Archive for the 'Divorce' Category

Rebounds and transition figures: doing it right after a divorce

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2010
in Divorce, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Marriage and Relationships
. 4 Comments

Another email, from Mallory. She writes:

I was married at 27 to my college sweetheart. This man checked all of the boxes dreamed of on the surface - doctor, boy scout-esque from a nice family - all of the family, etc. were thrilled when we were married. However, quite quickly after the wedding things fell apart and he told me essentially that he was not ready to grow-up and had to go find himself. I picked up the pieces, moved to another country with a business opportunity, and started over.

I started dating a man that is very fun, we have a great time together; he’s one year younger, we are very attracted to each other, he stimulates me intellectually and I care about him a great deal. However, I do not see it going towards a serious relationship and/or marriage. This is primarily for a mis-match in ambition levels, he is not willing to move countries, and I am not convinced he is fully ready to take on the responsibilities of a relationship on that level (needless to say a big sticking point after the last relationship).

Currently I do not want to be married, but I am ready to care for someone deeply again.
Being in my 30s, divorced, but not interested in dating lots of men, I feel like it should be okay to have a lighthearted relationship - but I cannot quite shake this feeling of maybe looking like the overweight, middle aged comb-over guy in the red Porsche when dating someone I have no intention of being serious about.

When does it become counter productive to engage in flippant relationships? Am I listening to society too much, or not enough to my gut?

Though I am fond of marriage (I’ve done it four times), I don’t think lifelong monogamous commitments are the only sort of relationships worth pursuing. I’ve come to believe, instead, that at different seasons of our life we may need different sorts of relationships to help us grow. And one of the most important kinds of relationships we can have after a divorce is with a “transition figure” who can help us process the lingering wounds and doubts that almost always remain in the aftermath of the end of a marriage.

I’m not talking about using people. I’m not talking about relying on one’s own pain as an excuse to deal cavalierly and recklessly with another human being. One basic dating maxim for grown-ups: our past history of suffering doesn’t vitiate our responsibility to avoid hurting others. It’s not enough to simply say “I’m on the rebound, watch out!” and then, having broken the heart of the person with whom we rebounded, to exclaim “What did you expect? I was on the rebound!” Nothing we’ve endured gives us the right to disregard our responsibility to consider how a sexual relationship we’re having may affect the other person emotionally. Misleading another person into believing that what is temporary might turn out to be permanent is bad form indeed, particularly for those old enough to know better.

That said, I think there’s a distinction between a “rebound” and a “transition relationship”. The difference lies in three things: our willingness to assume complete responsibility for our own actions, our honesty — in both word and deed — with the other person about what we can and can’t offer, and our own internal clarity about what purpose this relationship plays in our life. If we’re scrupulous about these things, “transitional relationships” which are time-limited but intense can be enormously healing for those who have them. Continue reading ‘Rebounds and transition figures: doing it right after a divorce’

Spared from relapse: of divorce, sex addiction, and angels in hoodies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 04, 2010
in Addiction and mental illness, Divorce, Memories and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 16 Comments

I got an email yesterday, asking me about advice for dating again after a divorce. It’s a post I intend to get to next week.

But something in the query reminded me of an another question I’d been asked by a mentee of mine. The mentee asked “Since you got sober and had your conversion, have you ever come really close to slipping back into old behavior?” The answer I gave dovetails with that of what one does after a divorce. I’ll share a story.

It was summer 2002. My third wife, E., had told me she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. E and I had met online (Matchmaker.com) in January 2000; she was finishing her doctorate at Fuller Seminary, I was 18 months sober and falling in love with Christ all over again. She had never been married before. I was eager to build a life with someone who shared my faith, shared my values, and was willing to accept a very troubled and turbulent past. E and I moved quickly; we were engaged within weeks and married in early 2001.

As I’ve written before, my third wife and I had terrific intellectual and theological compatibility. We also had very little physical chemistry. I saw that as a plus. I had grown mistrustful of “heat” with another person — in my experience over the course of many years and many relationships, the most intense sexual relationships were invariably the most unhealthy. I ought to have known better, but at this stage of my recovery, I equated heat with danger. I thought of the line I’m too lazy too look up (but I think it’s from one of the translations of Medea), the one in which a Greek chorus prays for a “small fire” of love, just enough to warm a house — but not a big fire, which will invariably burn the house down. Having burned down many houses, as it were, I was ready for something different.

