You don't count

It's strange, but I find that whenever I try to explain some kind of philosophical principle to Wife – I mean something I live by, something ethical, and I also mean something I think she doesn’t live by or I wouldn’t bother to explain it – whenever I try to explain this kind of thing I always overstate it so egregiously that I make it comical or absurd. Of course I don’t act like I find it comical – if she and I are arguing about fundamental ethical principles I am typically very much in earnest – but I always make the kind of overstatement where if I were asked about it later, once my blood had cooled down, I would say “Oh no, of course not; what I meant was something a lot milder, a lot less extreme, namely that ….” But my philosophical statements to Wife are always sledge-hammers, never tuning forks. I don’t know if it is because I get carried away by the heat of the moment, or because I figure I have to make big statements because she will niggle small ones to death, or because … well, I don’t really know. It is very strange.

Does anybody else in the world argue with a spouse over philosophical principles? Naah, I didn’t think so.

So it was dinner time last night, and I made a tofu-and-chickpea curry along with boiling rice and steaming some broccoli: hardly exciting, but I just got back from a trip abroad and so was planning the week’s recipies in the last half an hour of the workday. I served Wife only a tiny bit of everything, because she hasn’t been eating much lately; but I gave Son 2 and myself each somewhat larger (more “normal-sized”) servings. We ate and talked about the day. Son 2 cleared his plate and asked if he could have some dessert. By that time Wife had eaten her broccoli and pushed the other food around her plate, and she told him yes if she could have some too. She got up to put her curry back in the pan.

I was irritated on multiple levels, most saliently two: as a cook, that she was foregoing my curry for ice cream; and as a parent, that she was behaving in exactly the way parents traditionally forbid their children to behave. So I asked, altogether too peevishly, “Should I just stop cooking for you altogether? If you are just going to put the food back anyway so you can have ice cream, why don’t I simply buy and cook less food in the first place?”

She answered that she liked some of the meals I make more than others, and that it would be logistically inconvenient or impossible for her to make her own meals in the same kitchen so that she could eat at the same time with us, and more in this line, and I kept insisting that all this was completely beside the point. Son 2 actually tried to join the conversation briefly to say that he thought Wife got the point quite clearly, and I had to tell him that no she didn’t and could he please stay out of it. But I also found that I was totally incapable of continuing the discussion out there in the kitchen. The inhibition against arguing in front of Son 2 was so great that my mouth wouldn’t work. I asked Wife to come back in the bedroom where we could close the door.

Once there, I tried to explain myself … and here is where my statements started to morph into absurdity. I began solidly enough: “The point is that this is not a restaurant. In a restaurant you get to ask for exactly what you want, and their job is to serve you; then if you don’t like what you get you can send it back and make a scene with the waiter. But in a family the point is to eat together. This means …” and here I started to overstate the point past what I really meant, “… that the question what you like is completely irrelevant. It totally doesn’t matter what you like. If you make something I don’t like, I smile and I am nice about it and I eat it without complaining, because it really doesn’t matter whether I like it or not! And I expect the same thing of you! Regardless what I make, I expect you to smile and to eat it and not to complain!”

She asked, “But when you cook for a family, isn’t the point to fix what people like?”

I replied, “No, the point is to fix what will nourish everyone. If I were just going to fix what you like, it would be all ice cream and doughnuts.”

“I like other things too!” she protested. “And besides, I don’t complain about everything I don’t like. There are a lot of things you make that I don’t like, and I eat up most of them without complaining at all.”

I answered, “In the first place I don’t think you have any idea how often you complain, because I think most of the time you just complain on autopilot and don’t even hear it. So you probably honestly believe that you complain a lot less than you really do. But in the second place, surely you understand that there are more ways to complain besides just using words. I count rolling your eyes, sighing, inflecting your voice in a sarcastic way … all of that. And yes, you do it a lot.”

“Well, I have to wonder if you deliberately fix meals you know I will hate?”

“Of course not. In fact, I avoid a lot of meals that I would enjoy because I’m trying to steer around what you like and don’t like. If I were cooking just for myself, I’d make a lot more things with cooked greens (which I like) and mushrooms (which I love); but I know you won’t eat them.”

“Cooked greens are disgusting.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, and I disagree with you. But the point is that I don’t make them anyway.”

“I’m sure there are a lot of recipes in the world that don’t include chard!” [I am reasonably sure that what she meant here was, “Why do you insist on cooking so many vegetarian meals?”]

“Not as many as you might think. I can’t cook the way I did ten years ago, back when we only had a few different things – pork chops, spaghetti, broiled chicken, all on a rotation year in and year out – because I’m 50 years old and no 50-year-old man can afford that kind of cholesterol in his diet.” [Health isn’t the only reason behind the large number of vegetarian meals I make, but I figured it was a reason that she could hear and understand.]

“I didn’t know your cholesterol was too high. What is it?”

I wasn’t about to give her a number, so all I said was, “Well, it sure will be too high if I start cooking like that again. I’m 50, and I can’t eat that way any more.”

“No, I suppose not ….”

“And anyway, this is avoiding the main issue, because the main issue is a lot bigger than food. It is just this: I go through life assuming that whatever I want doesn’t matter – food or anything else – and I have made major life decisions on that basis. And I think you don’t believe that at all. And I just don’t get that.”

