The post that got eaten this morning was a long explanation of a comment I made last week when writing about "wild oats." I wrote on Friday:
Part of living a radically monogamous life is being intentional about "erasing the mental videotapes" of all prior experiences.
I need to explain what I mean. I meant to write primarily about the images of past sexual experiences, but before getting there, I want to touch on something else that led me to this conviction: weddings.
One of the innumerable things that I admire about my lovely wife is her extraordinary courage in becoming my fourth spouse. As you might imagine, she took a tremendous amount of flak from her friends and family when she and I started dating. At the time, I was thirty-five, going through my third divorce, with a conversion only four years old and a track record of reckless promiscuity, addiction, and mental instability behind me. Well-meaning folks rushed to warn her off, but she trusted me, she trusted her instincts, and she trusted in my transfomation.
Still, it was particularly hard when we got engaged in the summer of ‘04. One clod of a friend said to her: "Hey, just let Hugo handle all the wedding details; he’s done it three times before, he should be an expert." On the day I went to buy the engagement ring, a colleague said "Hugo, I bet by now you really know your diamonds, huh?" It’s not that these people were being deliberately cruel — but they were making it difficult to focus on the newness and the excitement of this particular marriage and this particular engagement.
Of course, I had vivid memories of my first three weddings. But after I proposed to she who is now my wife, I realized that the greatest gift I could give her would be to make a conscious,deliberate, concerted effort to erase the images of these past nuptials from my memory. I knew it would be hard, and it was. But in Buddhist meditation, they teach you that with persistence you can direct your thoughts and control where they wander. I may not be a Buddhist monk, but I appreciate discipline, and I respect its power. I began to pray a prayer that summer of 2004: "God, make this engagement as new and fresh for me as it is for my fiancee; take from me the urge to compare the now and the yet-to-be to what once was."
That prayer worked. It really, really worked. One of the most important gifts I was able to give my wife during our engagement was that radical excitement that comes when one does something brand new. I shared her joy, and by an act of will (aided by grace, naturally) refused to reflect on my three prior weddings.
Did I delete the memories, the way one deletes information from a hard drive? Probably not. If I were forced to recall the dates and details, I have no doubt that I could. But even if they are still stored in some corner of my brain, they aren’t part of my consciousness. They are stored and packed away in neat boxes, never to be opened again.
The same thing works, I believe, for sex. Some advocates for abstinence argue that too much sexual experience (whatever that is) can ruin one’s future marriage. They warn that if you’ve had a fair number of partners and a variety of short or long-term sexual relationships, you’ll find it impossible not to compare your future spouse to these past lovers. They also warn that your future spouse may be tormented by worry over how they compare to those with whom you had sex in the past. Thus, they argue, better to remain chaste before marriage — and stay married to the same person for life. No pesky memories, no debilitating anxieties.
Such warnings give human beings far too little credit. While it is absolutely true that for many of us, our sexual experiences get seared into our consciousness, it is — in my experience — false that we will invariably be haunted or titillated by those memories. Obviously, if we choose to dwell on the past we’ll keep our memories of past sexual experiences alive and close to the surface. Many people I know — including myself in my younger years — feel an intense desire to hold on to these recollections.
Since human memory is notoriously faulty, what we end up holding on to is frequently a very edited version of what actually happened. If we think of our memories as videotapes, what we’ve got in our consciousness is not actual raw footage, but a carefully reworked narrative that is edited and re-edited year after year. Frequently, I’ve noticed, people tend to edit out the awkwardness and the anxiety, and add in extra doses of excitement. The memory of a past sexual experience thus ends up being infinitely "better" than the actual incident was in the first place!
The danger is obvious: our very real present can rarely complete with the carefully edited film productions of our minds. For those of us who have had considerable experience, the danger is that our current relationships may suffer by comparison. In my previous marriages, I often found myself comparing the physical relationship we were actually having to these endlessly exciting, elaborately produced videotape memories in my head. It wasn’t fair at all to my partners at the time, and it made me feel as if i was destined for a monogamous life that I can best describe as "tender tedium."