My third wife did me the great favor of leaving me. We were not cruel or unfaithful or dishonest. We were incompatible in a very basic way, a way that could not be overlooked. She was unwilling to settle for kindness and conversation alone; she wanted passion, and that was something we could not generate. She promised me that I would thank her someday for leaving. I have done so. She is remarried, as am I. I hope that her new marriage is joyous.

In any case, back to 2002. I was heartbroken when E left. I also experienced a brief crisis of doubt. I doubted God. I doubted the wisdom of staying sober. The perfect narrative of fall and recovery had been shattered; I wasn’t supposed to get divorced again, not now that I was sober and faithful. In my mind, I had done “everything right this time” and still things hadn’t worked out. And as a consequence, I began to flirt with the idea of going back to old behavior. I don’t mean drinking again — that option wasn’t on the table. I meant returning to casual promiscuity.

I moved out of the home E and I shared in early October, 2002. I had rented a small apartment a few miles away. And I had a date lined up for that first weekend with a woman I’d known for years. To heck with celibacy again, I thought; I’d done that as a healing tool before. What I wanted was new skin. I was in danger of going back to a pattern I’d stayed away from for many years.

But I never went on that date. The day before I moved out, one of my favorite students, Katie, came to my office. Katie had taken a few of my classes, and regularly visited me in office hours. Katie had been “out” for quite some time; she had been in the first gay and lesbian history course I had taught at PCC. Katie had been dating her girlfriend, Jackie — whom I knew vaguely but who hadn’t been my student — for about six months.

Katie was in tears. She told me that Jackie had been chronically unfaithful to her. Jackie was sexually compulsive, she said, hooking up with and having nearly-anonymous sexual encounters with both men and women. Jackie kept pledging to stop — and kept breaking those promises. She had begged Katie to stand by her, and Katie had tried, but was now at wits end. “I’m ready to leave”, Katie told me. “But I was wondering if you would be willing to reach out to Jackie. I know your story, and I know you went through some of these same issues. I trust you, Hugo, and I was wondering if you could take Jackie to some meetings and see if you could help her.” Continue reading ‘Spared from relapse: of divorce, sex addiction, and angels in hoodies’

Divorce, break-ups, and the bitter loss of shared dreams

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 13, 2009
in Divorce and Grief
. 8 Comments

Via Amber, a blog post at the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Steve McNair story. The comments selection is particularly remarkable, and Amber notes that at one point, Coates asks:

I have an open question for readers: the person who broke your hearts the hardest, whom it took you the longest to get over, were they higher on social and economic ladders than you? Or were they lower?

Amber follows up with a question of her own:

Part of the trauma of losing a relationship is the trauma of losing the imagined future with that person. One can mourn that miscarried future, and whatever security it might have brought, without reducing the beloved to a meal ticket or a leg up the social ladder. Does this reflect your experiences?

And it’s got me thinking: not about the sad McNair story, but about the ways in which heterosexual romance in this culture is so wrapped up in aspirations and dreams, in issues of class and status. I’ve touched on this before; I’m hardly the only person to point out that we train aging men to seek out younger women as evidence of continued virility and prowess. But this sense that a particular romance opens a door to previously unattainable possibilities seems more widespread than just the older man/younger woman dynamic. It may not be universal, but it’s common enough to be nearly so. For a great many of us, a serious relationship serves to provide security, opportunity, and hope for what could not otherwise be achieved. And indeed, as Amber suggests, the grief we often feel at the end of a relationship is less over what was actually lost and more over the loss of the great cavalry of dreams we had (often unconsciously) marshalled. In other words, we mourn for what might have been at least as much as we do for what actually was. Continue reading ‘Divorce, break-ups, and the bitter loss of shared dreams’

Rights, desire, responsibility: Sandra Tsing Loh’s divorce and America’s cognitive dissonance on marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2009
in Divorce and Marriage
. 33 Comments

Sandra Tsing Loh is getting a divorce, and in her incomparable way, telling us a bit about it in the new issue of the Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off (thanks to Harvey for sending me the link), the witty social commentator whose 2005 CalTech graduation address remains one of the finest I’ve ever read announces that she’s left her husband of twenty years after falling in love with another man:

I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, “Good relationships take work.”

