Jill and Amanda both had posts up on Monday about the “Pushkin Problem”: the issue of love, disparate literary taste, and “deal-breakers”. Their posts were inspired by this Sunday Times piece: It’s Not You, It’s Your Books. It begins:
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.
As of this morning, there are 114 comments below Jill’s excellent reflection, and twice that many below Amanda’s. And all of this has me thinking about deal-breakers, both past and present, when it came to dating or marriage.
I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until I was 17 and a senior in high school. Before that, I spent a great deal of time talking with my friends — and fantasizing to myself — about what the “ideal girl” for me would be like. I’m not talking about physical attributes, though that sort of fantasizing was not absent from my reveries. I’m talking about taste. Like so many teenagers, I cared a great deal about books and music. It was the early-to-mid-1980s, after all, and I was in perhaps the only stage of my life where music (this meant records and tapes) was hugely important. I went back and forth between listening to Sixties folk-rock and early ’80s pop-punk; Joan Baez and The Clash were indispensable components of my adolescent soundtrack. And sometime in 1983, before I had even been properly kissed, I declared, with puerile self-righteousness, that “I would never date a girl who likes Duran Duran.” As best I can remember, this was the first of many “statements of exclusion.”
My first girlfriend didn’t like Duran Duran. But she did like heavy metal, which was enormously problematic. I was listening to obscure bands like Jodie Foster’s Army; she was entranced by the Scorpions. Of course, my hormones and my heart trumped my aesthetics, as they generally do, and I started listening to Dokken and Ratt and Iron Maiden. At least, I comforted myself, she didn’t like Culture Club. And darn it all, nearly a quarter century later, I don’t listen to Jodie Foster’s Army anymore. But I still like the Scorpions.
In college, where we were expected to have at least an outer veneer of seriousness, the “deal-breakers” did indeed become literary. Like many late adolescents, I discovered Ayn Rand. Unlike many adolescents, I found her infuriating from the start, so infuriating that I issued a new edict: no dating women who found The Fountainhead inspirational. I’m happy to say that throughout a colorful sexual and marital history, to my knowledge I have never been involved in anything approaching a serious relationship with a Rand devotee. I have kept so few of the promises I made to myself when I was young, but that one I have honored assiduously.
Though I find him almost unreadable now, I fell in love with Italo Calvino when I was at Berkeley. Starting with his magical Cosmicomics, which probably had a bigger impact on me than anything else I read as a spotty undergraduate, I devoured his work. I remember that at the start of my sophomore year, while I was living in a student co-op at Cal, I started one of those typically undefined “friends-with-benefits” relationships with a housemate. We talked a lot, and one day she mentioned she was reading Cosmicomics in her Comp Lit class, and “didn’t get it.” I was horrified, and instead of letting it be, insisted on waxing eloquent to her about Calvino’s genius. The one effect the discussion had was to annoy her immensely, and any chance that our relationship would progress towards something more serious was abrogated at that moment.
I’ve been married four times: to Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Buddhists, vegans and carnivores. I’ve lived with women who loved to exercise as much as I did, and with others for whom sweat anywhere outside the bedroom was anathema. I’ve dated, lived with, and married women who loved to watch television — and with one who wanted us to have no TV at all. I learned, especially as my teens turned into my twenties and my twenties into my thirties, that all the things I had thought were deal-breakers weren’t, and those that I thought weren’t, were.
I discovered that for me, shared politics were not particularly important, at least not on most issues. Cancelling out my beloved’s vote every election day doesn’t trouble me, and indeed, the friendly arguing about presidents and policies adds a certain spice. (This is, of course, symptomatic of privilege. If I lived a life closer to the margins, perhaps I would be less willing to share a life with someone whose politics were diametrically opposed to my own.)
I discovered too that shared musical taste was not essential. My wife and I both love Emmylou Harris, but when she’s in control of what comes on in the car, she’s fond of the likes of Luther Vandross, Keith Sweat, and LeVert, all of whom make me want to pull my hair out.
