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.

            

Fillette

One of my friends from college died today, at 1:53 pm Eastern Time. She had been suffering from fourth-stage sarcoma and died in the arms of her husband and two grown daughters. I'll call her "Fillette," or "little girl." That's not far wrong to describe her the way I remember her, and it has echoes of her real-life name as well.

Until last August I had been out of touch with her since the summer I got married, way back in 1984. I had googled her a few times and found an email address, but never actually sent her a note. Or maybe I did but the address was no good. Anyway, last summer I found an address that worked, and sent her a quick note. That's when I found out she was sick. I sent her a longer email and she said she likely wouldn't have the energy to reply to it … but maybe some day …. 

Of course that day never came. She got sicker and weaker, and then died. I got back in touch with her just in time to lose touch permanently.

So I never really knew her as an adult. My memories of her are all as a college student: warm, friendly, open, childlike … naïve and with a tendency to suck her thumb just a little when she was abstracted or thinking about something else. Cute. If I hadn't been so neurotically afraid of romantic relationships, I would have liked to gotten close to her. As it was we were just good friends. The year after I graduated I came back to town for a month to visit old friends and I stayed at the house she shared with four others. It was a lot of fun. Of course, sex would have been fun too, but I didn't know how to get there from here.

I'm trying to think what I feel about this, to describe it for you. I'm sad, of course. I'm a little shocked that someone I used to know as a peer is dead, although I'm close to 60 at this point so that's going to happen more and more often. Six years ago when I found out that Lisa had died, it was disorienting. But I really have no right to think of it that way.

And I'm sorry I waited so long to send her a note. In my mind I can't rule out the fantasy that she and I might have rekindled some kind of conversation. I don't know what that would have looked like, though. She was married and lived many miles from here, so there was no chance of anything romantic. And my conversations with, for example, Inga, have dropped off to a bare trickle just because there is nothing to sustain them in real life. One reason you can't go back to old friendships on the same terms as before is that both you and the other person have moved on, nearly always in different directions. You strengthen ties by repeating the contact, over and over; when they have lain dormant for decades, don't expect them to come back to life. My experience rekindling friendships with Marie and Debbie are very much the exception, and both cases involved sex. So the fantasy I had of rekindling a conversation would probably have proven false even if I had written her a couple years earlier.

Still, I'm sorry.

On the other hand she's out of pain, and that's good.

   

Old letters

Son 1 graduates from university in a week. He'll be coming home until he finds a job, and will have to park his stuff in my storage unit. So last Sunday I went out to the unit to organize it so there would be room.

Termites had gotten in, eating the door frame and damaging some of the boxes (though not, so far as I could tell, their contents — or not much). So I moved everything into the (happily vacant) unit next door, throwing out a bunch of trash in the process and making some room for Son 1. 

I wrote Marie a long email about the whole effort and considered pasting it in here, but the only part that really matters is one or two paragraphs near the end that touch on the most emotionally relevant part of the four and a half hours of work.

__________

[After talking about moving the physical stuff — bunk bed frame, camping supplies, an old chair — I then wrote about the boxes of paper, which are far and away the largest part of my storage. Some of this is old business or bills that I can probably shred once I sort through to make sure nothing important is hiding there. Besides that, though ....]

And letters. I have at least two different boxes full of letters, and I only looked through the one that I had to rebox. But there were letters from grandparents, teachers, form letters I'd kept because God knows why; letters from my friends in Canada, keeping up with me after I moved to California [back in the early 1970's]; letters from high school friends when we all went different directions to college; letters from friends at college. Oddly enough I found none of yours, and I know I kept them. They must be in the other box. But I found letters from correspondence I'd forgotten all about: C—, the summer after my freshman year; R—, filling a whole folder of his own; K— griping about whatever she felt like griping about [and lamenting "Why aren't you here when I need you?"]; Fillette apologizing for not having written in so long [and enclosing a photo of herself in a wimple captioned "Does this look appropriately penitent?"]; even one from Flora obviously sent after I had graduated, saying "Nobody seems to have the slightest idea if you are coming for Ren Fayre! Are you?" (Actually that one was signed "Sybel" and it took me a while to figure out who Sybel was.) 

[Flora was a woman Marie had been in love with for several years and they were briefly lovers; so while I mentioned her letter because I thought it would be funny I didn't mention that there were actually more like three of them. For a brief time Flora went by the name "Sybel" and the only way I worked out who that was (lo these many years later) was that she signed one of her letters with that name and also her legal name.]

It left me ... is there a word for it? "Nostalgic" is probably closest, but it implies too much sadness and I wasn't exactly sad. "Very aware of the past" might be a better way to put it. And it left me shaking my head a little at how much I walked away from when I got together with Wife and dropped completely off the face of the earth as far as all my existing friendships were concerned. Hmm. Maybe sadness is an element of it after all? It's hard for me to think of the right words. 

Maybe I'll go full Californian and summarize all these emotions with "Oh wow." Sure. That covers it.

__________

The letter goes on after that, but to me that's the heart of it. Last night Marie and I spoke on the phone; and while she sympathized with all the work, she didn't much comment on this part. But it lingers with me. Yesterday I spent too much of my time at work googling old friends or trying to find them on LinkedIn and wondering what any of them would say if I sent them a note all these decades later.

Wondering ....