I admit that I have little patience for the kind of narrative of infidelity that Loh offers here; falling in love with a man other than your husband is not something that happens to you while you stand idly by. The language of “surprise” suggests a lack of accountability; Loh’s use of the passive voice (”my commitment to monogamy, at the very end came unglued”) neatly avoids a full claim of responsibility. She’s one step away from, as J.M. Coetzee puts it, “resting her case on the rights of desire”. That’s troubling indeed. Someone who runs a red light might describe himself as “surprised” that an accident happened, but it’s obvious to everyone else that a poor act of decision-making preceded the “unexpected” crash.

But then again, I don’t know that claiming responsibility means all that much; most male politicians caught with their pants down do as John Ensign did this week — they claim “full responsibility”, which sounds laudable. It’s the politically wise thing to do: admit a mistake, come clean, and throw yourself on the mercy of your wife and the American public. It’s also a rather stereotypically masculine thing to do: by claiming responsibility, you assert control. You may be thought a wretch who made a bad choice, but you still get to present yourself as a strong person; you recast yourself as a brave man tough enough to “do the right thing”. When the Ensigns and the Spitzers of the world claim “full responsibility”, they imply that bad things don’t happen to them unless they let ‘em happen — which suggests a kind of manly sovereignty over actions and emotions. I’m willing to concede that it’s possible that Loh’s being more honest here in acknowledging that in the end some of us — maybe many of us — aren’t as in control over what we feel and even how we respond to those feelings as we imagine. Loh isn’t running for office; she’s telling a story about what it’s like to be us right now through the imperfect prism of her own life. She can afford a frankness about weakness that a politician can’t. Continue reading ‘Rights, desire, responsibility: Sandra Tsing Loh’s divorce and America’s cognitive dissonance on marriage’

“My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 07, 2009
in Divorce, Favorite Posts 2009, Friendship, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 23 Comments

I’ve been thinking lately about some friends of mine, getting a divorce after more than a decade of marriage. Children are involved, but the two spouses are as amicable as one could hope to expect. What is clear, however, is that the husband and the wife each have very different support networks — or more accurately, that the wife has a fairly strong support network of family and friends, and the husband has virtually no one. And looking at the two of them is a reminder of one of the particularly unfortunate ways in which we structure white American middle-class masculinity; too often, not only is a wife a man’s best friend, she is his only friend.

We live, after all, in a culture which shames displays of male vulnerability. Though some sociologists detect signs of a shift among younger men, millions of boys in this country still grow up with the “guy code” and its rules about toughness, competitiveness, and a steadfast refusal to cry. Even those young men who do everything they can to avoid playing by the “guy rules” — the sensitive, bookish lads, let’s say — find it difficult to find other men with whom they can be open, vulnerable, and safe.

A great many young women have had this experience: they’ve been dating a fellow for a while, things have started to get serious. A fight happens, or perhaps the dude has a setback of some sort or another. One night, he breaks down in front of her, surprising them both with his sudden vulnerability. He may say something like “This is the first time I’ve cried in years” or “I’ve never cried like this in front of someone before, not since I was a kid.” Now, it’s possible that he’s just being manipulative, seeing how far this kind of emotional flattery will take him. But dollars to doughnuts, there’s a good chance that he’s being honest — it’s only in romantically and sexually intimate relationships that many men find the chance to be vulnerable.

