called briefly a couple days later (to ask me to mail him a book). He had a wonderful time on the Freshman Class backpacking trip, in the week before classes started. And he called last weekend (and spent most of his time talking with Son 2). Meanwhile it has been a lot quieter back home without him, and his cat spent a lot of time wandering around puzzled and meowing.

"You could visit D"

Next week I'll be out of town for a week and a half: first, for a two-day training class Over Here, and then for a week-long conference Over There. In between, I'm going to spend the weekend with D. She can't get away from work for more than that right now, but it does mean we'll see each other. In the background I kind of wonder what it will be like at home, with just Wife and Son 2 to be each other's company for so long. But I won't let the question keep me from going.

So last night I reminded Wife of this trip.

Wife: What trip?

Hosea: You remember -- I told you about it before.

Wife: You may have told me, but I don't remember. How long will you be gone?

Hosea: A week and a half.

Wife: Wow, that's pretty long.

Hosea: Yes, but I've wrapped together two different destinations: this training class Over Here, and then the conference Over There.

Wife: You're going to Over There? Gosh, that's right near the state where D lives. You could visit D.

What do I say? One day I'll just tell her that Yes, in fact, I am going to visit D. Heck, at some level she probably knows already, although I would bet a middling sum that she hasn't let herself know that she knows. But I haven't decided when to say something, and right now I am continuing to put it off. So I asked her, "Do you know where exactly in that state D lives?"

Wife: Ummm, ... no.

Hosea: Well I'm going to be in That City There, which is a fair distance from the state line, and I'll have to be at the conference every day. You aren't making this sound real practical.

Wife: [no real comment] ....

Boarding school 2, Football practice

The business of moving Son 1 onto campus -- I'll be frivolous and call the school "Hogwarts" -- actually began in early August.

Wife had been reading the materials that Hogwarts sent out to families of new students, and misunderstood them.  Somewhere in the middle of all this information she found a description of the athletic program.  The school offers three interscholastic sports in the fall (football and two others), plus a variety of other activities for students who aren't interested in any of those three.  Wife totally missed the second part, and jumped to the conclusion that each entering student was required to sign up for one of those three sports.  She telephoned the Director of Athletics to verify this, but he somehow failed to set her straight.  (I try to explain this below.)  All he told her was that football practice began the week before classes started.

Wife asked Son 1 which sport he wanted to play, and he decided that football was the one he disliked the least.  (His real athletic interests lie in other directions.)  So Wife became a woman-on-a-mission, possessed by the idea that Son 1 must join football practice the week before school started.  Now as it happens, my parents live very near Hogwarts.  Wife called them and arranged that Son 1 could stay there for the week while going to practice.  She then offered to come along, in order to drive him to and from practice.  (It's only about a twenty minute walk, but my suggestion that he walk it was hooted down by everybody involved.)  After much discussion -- way too much discussion -- the plan was settled.

Now, football practice was scheduled to take place twice a day: from 6:00 to 8:00 in the morning, and again from 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon.  That first installment meant getting Son 1 up no later than 5:15, so he could get there on time, and Wife is not very good these days about getting up early.  Here is how the first morning played out, as described later by my father:

"Like you, I seem to be able to wake up at a pre-set time. I woke up this morning at 5:05 am -- about ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I got up and started puttering about the kitchen, setting out the stuff Son 1 had requested for breakfast: peanut butter and jelly and bread to make a sandwich or two, along with milk and Ovaltine, and some coffee for Wife. At 5:15 I tiptoed into the living room and woke Son 1 just a second before his alarm beeped. He said he might have turned it off and gone back to sleep if I hadn't been there. As he ate breakfast I figured it would be quicker for me to get dressed and take him up to Hogwarts than wake up Wife. Good thing I did. The directions given me on the phone last week by the Athletic Director were incorrect. [Long time readers will recall that Wife panics when directions don't work out quite right, or when there is a chance of her getting lost.]  Driving in the main entrance led only to a locked gate. We had to go in the back way up a service road. We made every possible wrong turn before we finally arrived just a minute before 6:00 at the upper field where they have football and a running track. Son 1 had looked at a campus map earlier and, like you, was able to remember where things were and ended up being my guide as I drove up the mountain. The foot tour that he had taken during his summer visit also helped.

"When I went back to get him at 8:00 I took both Wife and your mom so that each would know how to get there in the future. When we found Son 1, he looked like he'd been in a battle: exhausted, sweat soaked, and covered with mud. He said he didn't realize how out of shape he had become. I just think he has never been in Football Shape. That is a whole different level of physical conditioning beyond anything else -- except, possibly, classical ballet! As soon as he got home he hit the shower and soaked in the tub to soothe sore muscles, and then ate ten sausages and six English muffins for a second breakfast. An hour or two later he boiled up two packages of Ramen noodles and ate them. He is now [mid-morning] sleeping on the living room sofa. Later some of us are taking him shopping for a pair of cleats and going to the grocery store for more food. He hasn't given us all that much detail of the workouts themselves, but to remark on the size of some of the seniors, and how far they can kick the ball. He clearly has a path marked out for himself as to where he has to go to succeed."