Just as I made a commitment to my current wife to store and pack away all my memories of my previous weddings, I made a similar commitment a few years ago to do away with all the memories of my past sexual experiences. For folks like me, who’ve "been around", I think this step is both difficult and vitally important. This isn’t about denial, mind you. I’m not hiding from anyone the reality that I’ve been married several times and done all sorts of different things. Indeed, I’m not particularly sorry for the things I did in the past. I had a considerable amount of fun, though I also suffered great deal of pain and I inflicted a lot of hurt. For better or worse, those experiences brought me to where I am today. But the fact that I am partially the product of my past does not mean that it is healthy or wise to indulge in reveries about what came before. While I am not torn apart with guilt over what I did, I am wary of the temptation to relive my memories. Nothing good can come of that.
This post stands in parallel to my post in July, 2005, about being respectful of one’s partner’s past. I wrote then:
When we marry, we promise each other many things: fidelity, devotion, and a willingness to share all one has. For many of my generation who come to the altar after years and years of "experience", we perhaps ought to give another kind of pledge: the promise to focus on the future together, not on the past. Real love rejoices in all the things that have made one’s husband or wife who he or she is today, knowing that without those experiences he or she would be a fundamentally different person. But despite the often overwhelming temptation to pry, I’m convinced the wisest course is to acknowledge that there are some things none of us need to know, and we can give our partners and spouses the gift of an uncondemned, unchallenged, unquestioned past.
The corollary to that is that just as we have an obligation to respect our partner’s past, we also are obliged to place our own past in its appropriate place. My wife’s job is to do her part to accept who I was and what I did and who I did it with. My job is to make sure that my own memories of those experiences do not trouble our marriage. That means not allowing images or scenarios from the past to enter into my consciousness, and if they do flash across my screen, to make sure that I quickly redirect my thoughts. For a long time, I wondered whether this would be truly possible. Though I have no way of convincing my readers of the sincerity of my words, let me make it absolutely clear that it is possible to let the past be the past, the present be the present. That’s not an easy thing for a historian blessed with an acute memory! But it needed to be done, and I’ve done it.
I guess this goes along with the “forsaking all others” part of the wedding vows.
And even those who haven’t been “expcrienced” have unrequited crushes and, in these days of ubiquitous Internet, pornographic images to deal with. At least your real-life experiences helped you to grow and mature as a person, and you won’t forget the lessons that you learned.
As a practical matter, what do you do with photographs showing yourself and a former spouse or girlfriend? Does it depend on the context? Did you trash them when the relationship ended, or only at the next wedding?
from the Buddha,
Looking deeply at life as it is
in this very moment,
the liberated one dwells in
stability and freedom.
There is a playful sketch of this, a Buddhist cartoon, on my bulletin board at school.
The Rilke you’ve used is trans. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows– see http://www.joannamacy.net
Ji, thank you for the poem from the Buddha.
K, when I was younger, I had boxes of photos of ex-girlfriends and wives. On my own, without being pressured, I made the decision to get rid of almost all of the pictures and letters. For me, it was the right thing to do. I saved a few pictures that had other important family members in it. Doing this was not an act of hostility to my exes, but a respectful, ritualized way of acknowledging that what once was is no more, and all of my emotional energy needs to go to my current relationship.
Dude, this is why I keep coming back to read you. I mean, I don’t always agree with you. But no one posts about the things you do. Tenure is a good thing, yah?
This doesn’t sit well with me at all. Being married doesn’t make your past relationships any less real or valuable. Erasing memories of your past sexual encounters seems like simple denial, and totally unhealthy. Unless you have a terrible marriage (and of course you don’t), I don’t see why memories of the past should be so threatening to the present.