One rather flippant but generally sound piece of advice I gave (and still do give) in youth group about sex: “Don’t get naked until you’re ready to get naked”, meaning that in relationships, it’s often wise to have some degree of congruence between emotional and sexual intimacy. Generally speaking, emotional intimacy is a good precondition for sex; the danger lies in the attempt to reverse cause and effect, and using sex as a way of generating enduring intimacy. But of course, for many men, sexual intimacy is a kind of trailhead into some deeper and more concealed parts of themselves. This doesn’t mean that heterosexual men can only trust those women with whom they are sleeping, but it does mean that sex gives a kind of permission for a man to be vulnerable. (If I had a dollar for every woman who has ever asked me if it was “normal” for men to cry after sex, I’d have enough to take my family out for a nice vegan dinner. Many women are floored by these sudden post-coital displays of strong emotion; though not universal, it’s more common than many think.) Continue reading ‘“My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked’

Rights and Sacrifice: more in response to Maggie Gallagher

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 02, 2009
in Divorce, Marriage and Politics
. 53 Comments

I want to return to the same Maggie Gallagher piece I wrote about yesterday. Gallagher, in making the case for what she calls a “marriage culture” (which she defines, oddly, as a culture which seeks to limit rather than expand the marriage franchise) suggests that what she calls “sacrifice” is at the very heart of what marriage is. And as it turns out, I think she’s right — at least, if we understand the real meaning of the word.

Gallagher writes:

These decisions are being made every day: Sacrifice or immediate gratification? The audacity of hope or the audacity of fidelity? Grownups have to choose. A marriage culture consists of offering a provisional answer to grownups about how they should choose. Marriage as an individual right offers no cultural basis for helping people answer the questions that matter most.

She’s a bit muddled there, but her last line makes good sense to me, though I stand on the opposite side. Rights don’t exist in order to provide a cultural basis for helping people grow; rights exist so that people may live their lives with the maximum degree of freedom possible without impinging too grossly on the rights of others. Marriage can be a vehicle for personal growth and transformation for some, but it is not the only such catalyst for individual change and happiness. When marriage is defined as a right rather than an expectation, and when that right is granted regardless of the reproductive potential of the persons involved, then we are all liberated. And while Gallagher thinks that all we’re liberated from by altering the definition of marriage is the duty to do hard things, I think we’re liberated from a very particular kind of idolatry.

Marriage advocates like Gallagher fantastically overestimate the power of this one particular institution to glue society together. Like a moonstruck teenager who thinks that life will be perfect when she finds true love, Gallagher thinks that the sooner we’re all in sacrificial heterosexual marriages, the more robust and joyful our common life will be. And the danger is that her very own enthusiasm for the institution undermines the long-term viability of traditional marriage. Raise young people with a reverence for marriage, combine that reverence with a denunciation of divorce as invariably selfish, and wham — you get falling marriage rates. You make an icon out of marriage, and you leave a generation of young people concluding that it either isn’t worth all of that “sacrifice”, or that they had better wait until they’re damn good and ready before dipping a toe into the nuptial pond.

Gallagher makes marriage sound like the Marines: “we’re looking for a few good straight couples”. Some young folks love the idea of joining the Marines — but most aren’t interested. We’re already seeing the signs that Gallagher’s efforts are paying off: the divorce rate, according to most sociologists, has begun to decline slightly. But it is only declining because fewer people are getting married in the first place. And contrary to what Gallagher might think, the increased accessibility of divorce and the drive for gay marriage is not the reason why so many young folks are delaying marriage (or giving up on the idea altogether.) It’s that the vision of marriage as a unique vehicle for human happiness seems more like a quaint romantic fantasy — and that the hard labor of commitment doesn’t seem very appealing. This doesn’t mean young people are lazy or afraid; it simply means that modern marriage doesn’t stand up particularly well to a cost-benefit analysis. (This is why, of course, so many social conservatives are desperate to preach abstinence — the more they can create the sense that orgasms are only licit after marriage, the greater the appeal of getting hitched.) Continue reading ‘Rights and Sacrifice: more in response to Maggie Gallagher’

Plus ça change… the more work remains to be done

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 25, 2009
in Divorce and Money
. 12 Comments

Men’s Rights Activists are eager to make the case that divorce and family custody laws in Britain and the USA discriminate against men. The Guardian reports today otherwise:

Divorce makes men - and particularly fathers - significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties. Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman’s income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years.

The research was carried out by Professor Stephen Jenkins, a director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and chair of the Council of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth.

His survey, Marital Splits and Income Changes over the Longer Term, is the first to track the changing wealth levels in Britain associated with a marriage breakdown.