But I still have my deal-breakers, byond the obvious things like honesty: I don’t think I could be married to someone who wasn’t a feminist. I couldn’t spend my days arguing against traditional gender roles in public and then live a private life with a woman who embraced a “separate spheres” ideology. While specific theology isn’t important, I don’t think I could be married to someone who didn’t believe in God and a life to come. My wife and I both lost our fathers within the past two years; we each reassured each other that there would be, someday, a happy reunion with these dear men on the far side of the Jordan. I can’t imagine having gone through those losses whilst being with someone who thought that comforting certainty was a childish fantasy.
I couldn’t be married to someone who didn’t love animals; having non-human living creatures in my care is a key component of my happiness. My views on animals have evolved to the point where I live a vegan lifestyle, as does my wife; should I ever be single again (God forbid), I would have a very hard time seeing steak in the family refrigerator.
But perhaps above all, even more important to me than faith, feminism, and compassion for animals, is something else: desire. I’m not talking about libido alone, though that is surely part of it. For me, the absolute sine qua non of committed relationship, the indispensable quality that my partner must have, is a driving ambition to change the world. Someone who says “I just want a little house with a little yard and a little comfort” — gosh, that terrifies me! The great fear of my life, as I head into what I like to think of as an energetic and exuberant and exhausting middle-age, is that I will not achieve what I was called into this world to achieve. There is so much to do — books to write, lives to touch, people to help, places to see, experiences to be had. That Gemini ENFP-ness craves novelty, not in the form of new lovers but in new challenges. I am here to love my wife and push her hard; she is here to love me hard and push me harder. I could not, would not, be with someone who didn’t believe that that process of mutual challenging was the very essence of what it means to love.
That means that if my wife reads Jodi Picoult and listens to Mos Def, I can live with what I consider to be serious aesthetic failings. In the end, we have love — and more than love, we have a common sense that we are called to something extraordinary, something we can do better together than apart. It’s hard work, but she and I both love to work hard. Were it not so, our deal would indeed be broken.
(I’m not talking about any specific person with the following comment.)
It must be really nice to have love come so easily for you countless times that you’re perfectly willing to throw something special away because the person you’re in love with likes Joyce Carol Oates novels (or DOESN’T like them), or eats his/her French fries with vinegar instead of ketchup, or whatever. There are boatloads of people out there who’ve never found romantic love even once, aching to experience what others are willing to throw away because they can’t believe their partners don’t listen to INXS.
I used to get upset while watching SEINFELD, because the characters would break up with somebody, simply because (s)he brushes up and down instead of side to side, but I was reassured that we’re not supposed to identify with the four main characters on that show — that people aren’t really like that.
Now I’m not so sure.
…my partner must have a driving ambition to change the world. Someone who says “I just want a little house with a little yard and a little comfort” — gosh, that terrifies me!
Amen! This is precisely why my last relationship didn’t work out. In one of our final conversations prior to the break-up, I asked him what he truly wanted out of life, and he said something to the effect of having a decent job and a house. I wonder why it took me five years to ask that basic question, but I finally did, and I now realize how important passion and dedication to a cause higher is to me.
To be honest, I’ve never understood the aesthetics deal-breaker. I tend to lean towards the suspicion, expressed in the original NYT article, that some of this may be excuse-making. I dunno. Sometimes, maybe someone just needs a high-falutin’ reason for being “just not that into” someone.
The only brush with a big aesthetics rub that I can remember was when, after dating about 2-3 months, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) thought that Lonestar’s “Amazed” was how she felt about us. I was a little “hehe! Okay! Fatal Attraction much?” That, and I thought and still think that the song itself was a ten on the glurge-o-meter. Maybe I feel a little better that, after nearly 5 years of marriage, she probably doesn’t feel the same (j/k)! Also, I think that “The Notebook” was one of her favorite movies (no thank you). I got my videogames and a fair number of TV shows and movies she doesn’t care for either. I think that she maybe chews through 2 books a year, if that (I’m not sure that I’ve read a novel-sized piece of fiction in a year, but read a lot of non-fiction books, maybe an average of one a month).