That night, I got a second installment from my father, describing the afternoon practice:

"Son 1 returned from his afternoon workout exhausted (again). This time they ended their workout in the weight room doing every kind of exercise designed to use muscles that their owners had never known they had. As soon as he walked in the door, he retired to a hot bath with three pints of Gatorade to restore his hydrolysis and electrolytes as he soaked his tired body. He finally emerged to eat a supper of spaghetti with my famous tomato sauce and a broiled sausage (only one) and then retired to the orange sofa where he is now asleep. (It's about 8:30 pm.) Wife, meanwhile fixed herself a couple of gin & tonics (half gin, half tonic) after she brought Son 1 back from Hogwarts, watched Jeopardy with your mom and me while Son 1 soaked, and zoned out after (almost during) a light supper (only half a sausage) at the same time as Son 1. Your mom and I are exiled to my study or hers so as not to disturb either of our guests. We might sit up and talk awhile, but I think I'd better get up at 5:05 once again just to make sure all goes as planned."

And so it went.  Occasionally I got phone calls filling me in on the details.  Tuesday's practice was worse than Monday's.  By Wednesday. Son 1 said that he thought he was getting his feet under him.  Then Thursday morning he hit a wall.  He came back from the morning practice, and couldn't go back.  He called me at work to tell me this, ... and, I think, to get my approval for dropping football.  I told him that it was too bad not to be able to finish the week; but if he couldn't, he couldn't.  I reminded him that all along he had had other options as well, so it wasn't going to be any big long-term tragedy if football didn't work out for him.  I insisted on only one thing: call the coach to let him know, before the time for afternoon practice to start -- don't just no-show.  Son 1 said he was fine with that.

So Son 1 and Wife had Thursday evening and Friday free.  I took Friday off of work, so that Son 2 and I could drive out there and meet up with the others.  We got a late start, because I had some odds and ends to tie up.  Then we had a long, hot drive through Friday traffic.  (The air conditioning in my car is out.) We finally got to town about 2:30 to find that my parents had held lunch for us (although I had called ahead to let them know we were going to be there well after lunchtime). When it turned out that neither Son 2 nor I was at all hungry, my father was rather put out. So the rest of them ate lunch.

After lunch, my father asked me to explain what I meant, when I said that Son 1 had always had lots of other options. I explained that it was very simple: there were three available interscholastic sports (football and the other two) but also lots of other after-school activities that one might pursue instead. The thing is that those other activities weren't specifically itemized in the printed materials, because they change from year to year and so nobody ever knows in advance what they are going to be. They can only be selected after school starts. But the printed material is very clear that they exist if only you read it attentively.

What appears to have happened, I told him, is that Wife wanted to make damned sure that every possible variable related to Son 1's school year was defined and nailed down unmoveably before school started … probably because she is so terrified of any indeterminacy or uncertainty. So her eyes must have glossed over the part about the other activities, because they weren't so clear-cut. Yes, she telephoned the Athletic Director, and came away with her (mis-)understanding confirmed that Son 1 had to choose one of the three interscholastic sports. I have no idea how this happened, except that she frequently misunderstands what people tell her. To be charitable, I invented a Just-So-Story that the Athletic Director must have assumed she was restricting her questions to the interscholastic program from the outset, because naturally he would have assumed that she had read the printed material on the website and therefore already knew that he couldn't speak to the other activities until after school started.

Why does all this matter? Well, it really doesn't except that my father started to get riled and say (with Wife in the room) "Do you mean that all this getting up at 5:00 in the morning was totally unnecessary and just came from misreading the damned catalog??" I interposed at this point a suggestion that it wasn't really a tragedy. I explained that I had tried to tell both Son 1 and Wife at the time that there were, after all, other choices: this part is true, although my voice was small in that conversation and Wife's was large (amplified by the righteous self-confidence that stemmed from her having just now gotten off the phone with the Athletic Director). Anyway, when I pointed this out Son 1 had said, "No, it's OK, I think I want to give football a try." Maybe he meant it. Maybe he meant he wanted to humor Wife. I have no idea. In any event, I let it drop; and what I told my father and Wife on Friday afternoon was that I figured if Son 1 wanted to try out football, then we should let him. Now that he had tried it and concluded it wasn't for him, he could go do something else. I hoped that this would add up to a certain amount of oil on the waters.

The boys spent all Friday afternoon splashing in my parents' pool in the most vigorous possible way … a few times it looked like it narrowly avoided outright violence, but never quite made it. Somehow they got into a water balloon fight with the people next door.  There was a bit of joking about how they must have missed each other, although they both denied it. (But later, Son 2 admitted that he did miss having Son 1 to talk to as they both fell asleep at night.)  I stayed away from most conversation. My father had planned a huge dinner, but nobody was all that interested so we had bits and bobs instead, left over from lunch.  And we all went to bed early.