“Christians Make You Earn Your Divorce”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 05, 2008
in Christianity and Divorce
. 33 Comments

I’ve been emailing back and forth with an old friend who is going through a divorce. My friend is a Christian who married young and had children early; she and her husband were enmeshed in what was, for a time, a warm and nurturing community of fellow believers. But for a variety of reasons which are not the point of this post, she and her husband found their marriage first in trouble, then irreparably damaged. And after a great deal of private anguish and almost-as-private counseling, they have gone “public” with their intent to divorce.

In a recent email to me, my friend included the line that is the title of this post. In as much as it is possible to laugh empathetically in a Facebook message, I chuckled with her as I read it. My friend has been besieged by well-meaning people, mostly from her church home, who have taken it upon themselves to do everything they can to “save” her, her husband, and their children from the disaster of a divorce. These friends are convinced that my friend is being too hasty; and as a result, keep asking the same sort of questions over and over again: “Have you really, really tried to make it work?” But have you seen a Christian therapist?” “Have you thought about what sort of impact this will have upon the kids?” And there have been a few reminders of that tired old slogan “God hates divorce”. My friend is very tired of feeling as if she has to build a legal case for her “right” (in the spiritual sense) to divorce.

I remember this well. My first two weddings were in churches (a Roman Catholic and an Episcopal one, in that order). But when these ended, few folks tried to stop the divorces. In my first two marriages, we weren’t churched; our friends were largely secular and liberal. My first wife and I were so young when we wed that in the eyes of many, our divorce was a foregone conclusion. The second marriage ended when after a period of sobriety, I relapsed on alcohol, drugs, and sexual infidelity. No one tried to talk wife #2 out of filing for a divorce! But my third divorce was very different.

My third wife and I met on Matchmaker.com in early 2000. We were both online looking for a serious relationship with a fellow Christian. I was already 18 months sober, and nearly eighteen months into my “conversion.” E and I met, had an immensely hasty courtship, and were engaged within weeks. I wanted finally “to do it right”, sure that my sobriety and my faith would at last ensure a successful marriage. E, a graduate student at Fuller Seminary, was on the cusp of 30. Virtually all of her fellow students in her program were already married, and many were parents. Evangelical Christian culture, with its hostility to pre-marital sex, often turns marriage into an idol (despite Paul’s lukewarm endorsement of the institution in 1 Corinthians 7). And for different reasons, we each felt pressured to get married. Continue reading ‘“Christians Make You Earn Your Divorce”’

The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 10, 2008
in Divorce, Ex-lovers, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage, Memories, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 10 Comments

After ten days of “all election, all the time” posting, I’m ready for something different.

I’ve got a remarkable number of friends going through divorces or break-ups right now. And a week or so ago, one of those friends asked me a question I often get: “How did you survive three divorces?” The question is usually half-facetious, half-serious. I have the quick and facetious answer down pat: “I’m the King of Starting Over”, something I’ve blogged about in the past. I know better than most how to move out of a shared space and begin a new life with rented furniture! Three divorces before my 36th birthday (still, and one hopes always, a standing family record) have given me a great many interesting stories about “new beginnings”.

But last week, my friend asked me a question I get far more rarely: “How, Hugo, do you deal with having been in love with so many women? Where do they all ‘go’ in your head and your heart?” My friend is an evangelical cradle Christian; his soon-to-be-ex wife was his first love and his first lover. He can’t imagine ever being as intimate with anyone in the future as he was with her. He’s worried that memories of his first marriage, and his first romance, will haunt any future relationship. He repeated his question: “Where do all these past lovers ‘go’?”

There’s a great line in Jane Hamilton’s otherwise over-wrought A Map of the World (which was turned into an underrated Sigourney Weaver/David Strathairn film). I don’t have the book or the movie handy, so I’ll quote it as I remember. Near the end, the lead character (who has gone through unspeakable tragedy piled on unspeakable tragedy) says of her past loves: “They’re always with you, just not consciously. They’re right beneath the eyelids.” I may be misquoting the line, but the point is reasonably clear: the past is something you heal from, something you get over, but also something you carry with you. And the lovers and exes whose bodies you knew and whose lives you shared are gone — and in some sense, need to be gone — but their influence on your own life continues.