At any rate, we’ve found, at least as far as I can tell, that the best solution is realizing that we really don’t need to live absolutely the same lives or something, to the point that we have to have compatible tastes in everything (we have enough in common). Sometimes, it’s actually a boon not to have the same (I can always be sure that a fair amount of the food that I pick up will remain unmolested in the fridge). If you each have enough of your own thing going on, and keep enough of your own independence, the narrower aesthetic stuff fades into the background and you only trip on real deal-breakers. That, and having the TV in one room and the computer in another, help a lot.
My wife and I have been together long enough to find plenty of deal-breakers in each other. It’s been painful, but so far we have and continue to work through them and with them.
To say “I will not stay in a relationship with X” is a way of saying “my wife is an X and I am not.” So far, when I looked more courageously at myself and the reasons the relationship blossomed in the first place, I have found that I’m not as pure “not-X” as I thought.
//I used to get upset while watching SEINFELD, because the characters would break up with somebody, simply because (s)he brushes up and down instead of side to side,// etc.
In this circumstance, I must say, I think if the small things bother us so much, then the problem isn’t the perceived problem, but that they’re just not the right person for us. I don’t think it was that way on Seinfeld, by any means, but I think that’s true of most normal people. The guy whose ears didn’t fold at the top? That wasn’t what bothered me, really, it was that, at the end of the day, I wasn’t into him. Sometimes the little horrifying things are just excuses we find to justify that we’re just not into someone.
I always thought I had certain dealbreakers, but I find that I’ve completely thrown some of them to the wind in my current relationship. I think that’s what usually happens. The perfect person for you is never exactly what you thought they’d be.
Ditto. But as you yourself observe, people change, and the person who nods enthusiastically when you say you want to build that school in Africa next year may, indeed, have turned into an apathetic couch potato. So, even before marriage or commitment, you really can only know as much as a person tells you about him/ herself.
I mean to say “an apathetic couch potato one year later”
You are a highly priviliged man to be able to consider all of these possibilities. Those of us who want that comfy little house struggle to get by in this world.
Vincent, I’m not talking about material desire alone. Plenty of people who are on the margins, struggling to survive, manage to — thanks to tremendous desire — devote huge energy to changing the world.
Look, I have no problem with those who want “just a little” out of life. I just don’t want to share a bed or a life with one. And yeah, Charlotte, people do change. Illness and ageing and children change the rules. But a high level of energy and ambition usually survives, and a prolonged period of dating before marriage is a good way to see if that hunger is real or feigned.
Excuse me, it’s Scorpions. Not THE Scorpions. Jeeeesh!
the characters would break up with somebody, simply because (s)he brushes up and down instead of side to side, but I was reassured that we’re not supposed to identify with the four main characters on that show — that people aren’t really like that.
People are really like that, meaning that if you don’t like a person, all kinds of small things become painfully evident. Tolstoy showed it beautifully when he made Anna Karenina notice the ugliness of her husband’s ears, after falling in love with Vronsky.
I used to get upset while watching SEINFELD, because the characters would break up with somebody, simply because (s)he brushes up and down instead of side to side
I always had the SAME EXACT thought about that show, glad to know I’m not the only one!
Although it’s true what other people are saying that, once you realize that someone is not the one for you, tiny little things start to irk you. I’ve been there myself, wondering why I was suddenly being annoyed by what seemed to be prtty minor things. I always followed up that thought with, “Well, if it was someone who was actually right for me, those things probably wouldn’t bother me.” (That’s the theory anyways, I haven’t gotten the chance to test it out yet!)
On Seinfeld though, the story always seemed to be, “I really like her…but she has man hands! I’ve only ever seen her wear one outfit!”
People are really like that, meaning that if you don’t like a person, all kinds of small things become painfully evident.
Equally evident is that they are excuses, justifications, and rationalizations. Not reasons.
If you just don’t love someone - or, more importantly, WANT to love them - just have the integrity to say so.
And “want” is inserted on purpose. Love is a choice. If you decide not to love someone, it is quite easy to talk yourself into not loving them, disliking them, even hardening your heart and hating them. “I could never love an X.” This is a statement of intent, in essence saying “I will close off even getting to know such people for fear I might come to love them - or even consider them human beings.”
