I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.
I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.
I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.
Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.
I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?
Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.
I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.
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9 comments:
Choose happy and fulfilled. Or don't. Simple as that.
These keep getting better and better. :-)
I like Jefferson on spitting up: "All experience hath shewn that men are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to change the forms to which they have become accustomed." And then he says: "BUT," and proceeds to list the insufferables; and after he's done that, he ends up by saying "look, we warned, we tried, etc.," and then he says, basically, it's time to move on and split up and damn the consequences, no matter what, because it's so bad now that we don't care even if this costs us all our money or even if we get hung for it. Which always impressed me as good basic thinking for any splitup.
Just my $.00002.
We suffered the insufferable (which are not the same for each person as it turns out) until we couldn't, but everyone's different. That's the thing I wish people would accept and quit their judging, their "but I would never..." First, you don't fucking know that, and second, who cares? Things do evolve and I totally understand thinking that a split is certain on Monday but maybe not on Wednesday and no way on Friday. Went through that for years. My parents did too and ended up sticking it out for 50+ and declaring that they were happy at the end, were glad they did, and loved each other. What more can you ask for?
We're like that. Not insufferable at all. I just have a problem with living this life in such continual compromise. Philosophical problem with sentimentality, too. And there's all them fine forty nine year old wimmins out there too. :-D Man, I have got to start a new blog for this shit so family don't read it. Hear that, fam? Love my wife, not me, if you got to choose.
hmm. was at lunch today and realized that I'm somewhere along the way stopped saying grace before every meal. Somewhere in my 30s. Don't know the exact point, but wondered if it correlated to the point when I decided that the course of my life wasn't going to be by divine intervention, but by MY intervention. Huh.
Deep thoughts, my friend. Keep dredging 'em, keeps the pipes clean.
My personal opinion is that there are five primary things that are involved. First, people simply think about it too much. Second, people don't realize what's involved in a "happy" marriage when they get married, and they can't merge their expectations with the realities. Third, there's respect. Fourth, there's trust. Five is hard times.
People think about it too much because they think there's more than there is. Jodie Kash was right. I heard it differently many years ago as "Life is the only game you win by declaring yourself the winner." It's true for marriages as well as life in general. Live for today -- and live your marriage for today. Don't get me wrong. People should have goals. But Cindy and I concentrate on having fun along the way. Each step along the way, we create a memory, and it's those memories that form a very strong mortar that holds the more substantial pieces of our marriage together. After 20 years, that's a lot of stone and a lot of mortar. If it's not fun to be with your partner, it's hard. I see a lot of marriages that consist mostly of parallel play -- each partner has his or her own life, and not all that much is shared; they might as well be college roomates.
The second thing is that I see folk who have some odd expectations of what marriage is, and what is required of it. Being married means that you give up a part of yourself -- your goals, your dreams, your interests, your friends, everything. You give up a bit of your selfhood. Not all, but a part. In return, you get a different self that is in part defined in terms of another person. The biggest thing I have seen in failed marriages I've observed is narcissism.
I don't do things that I would have done had I married a different person. Things that were important to me. But everything has a cost, and as far as I'm concerned it was a good deal. The problem comes in when folk get married without knowing what they'll have to give up, without being willing to give it up or are willing but resent it, and/or arent' willing to surrender their self to the marriage. Unfortunately, *both* people need to do this, not just one. If one does and one doesn't, eventually it will become untenable.
Third, it's necessary that both partners respect each other. They have to respect each other's value, each others' rights, each other's idiosyncracies. It's easy to hurt a partner, and it's tempting to do so when you're mad. Respect is the only thing that will keep folk from taking that cheap shot. A number of studies have shown that fights don't hurt marriages. Expressions of contempt and belittling one's partner as a person are what hurt. They attack the core of the relationship because they corrode that unity that is built when you sacrifice that bit of self. When one belittles a partner, one emphasizes separateness, not sameness.
Fourth, it's hard to do either of the above if you don't trust your partner completely. Betrayals weaken a marriage -- not just big betrayals, but small ones as well. I think it's important to distinguish between betrayal and failure, but real betrayal is hard to come back to, since the first three are built on it.
Hard times make it tough because it provides fodder for conflict. If there's not enough money, then there's more need to compromise. If the kids are a problem, then there's more conflict. If there's sickness, then the burdens become more unequal. It's not a *cause* of problems in a marriage, but its a stressor that unmasks problems.
As I noted above, almost every marriage I've seen fail did so because of narcissism. One of the partners simply wasn't willing to surrender enough of themselves to make it work. In some cases, *neither* partner did. In some cases, one partner surrendered too much in order to make up for what the other one didn't give up -- and ended up being treated with contempt by their partner for it. One partner simply could not be trusted, and both ended up betraying their marriage.
Thank you, Dr. O, for the thoughtful reply. I will cop to narcissism, to being self-centered. It's a trait I share, along with an unfortunate laziness, with both my parents. They endured a difficult marriage in the 1950s which ended early in the 1960s. They never fully merged with other people: their second marriages also ended in divorce.
Today I can boil the situation down to a choice:
1. For the principle of marriage, work on transforming myself into a (presumably) less-narcissistic person who can find true fulfillment within marriage.
2. Cut the b.s., quit dragging my wife through my constant doubts, stop with the hundred subtle ways of rejecting her, and just do her a favor and make a clean break. This offers me the risks associated with a sort of freedom I've never experienced and provides her with a clear path she can make her own.
You might notice I was unable to introduce #2 in terms of some principle. #1, on the other hand, is a lifelong commitment with no clear reward.
So I am to serve principle, or explore life honestly.
"Don't worry, be happy," is not a useful philosophy. Helpful to the coal miner stuck in a worker's paradise, perhaps. But not to folks who want to be free.
So as always, upon thought I lean towards the family tradition I grew up with; yet my heart isn't really in that, is it, or I'd have left by now.
Maybe a third option is to merge #2 with #1; end the marriage, and then also work on being less narcissistic, simply for the sake of personal growth, rather than because you "have to" within the marriage.
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