One of the Apostle’s loveliest images is of a “cloud of witnesses” urging us on. Whatever St. Paul meant, I’ve long cherished the idea that I am watched over, and perhaps in some sense even protected, by those who have gone before. I think of my father, my grandparents, and countless other friends and relatives who have “gone to join the great majority” on the other side. As a Christian, I believe not only in a life to come but also in the promise of being reunited with deceased loved ones. I also believe, based on Scripture and on hope, that I am watched over and cared for by these witnesses. I’m not practicing some sort of ancestor worship, never fear — but though my great hope is in Jesus, my quiet comfort is also in the presence of those who cheer me on. (I know this isn’t a comforting image for everyone. I had a friend who was raised with the belief that the dead could see you, and she grew up with a genuine phobia about going to the toilet, worried that dead people were going to watch her poop.)

In any case, I don’t just apply the “cloud of witnesses” image to the dead. Continue reading ‘The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow’

Reprint: September 11, marriage and divorce

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 11, 2008
in Divorce, Marriage and Memories
. 1 Comment

This post originally appeared on September 12, 2006.

In yesterday’s New York Post (a paper I’ve never actually held in my hands, despite many visits to Manhattan), conservative commentator John Podhoretz wrote a personal commentary on 9/11: The antidote to horror is love.

Podhoretz tells the story of his rapid engagement to his wife, Ayala, in the aftermath of 9/11:

Within two months of 9/11 I was engaged to be married, within 13 months I was married, had a baby 19 months after that and another one due to be born in a months’ time.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for me. I had only met Ayala in June, and I was determined not to think about marriage for at least a year in any relationship. I had nearly ruined my life getting married precipitously after a 10-day romance in 1997, and I simply could not trust myself.

But I couldn’t be bothered with learning to trust myself. Getting married was an urgent, all-consuming need.

I took Ayala aback with the ferocity of my determination. At every turn I brought up what it would mean to be married. I was so determined that I proposed to her at 9 in the morning sitting in the living room of my Brooklyn Heights apartment, through whose window we had seen the black gash of the sky above Ground Zero every night since 9/11. She accepted - and then informed me we had to come up with a more romantic engagement story to tell her family and friends.

I’m telling the story now for the first time because I think it is romantic. I fell in love more deeply with Ayala and had to marry her because I had witnessed the worst and needed the best. Something deep and elemental within me needed to supersede the evil of 9/11 with the purest affirmation of existence - unconditional hope for the future and new life in the form of children whose presence on this earth would be the most crushing blow a middle-aged man like me could deliver to the cult of death that sought to tear out America’s heart.

I’m inclined to be charitable towards Podhoretz, even if his final sentence seems a bit over-wrought and self-congratulatory.  Too often, the "traditional family" crowd, in their desperation to affirm what they see as an institution under attack, paint the exceedingly common acts of marrying and reproducing as heroically counter-cultural deeds.  It certainly flatters the sensibilities of those who do choose to marry, stay married, and make wee ones.  But it reminds me of those who suggested, five years ago, that the best response to 9/11 was to go shopping.  I mean, I get the principle of the heroism of everyday life, but it still makes me wince to read about how a middle-aged man’s decision to reproduce was a "crushing blow" to Al Qaeda.  ("Honey, let’s make a baby!  That’ll show Osama!")

Continue reading ‘Reprint: September 11, marriage and divorce’

“Teaching May Be Hazardous to Your Marriage”: Social scientists and the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 30, 2008
in Academia, Divorce, Myth of Male Weakness, Older Men & Younger Women, Teaching and Youth
. 37 Comments

Reader and blogger Treifalicious sends me a link to this PDF file of a 1999 study on college professors and divorce. Published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, it’s melodramatically entitled Teaching may be hazardous to your marriage.

