What was wrong with us all?

I've wanted to write this post since I spoke with Cassius back on New Year's Eve, but I've had no idea how to start or what to say. That's still true: I still have no idea. But instead of trying to work this out, I've just spent my evenings drinking too much and browsing the Internet. So I may as well make a stab at it. I can't promise not to drink too much tonight, but I can try to explain what is irking me. Solvitur ambulando.   

Back when I was growing up, in the 1960's and 1970's, there was a pretty common idea of what adulthood looked like, at least in certain basic respects. You went to school for a while (through high school or through college), started working at a job, got married, and had kids. Marriages might not be perfect, but they provided islands of stability in an uncertain world, environments in which it was safe to raise children. Once upon a time, there was even an assumption that they were permanent, though that became obviously less and less certain as the 1970's wore on. But long-time readers know that even when I started out this blog in late 2007 I still believed that marriage should be permanent -- see, for example, this rant from early 2008. 

Anyway, of course intellectually I understood that just because a huge number of cases averages to X, that says nothing about individual cases or about tiny sample sets. So if you had asked me, back when I was in college, "Are you mathematically certain that the lives of you and your friends will fit the Standard Narrative?" I would have known that I could not answer Yes. But at an emotional level I would have thought I should be able to answer Yes anyway, or else I would have thought that any deviation required some kind of systematic explanation beyond random chance. I never was very good at understanding statistics.

How did it turn out? Let's look at my sophomore year in college. During that year I was part of a well-defined group of seven friends. I mean, of course we all had other friends too, but the seven of us regularly ate together and hung out together. How well did the seven of us fit the Standard Narrative?

• Hosea: Pretty well. I married two years after graduation. We had two kids. We stayed together for thirty years. But now we are separated. Also, Wife was a bipolar, abusive narcissist, so "stability" was sometimes a question. But I did my best to compensate.
• Cassius: Married a few years after graduation, a woman 22 years his senior. No children that were genetically his own, but two stepchildren from her past: one was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. One way or another, the domestic environment (including the domestic power dynamics) had to have been very different from what you expect from the Standard Narrative. After he was widowed, he started a relationship with an abusive, nonbinary sociopath. He suffers from gender dysphoria and is now considering gender transition.
• Schmidt: Flunked out of college and went home to live with his parents. Never left. Took over the family business after his father died. After some years, figured out that he is gay. Never married. Never established any long-term romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. No children.
• R: Shortly after graduation, he entered a prolonged sexual and emotional relationship with a woman a generation older, just like Cassius. But to the best of my knowledge he never married her. The relationship lasted at least three years, probably rather more. Cassius tells me that R is now living on the other end of the country and has a 14-year-old son. I got no more news than that, so I have no idea whether he also has a wife. Maybe so. A fortiori, I know nothing about their relationship -- if any.
• Mac: No idea. I have no data. I know where he is working now (because the Internet is amazing). But I know nothing about his personal or domestic life. Mac was always kind of wild. It's hard for me to imagine him settling down with a wife and kids. On the other hand, back when we were in college most of us assumed we would end up in academic careers and Mac is the only one with a professorship today. So you never can tell.
• Scarlett: As you know, she doesn't want to talk to me. But I've been following her online (off and on) for over a decade, so I know something about how her life has turned out. She entered graduate school the year I left it -- at the very same school. Then it seems like she was associated with that graduate school from then (the mid-1980's) until only a couple of years ago. That would be thirty years or more. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a student all that time. For a while she was the Director of the English as a Second Language program. She wrote scholarly articles and contributed to at least one book. But so far as I can tell, she never finished her Ph.D. And today she is working in a more-or-less clerical or administrative job in the same city, but in an organization totally unconnected with the University. Now, in fairness this school -- think of it as the University of Hell -- is well-known for feeding on graduate students, chewing them up until all the nutrients have been extracted from them and then spitting them out. But it's sad. As for her domestic life, ... strictly speaking, I suppose I should say that I have no data. But she is still using her maiden name. And graduate students at the University of Hell have a hard time maintaining relationships, to say nothing of marriages. It is almost impossible for me to imagine Scarlett as both a graduate student and a mother. So my bet is that she has had no long-term relationships and no children. Maybe I'm wrong.
• Marie: I've talked about her a lot, of course. But as for the Standard Narrative -- some short-term romantic relationships, but nothing long-term (before me, if you want to count me). No marriage. No children.

In other words: of the seven of us, two certainly married and another two might have; the two who definitely married are no longer so (but there is no data about the other two); three have definitely (or pretty definitely) never married. Also -- again, of the seven of us -- two have children genetically their own, and one has legal stepchildren who are about his own age; three definitely (or pretty definitely) have no children; about one, I have no data. This is a poor showing for the Standard Narrative.

But what's the most remarkable failure with respect to that Narrative? 

• Is it that only two of us begat children (or three, if I should add Mac to the list)? 
• Or is it our track record with romantic relationships, wherein: ... 
• at least two of us (me and Cassius) entered abusive relationships, ...
• two of us (Cassius and R) entered relationships with partners a full generation older (so that the power dynamics were inherently unequal), and ...
• three of us (Schmidt, Marie, and probably Scarlett) managed to avoid any long-term relationships whatsoever? 

Only Mac is an unknown quantity on these scales.

And I wonder, what the hell was wrong with us? Why did we turn out this way? Was it literally just random chance? (As I said, I was never very good at statistics. It might have been.) Or did we have something in common: something that made us choose each other as friends, because we somehow resonated with each other; but which also made us weak or ineffectual in romantic relationships, so that we later sought out partners who abused us or who overawed us with age and experience ... or else we avoided romantic relationships altogether? Is it even possible that any common feature might answer to this description?

I truly don't know. And maybe it's just random chance. But I can't stop wondering about it.

__________

P.S.: If I try to make the list longer, I come up with two other friends I can fold into the mix.

There's Dale: he didn't go to the same college that I did, so he wasn't part of the group I listed above. But I knew him in high school. His marriage ended up being eerily similar to mine.

And there's Fillette: as far as I can tell, her life fit the Standard Narrative pretty well -- stable marriage, two daughters, and lots of friends saying wonderful things about her life after she died. My data is skimpy, but she may have come closer than any of the rest of us to realizing the Standard Narrative. Good for her.