Of course, I don’t really believe this, certainly not in that form! If I had to defend a proposition like that philosophically I could never do it. At the very least, there is a distinction between tastes or minor preferences, which can change like a will o’ the wisp, and fundamental values. A better way to say it would be that some preferences are more important to me than others, so I am willing to dispense with the low-priority ones without missing them. I don’t know why I was overstating it so to her. But I did.

“Ummm, … no, I don’t.”

“Well, didn’t your parents ever teach you that what you want doesn’t matter, and that it is up to you to adapt yourself to other people and the rest of the world? Because that’s the truth and it is what grown-ups are expected to do. And if your parents never taught you as much, then I don’t know what to say. I just think that was very irresponsible on their part.”

What did I just say??? Did I really want her to think that other people’s parents spend their time indoctrinating their children with the idea that their likes and dislikes truly don’t matter? I don’t believe that. Why did I say it? What I really wanted to convey was the value of a kind of reticence that holds back from asserting itself too forcefully, as part of a mutual give-and-take that holds any group together – a give-and-take springing from mutual respect and consideration. I would never really want to make it all or nothing. What could I possibly have been thinking??

“No, they didn’t teach me that at all.”

“Then they failed in an important duty, because learning that is part of the difference between adults and three-year-olds. Little kids think that what they want is important and they insist on it. They throw tantrums if they don’t get it. But when you grow up you should learn that what you want really doesn’t matter, so that you are more relaxed about it and don’t insist all the time.”

“But when you cook vegetarian meals, isn’t that because you like them?”

“Sure, but that’s not the point. If I’m doing the cooking, sure I’ll cook something I like; when you cook, so do you. The point is that when you cook, I smile graciously no matter what you put on the table. I don’t have to like it. Because fundamentally what I like or don’t like doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to live like that.”

“Happier. If you really think that what you want matters, you’re going to get really cranky trying to get it and you are going to expect that it will make you happy. And as a simple matter of fact, it won’t. The people I know who have gotten the things they thought they wanted are never made happy by any of it. But if you realize that what you want doesn’t really matter, that it’s just bubbles floating this way and that because tastes are so changeable, then you don’t get upset when you don’t get it because you can let go of all that. And you can be happier.”

Do I really think this? I guess I didn’t pull it completely out of my ass … I mean, in a certain very warped way it reflects the Buddhist teaching that craving leads to suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but it’s reassuring to me to think there might be some respectable opinion out there that I was distorting. Maybe it wasn’t completely crazy. But it seems to me I was saying it crazily.

“Anyway,” I went on, “that’s why parents should teach their children that what they want doesn’t count. So they will have easier and happier lives.”

Whoa. Again, do I really believe that? I’m sure my parents never taught me anything like that, or at any rate not in so many words. They taught me I had to be polite to others, of course; and somewhere aong the line I learned to feel shame if I appeared too grasping or self-centered. But that’s not what I just said, is it? I just said that parents should inculcate the message “You don’t count,” which seems extreme. Have I ever taught the boys that? Surely not!

We went on for a while, back and forth this way and that, but towards the end I posed the following question to her: “If I had done just what I liked every minute for the last twenty years, would we even be sitting here having this conversation?”

At first she jumped to her default answer, “I have no idea.” But then she thought a minute and added, “You probably would have left me long ago.”

The conversation kind of sputtered to a stop, the ideas getting smaller from there rather than bigger. And then soon she was exhausted and fell catatonically into bed.

But I was thinking some more about what I had said, and I began to wonder something. Yes, of course the things I said to her were grotesque and outlandish. “You don’t count”??? What kind of philosophy is that for guiding your life? Of course I got carried away. And of course if I were to try to defend any of this rationally, I would first scale it way, way back and nuance it a whole lot before I would even make the attempt. But all the same … how do I say these things when I talk to myself, when I try to assess my own behavior or my own choices? Am I really so sure that I am careful to nuance the message the way I would have to before I could possibly try to defend it as true? Or do I say it to myself in just the same way, using just the same broad brushstrokes?

When I first began to mull last night, the question I posed myself was more limited: The times in the past that I chose to overlook how incompatible Wife and I have always been in the basic ethical principles we use to guide our lives – all those times I hung in there – was I making the intellectual mistake of treating fundamental principles the way I treat ephemeral tastes? In other words, since I knew that I should eat up when at somebody else’s table (regardless of what I thought of the food), did I make the mistake of treating my ethical principles with the same disregard, telling myself that it didn’t matter so long as I reaffirmed the communal bonds (meaning in this case the bonds of marriage) which are more important than personal preferences? Is that why I hung in there so long?

This morning, I realized that the question can safely be stated more broadly: All those times that I hung in there, was I making the more fundamental mistake of telling myself flatly that I don’t count? Could it be that the reason I state ethical principles in such a cartoonish and uncompromising way when I am arguing with Wife is that that is the way I really believe them myself?

I wish I could answer some of these questions with “No,” but I haven’t convinced myself yet that I can. It may require more thought.


Postscript: By the time we were done in the bedroom, Son 2 had put himself to bed. This morning he barely spoke to me. It is times like this that I start to despair of any decent relationship with him in the future. But then I remind myself that all the same, I have to do whatever I have to do. If it doesn’t turn out the way I like, … well, what I like or dislike doesn’t really count ….