The abstract:

Kenrick et al.’s experiments demonstrate that men who view photographs of physically attractive women or Playboy centerfolds subsequently find their current mates less physically attractive and become less satisfied with their current relationships. What then would be the
cumulative effect of being exposed to young, attractive women on a daily basis? Would there be any real consequences to the men’s dissatisfaction with their relationships? Secondary school teachers and college professors come in contact with more young women at the peak of their reproductive value than others do. The analysis of a large, representative data set from the United States indicates that, while men in general are less likely to be divorced than women, and secondary school teachers and college professors in general are less likely to be divorced than others, simultaneously being male and being a secondary school teacher or college professor statistically increases the likelihood of being divorced We contend that the contrast effect that Kenrick et al. find in their experiments is cumulative and has real
consequences.

It’s an almost laughable study, save for the fact that it’s, well, so bloody infuriating. Here’s the initial premise:

Few occupations and professions afford greater opportunities to come in contact with
women in their teenage years than teachers in secondary and postsecondary schools. These
teachers experience the cumulative effect of exposure to young, attractive women who are at
their peak reproductive value more acutely than people in most other occupations.

I suppose that’s true enough, though I can’t say I think much of the term “peak reproductive value.” No offense intended to teenage moms out there, but in my experience, those who choose to make babies in their thirties often (not always) have more “valuable” resources (time, patience, finances) than those in their “peak” reproductive years.

But then the study’s authors lose me completely. They note that those who teach are slightly more likely to stay unmarried after they divorce, though the difference with the general population is barely significant. But then this whopper:

We believe that there are two possible interpretations for this finding. First,
subsequent to divorce, male teachers and professors may remain unmarried because they prefer
to pursue a series of affairs with female students without marrying them. Second, they may remain unmarried because, due to the cumulative contrast effect, any adult woman they might meet and date after their divorce would still pale in comparison to the young attractive women with whom they come in daily contact.

“Pale in comparison”? Continue reading ‘“Teaching May Be Hazardous to Your Marriage”: Social scientists and the myth of male weakness’

Three divorces, four successful marriages

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2008
in Divorce and Marriage
. 13 Comments

Ariranha has a blog post up that, very kindly, quotes at length from my old essay on being the King of Starting Over. Ariranha is going through a painful divorce herself (the subject of my original post), and mapping out her own short and long-term responses to the end of a fifteen-year marriage. It’s difficult and painful work, and she makes this excellent point:

And while in one sense I want to “keep looking forward and not look back,” as my mother says, I cannot escape the conclusion that I absolutely must spend a great deal of time “looking back.” I must do the autopsy, conduct the postmortem of this marriage. How else will I know what in me must be improved? How else will I get a handle on the dynamic and challenges I bring to a relationship? How else will I avoid dooming myself to the exact same situation, years down the road? There is a difference between honest reflection on your past, and becoming mired in the bitterness and pain of it. There is more ambiguity than the false dichotomy of looking forward or looking back. I think you have to look back. And even once you have spent enough time surveying the past, I think you still have to check it from time to time. I think it boils down to this: Attend to the road ahead, but don’t forget to check your rearview mirror.

Bold emphasis mine. She’s absolutely right. To one degree or another, we chose the partners we married, and we chose to stay with them up until whatever point one or the other of us (or both) decided to leave. Marriage, I’ve often felt, is like a movie with two directors, two screenwriters, two lead actors, and no editors. In the end, there’s a reason why you chose to write this other person into the movie of your life, and a reason why he or she did the same. Put another way, while we can be momentary victims of abuse or infidelity in a marriage, those of us who enjoy a reasonable degree of prosperity are more often volunteers for the suffering we both endure and inflict in the course of what will be an unhappy marriage. Learning how to break that cycle for ourselves, and how to make better romantic and sexual decisions, is a vital part of any post-mortem.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve been divorced three times. That doesn’t mean I’ve had three failed marriages. Marriage is, in the modern world, a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth. (That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other excellent vehicles.) A marriage is a failure if it inhibits the growth of either party; it is a success if it becomes the catalyst for individual and mutual transformation. Though all three of my divorces were painful, all three of my former marriages were, to my mind, ultimately successful in accomplishing the goal of facilitating the personal growth of the two parties involved. None were failures. I was not and am not a failure, and neither were my ex-wives. As loth as I am to buy into the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, in the case of my fourth, final, and happiest marriage I can say that my happiness and my maturity are in no small way directly due to the lessons I learned as a consequence of the first three.