Speaking for me, Sara, it is because they are past. If they were positive, I’d have kept the marriage. Why keep negativity around? I have my memories to serve as a terrible warning to never make that mistake again.
The kids have what pictures of their mothers that I had. I have them, and that’s really all I want of that part of those years; as for anything else, I see no reason to keep a shrine to failure.
Were I a widower, I might feel differently.
For me, Sara, denial is saying “That never happened.” What I’m saying is “That chapter of my life happened, it was what it was, and now it’s done. I’m closing the book on it forever, not to be revisited in my fantasies, daydreams, or quiet moments of nostalgia.” Big difference, IMHO. YMMV, of course.
Hugo I really appreciated this post and I have alot of respect for your insight on this particular subject
I have hope that memories can be put away, in time, with work. (And sorry that this is kind of bringing nastiness along to your hopeful approach to future.)
So far, not so much: memories come out in great globs of hatred and disgust whenever stuff is tied down enough in my life for there to be room for the healing process to move along. I am working at it, but I am pretty envious of people who don’t have to deal with the reality of traumatic memories of torture written into their bodies.
A truly great post! And remember the Biblical injunction to “Love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it…” (Ephesians 5).
Indeed and amen, Phil. Also from Ephesians 5:
22 Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.
24 But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.
Otis, quoting Ephesians 5:22ff without understanding that 5:21 is the controlling purpose for what follows is disingenuous at best.
I disagree. Ephesians 1:1 to Ephesians 5:21 are addressed to the church body as a whole.
Ephesians 5:22-33 are specifically addressed to married couples, in the same way that Ephesians 6:1-4 are for parent/child.
The only authority a wife has over her husband is in the realm of sex, as is detailed in 1 Corinthians 7:1-6
1) Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.
2) But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.
3) The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.
4) The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.
5) Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
6) I say this as a concession, not as a command.
So the husband’s body belongs to the wife and she has the authority to require that he “do his duty”, that is, give it to her when she’s horny. Likewise, the husband can make the same claim on the wife’s body.
Other than this, scripture affords a wife no authority over her husband.
How on earth can you read 5:21 as belonging to what comes before it, and not what comes after it? The NIV, adding in topic headings that were never in the original, tries to separate the two as you do — but since the topic switches to submission here, it’s pretty clear that 5:21 controls what follows rather than summing up what came before.
Reading from Eph. 1:1 to 5:21, no mention of marriage is made. Rather, it describes salvation through grace, acceptance of gentiles, an individual’s calling in the Spirit (apostle, prophet, evangelist etc), how the individual fits into the body (the church), and repentance from sin.
Five different subjects.
5:22-33 discusses marriage.
6:1-4 parents and children
6:5-9 slaves and masters
6:10-17 The Armor of God
6:18-24 Paul asks for prayer and a blessing on the church
Five other subjects
You are the one cherry-picking.
Otis, I don’t want this thread to wander where it’s wandering, which is in to the ongoing discussion between complementarians and egalitarians, a divide which continues to split serious evangelicals. Another place, not in this thread, is the place to continue this old argument.
OK brother. I can see where some confusion may arise with this Epistle. But how about this? Same author. KJV
1Tim 2
10) But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.
11) Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
12) But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
13) For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
14) And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
15) Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
and this:
Col 3
18) Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
19) Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them
Doggone, Hugo. Do you believe the Bible is The Word of God or not?
Again, Otis, I won’t fight a proof-texting battle with you over this. Check out the website for Christians for Biblical Equality; you’ll find serious evangelicals arguing for radical egalitarianism, making the case far more eloquently than I ever can.
Thanks for the link. I checked it out. A lot of contortions to make a political statement, but I know now from whence your beliefs come. I’ll pray for you.
Otis has the better argument, Hugo. It’s clear that Paul considered men superior to women, and torturing his writings to pretend he meant otherwise is a fool’s errand. The only real question is whether these writings were the word of God, or the rantings of a male chauvinist crank who arrogantly and/or dishonestly claimed to speak for him.