How do you handle money?

At one point, on our last date, D asked me if I could help her with the cost of her airline ticket. I understand why she asked -- most of my expenses were being picked up by my company, so the financial impact of the date fell disproportionately on her. And from time to time she has mentioned that if we are going to be involved in the long term we have to be able at least to discuss money rationally.

I didn't react too well at the time, however. Instead of being able to discuss it calmly, I sank into a depression that lasted much of the evening. Recently as we were talking on the phone, she tried to ask why I reacted so badly, and again the conversation didn't get very far. But it left me wondering about myself, and in a while I was able to see at least parts of an answer.

The first point, and the most basic one, is that I am not at all consistent in how I feel about money. Anybody (like D) who tries to deduce my underlying attitudes about money by watching my behavior will end up very confused, ... because the behavior is confused. It is not, as I say, consistent. I can fret and agonize over small sums, and then write out large sums without blinking. It makes no sense.

Or rather, the sense it makes is a kind of complex emotional sense, and I am not sure that I can identify all the pieces. One piece is that I don't grok money terribly well, and so I don't enjoy thinking about it. I'll do it as a chore, because I have to; and Heaven knows I'm better at it than Wife. But the very fact that it takes me so long each weekend to make myself sit down and do the bills -- and that after all that angst and delay I'll only do what is absolutely necessary, postponing the rest -- is a sign to myself that I would rather do ... if not "almost anything," then certainly many other things. So there is a measure of discomfort there, from the get-go.

Because I don't grok money very well, I rely heavily on constructing for myself some kind of frame-story when I am dealing with a financial situation, and these frame stories allow me to see the situation as a picture, where the decisions I have to make become obvious. So when Wife spends a handful of change on a spool of thread in a color she's already got, I see it as part of a frame-story about hoarding and greed and compulsive acquisition and waste. Those are all very ugly things, and I react by hitting the roof. If I then have to turn around the very same day and write out an installment on Son 1's tuition at his new high school -- a sum which, by year's end, will have added up to something in the neighborhood of ten thousand times more than the spool of thread (just for the sake of round numbers) -- I see it as part of a frame-story about prioritizing my children's education, and I'm very calm about it all.

What is more, it can sometimes be difficult for me to shift gears, to re-frame the same event in a different story. Or say rather, that I can do it but I don't find it easy to do on the spot, on the fly. So when I am travelling on the company's dime, for example, the narrative that is running through my head is a narrative about, "How am I going to account for myself to the mysterious trolls in Corporate Accounting?" And part of my thought is that I am given a lot of leeway precisely because I have never run afoul of the system. My fear is that if I ever do slip up, I will invite a lot more scrutiny in the future ... and I'd rather avoid the extra scrutiny. So any time D and I go somewhere in the context of one of my business trips, I hear a little voice in the back of my head murmuring this narrative over and over. It makes me fretful trying to parcel out expenses into the two buckets, Corporate and Personal (totally regardless of how much money -- or how little -- we are really talking about). And so it can be a lot harder than you would think for me to stop that Corporate-oriented monologue long enough to break in with a simple question like, "Is this expense here really all that important in the big picture? Isn't that expense there really remarkably cheap if it spells the difference between being able to see D and not?" These are obvious logical questions, and anybody who felt comfortable with the topic of money would ask them as a matter of course. But because of where I find myself with relation to the topic, it can be awkward to get from here to there.

So far as I can reconstruct it, what happened that night during our last date is that we were driving out to dinner somewhere, which means that the Corporate Accounting narrative was already nagging endlessly in the back of my head. Then en route D asked the question about her plane tickets. I think what happened inside my head was that somehow this threw me -- without even stepping on the clutch to shift gears -- into an entirely different frame-story whose message is, "Hosea, you're a cheapskate (or you would have volunteered to help with her tickets without waiting for her to say something)." I don't say that's what she was trying to achieve, but that's how I remember it from the inside. And so I was rattled: partly from the sudden change of narrative; partly because the new narrative concerned a bill (her airfare) that was probably going to be ten times anything we could possibly spend on dinner that night, and I was already fretting about dinner (because of the whole Corporate-accounting mantra); and partly because I would do almost anything to avoid being thought a cheapskate. Emotionally, I was being pulled hard in two flatly opposite directions; intellectually, I was trying to see the situation through two incompatible sets of lenses. And I shut down.

Great, now what? Well, in the aftermath of our somewhat unconstructive phone call, I sent her a check for some fraction of the tickets. At that point, because the conversation had been so difficult, she actually felt funnier about accepting it than I did about writing it. But I think this business of competing frame stories explains my side, at least. Really, none of my reactions had anything to do with the amount of money in question. But time and distance allowed me to shift my internal frame story. And once I had done that, the thing was much easier.

I don't know if there is any kind of advice here for the future ....