Three divorces, four successful marriages. That’s how I see my past.

Grief, Remorse, and Judgment: the myth of a “right response’ to abortion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 28, 2008
in Abortion, Christianity, Divorce, Favorite Posts 2008 and Feminism
. 51 Comments

In response to my post on Tuesday, I got an e-mail from a reader who wrote that while she had come to the point where she no longer believed in banning abortion, she still considered herself pro-life. Reflecting on how she had been raised (in a conservative Christian household), she noted that she had always been taught that women who undergo abortion will invariably experience regret and depression. Faced with the reality that that is not always the case, my reader writes that she finds it harder not to judge women who don’t experience regret.

One of the hallmarks of traditional sexism is its insistence that “good women” feel certain feelings and not others. “Good girls” are expected to be interested in romance, but not in sex — especially not the latter when it is disconnected from the former. Good girls are allowed, even encouraged, to daydream about marrying their handsome boyfriends; they are discouraged (via shame) from lusting after the hot water polo players in their Speedos. These messages about what the right emotions are for women (compassion, tenderness, romantic longing) and what the wrong emotions are (ambition, horniness, anger) are taught early, usually long before puberty. And the grip of this dichotomy of good and bad feelings can be intense, lingering for a lifetime, passed on to the next generation.

I know a lot of folks who feel as my reader does. In this world view, shaped both by sexism and popular Christian teaching, remorse and regret are prerequisites for forgiveness and understanding. A young woman who has had an abortion will have no trouble finding sympathy in even the most conservative circles if she says the right words. For example, this will do nicely:

“Oh, I was so confused and scared! I had no idea what to do. I I just wanted it all to be over with, and I had nowhere else to go, so I called up the clinic and I went and ‘took care of it.’ I cried afterwards for hours; it hurt so much. At first I felt numb, and then I felt relief, and then I felt this awful sense that I had done something terrible. Every day I ask God to forgive me. I regret it so much, and I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling so horrible.”

Say that in private — or better yet, tearfully in front of the congregation — and you can expect the outpouring of warmth and forgiveness given to a Prodigal Daughter. The pastor will use you as an example, mingling admonition with a reminder about God’s grace and a wildly inappropriate but inevitable reference to Rachel the Matriarch weeping for her children. Folks will hug you and pat you and say soothing words. “We’re praying for you, sweetheart.” “Jesus loves you.” “You are forgiven.” “Thank you for speaking out; you may have saved another girl’s baby today.” And on and on it goes. Continue reading ‘Grief, Remorse, and Judgment: the myth of a “right response’ to abortion’

On “settling” and the indispensability of passion: a reply to Lori Gottlieb

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 09, 2008
in Divorce, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage, Memories, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 33 Comments

The March 2008 issue of The Atlantic has one of those sure-to-start-a-heated-discussion pieces: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. The author, Lori Gottlieb, is exactly my age: forty, on the nose. She’s a single parent, having conceived her young son with donor sperm. Lori begins:

About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

Gottlieb anticipates that this last sentence will arouse howls of indignation, but she pushes blithely ahead. She’s writing, it seems for younger women, and she’s offering what is only a slightly different spin on the by-now ubiquitous bromide that “feminism hurts women by suggesting that happiness is possible without a man.” I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t dozens of books and articles out there aimed at headstrong young women warning that if they don’t get hitched and start breeding early, they’ll miss their chance at the deepest and most satisfying source of happiness that the be-ovaried can ever know. It’s an old trope: the wiser older sister figure presenting her own story of woe as a cautionary tale. (And yeah, I know I sometimes do a similar thing here on this blog.) What’s interesting — and particularly galling — is Gottlieb’s hook: she urges smart young women to marry “Mr. Good Enough”. Continue reading ‘On “settling” and the indispensability of passion: a reply to Lori Gottlieb’

A note on Blair’s conversion, and on missing Rome

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 26, 2007
in Christianity, Divorce, Faith and People
. 10 Comments

Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.

A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.

It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.

I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.

I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.

It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.