For some it’s Blacks. Or Jews. Or even Conservatives.
I believe I know what you mean here although I dare say that you might have phrased parts of this better. It seems that you’re basically saying that you want to be with (and thankfully are with) someone who shares your values, one of which is a desire to be challenged and also tikkun olam (repairing the world). Of course the phrase ‘change the world’ might be misleading as it implies something on a grand scale and I’m sure you’ll agree that there are large and small ways to ‘change the world’.
My question is this, it’s important to you that someone share your values and beliefs about feminism, animals and spirituality. Well politics, to some, is a pretty important manifestation of their values and beliefs. So why is that one not such a priority?
(Here I am, rocks you like a hurricane!)
You answer your own question, Bill: “politics, to some”… we all draw the line in different places, frequently arbitrarily, which was the point of the post!
Well the reason it surprised me in your case is that you ARE a very political person and politics are important to you.
Also, I thought the point of the post was also that as we grow older that shared values should matter more than aesthetic tastes. I’d put politics more in the former category and that’s why I was surprised that was the case with you(although I know your politics are ever changing).
Actually, the older I get, the less I regard electoral politics as an effective way to promote enduring change.
Hugo,
Are you looking for someone who will submit to His will, pray for guidance and direction, and lot God enable her to change the world with you? Or are you looking for ambition coupled wih righteous indignation as a motivator, with the target of indignation mutually shared?
I would suggest that the former is more likely to be effective and will also lead to a more fulfilling marriage.
Tom, those are hardly mutually exclusive ideals. We are called to righteous anger as well as humulity.
You find Calvino unreadable? I’m going to stop reading this blog!
Shame on you for breaking up with that nice person! Why, there are romantically-deprived people in Africa starving for relationships, and they’d be GLAD to date somebody who forgets their birthday and expects them to do all the driving!
Kidding, but I think you’re oversimplifying. The article is muddled, but “books” here being a proxy for values and ideals, and what people like or don’t like can tell you something about them. Of course it’s a little shallow to dump somebody just because they don’t share your appreciation for John Grisham. But should we pretend that what people do or don’t choose to read (or watch, or play) is meaningless? If you turn away a potential date because she thinks Karl Marx is the most profound writer in history, are you really dumping her “just because of a book”? Don’t think so.
I have an acquaintance whose politics are absurd. She does not use logic, she knows nothing except for what ain’t so, is impermeable to facts. She operates on feelings. Her leaps in discussion are so irrational that even following her is nearly impossible.
The problem, were one to be in a relationship with her, would not be the politics, but the way of thinking. How competent would she be in the rest of the world? That could be a red flag.
Mythago, I think I’m only oversimplifying if, indeed, the ending a relationship over an author really is, as has been suggested here, a facade for a deeper underlying reason, but the woman’s statement was — and I quote — “Can you believe it! He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
Hadn’t even heard of. Well, hell, I hadn’t even heard of Pushkin, either, before this thread began. Maybe I’d really like Pushkin’s writing; maybe I wouldn’t. But it’s still a piss-poor reason to get rid of something special. Why not look at it as a chance to introduce her favorite writer to her boyfriend? And how does that woman know that she’ll bounce back and find somebody new in a few weeks? Maybe she’ll never hit it off with anybody again, and a few decades later she’ll be wondering aloud if breaking it off with a guy for not knowing an author from her lit class was really worth it.
See, that’s the thing. You brought up the “starving in Africa” rejoinder as a joke, but it applies, in a way. Those who haven’t gotten to experience something really don’t want to see those who do experience it take it for granted. I remember a comedic film — it may have been by Mel Brooks — in which two people are traveling through the desert. One is dying of thirst, and watches intently as the other takes a nice long sip from his canteen, and, once sated, dumps the rest out to clean his hands and his shoes. That’s what the Pushkin reader is doing.
I’m not sure that your Karl Marx example fits. One saying that her favorite book is THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (or even something like MEIN KAMPF) is a bit different from saying she likes a certain fiction writer (or doesn’t), or admires a writer you haven’t heard of (or doesn’t).