Archive for the 'Marriage' Category

“Scrubbing the calendars of every conceivable risk”: Carolyn Hax on trust and fidelity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2008
in Friendship, Marriage, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 8 Comments

Leslie very kindly sends me a link to this Carolyn Hax column that ran in the Minnesota paper. Carolyn responds to a young man who has broken off a relationship with his girlfriend over her refusal to give up her (platonic) friends of the opposite sex. After some general remarks about the importance of honesty, Hax opines:

…you were hiding, too, behind that ridiculous opposite-sex boycott. You were hiding from the very real risk every couple faces, that one of you will fall for someone else. People who love and respect each other do so not in a vacuum, but in a world populated by others — some of whom, inevitably, will prove tempting.

If your relationship can’t survive that, it can’t survive, period, no matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk.

Emphasis in the original.

“No matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk” is a terrific line, and I am going to borrow it regularly. Hax is on to something very important: despite our best and worst efforts, we can never — thankfully — control what an adult romantic partner will do. Part of being in a real relationship, a real marriage, is honoring the omnipresent possibility that your partner could make a different choice. For some, that reality is too terrifying to contemplate, so they stay in denial; for others, that reality is so terrifying that it turns them into over-controlling snoops. And for others, that reality is part of the risk of what it means to love someone. We cannot be vulnerable to the possibility of joy without being concomitantly vulnerable to betrayal; it is axiomatic that intimacy and risk are nearly perfectly correlated. To the extent that you are unwilling to take on the latter, you assure yourself of not having the former.

My wife is somewhere in central Africa at the moment. A classic ESTP and a successful businesswoman, she travels a great deal (sometimes without me). She’s beautiful and gregarious, and every day she meets and works closely with handsome men and gorgeous women in what is our town’s most famous industry. She has excellent boundaries, or so I believe; the ring she wears is an outer symbol of a profound inner commitment, one that I am confident radiates forth from her. Mutual friends have said to me that they have seen my wife in social situations (such as “girlfriend weekends” in Las Vegas) where I wasn’t present, and that she was exuberant, extroverted, and — in her words and actions and aura — evidently married. I like hearing things like that.

My wife could be meeting all sorts of men on her trip: hot young European businessmen in the British Airways T1 lounge, dynamic Ugandan tour guides, impassioned volunteers with NGOs in Kigali or Kampala. Some of these men will be cuter than I am, younger than I am, better muscled than I am, wittier than I am, and so forth. But they won’t be the unique package of Hugo-ness to which my beloved has pledged her fidelity and her love, and I trust in that love and in her good judgment.

I meet all sorts of attractive people in my world as well. I’d like to think I exude a certain level of married-ness (uxoriousness?). I was a pretty damn good flirt in my younger years, and I consciously avoid being flirtatious with women (or men) these days. Though I always wear a wedding ring in public unless I’m working out, I am fairly certain I project a clear “taken” energy even when that David Yurman band is not on my left ring finger.

Better than most, I know marriages can end. A promise given on a wedding day is not, in and of itself, surety of everlasting faithfulness. For me, fidelity is a choice. It was a choice I made when I first decided to stop seeing other people and be “exclusive” with she who is now my wife. It was a choice I made again when I asked her to marry me, a choice I made when we were married, and a choice I make day after day after day.

The other day, I was in a coffee shop I don’t normally go to, playing with my iPhone, which I still don’t understand. An attractive woman near my age also had her iPhone out, and we started talking about our mutual frustration that the “new” model was coming so soon after we had purchased the soon-to-be-outdated ones. I was getting ready to go to Pilates, so I was in workout clothes with no ring on my finger. At one point, I caught “that vibe” from the woman in Seattle’s Best Coffee, the vibe that suggests at least some initial interest. And I made the decision that comes blessedly easily to me these days: I dropped a reference to my wife into my next sentence (remarking about my beloved’s far greater technological facility.) The tall brunette deftly picked up on it, and in that unspoken and yet obvious way, withdrew “the vibe” without the slightest hint of incivility. We chatted for a few minutes more, and off I went.

Bottom line: I make choices every damn day to honor my marriage. I have other options, my wife (younger and lovelier than I) has far more. My happiness and security are not predicated on controlling who it is that she talks to. My goal is to take all of my sexual energy and direct it towards her, and no one else: that means fidelity in fantasy as well as in body. She has told me she does the same, and I believe her. It would devastate me if I found out it were otherwise, but I am smart enough to know that joy and growth are contingent upon two things: my own trustworthiness on one hand, and my radical willingness to be open to devastation and betrayal on the other.

Carolyn Hax nailed this one; brava, sister woman.

Making it personal: getting the reluctant middle to embrace same-sex marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 17, 2008
in GLBTQ and Marriage
. 12 Comments

With legal same-sex marriages now being performed up and down the Golden State today, conservative opponents of such unions are scrambling to re-frame their opposition in a way that doesn’t make them sound like, well, party-pooping nasties.

This fall, an initiative on the California ballot will seek to undo what has already been done, and declare that marriage is reserved for a man and a woman. The task for the right-wing is tough, and Maggie Gallagher takes it on in today’s National Review, trying to make the case that the fight over gay marriage isn’t really about, uh marriage. You see, conservatives know that the more the public sees of elderly women tying the knot, or of two handsome grooms exchanging vows, the greater the reluctance on the part of California voters to “rain on the love parade.” Someone who votes “Yes” on the November initiative will be voting to invalidate same-sex marriages that have already taken place — which is, in effect, the same thing as walking up to Phyllis and Del and saying, “I don’t accept that you can pledge your love to each other in the same way that a man and a woman can.”

A certain percentage of the California public will vote against same-sex marriage no matter what, but that percentage is far from a majority. Perhaps only a third of Californians have strong religious objections to same-sex unions. Another third of Californians are enthusiastic about the idea of gays and lesbians getting married, believing that the sex of a couple has no real bearing on the real issue, which is one of love and commitment. And a middle third is ambivalent. That middle third is, perhaps, caught between a vague discomfort with the idea of “calling it marriage” and a strong desire not to be judgmental. That middle third strongly supports civil unions and domestic partnerships; that middle third, at the same time, clings to some old-fashioned ideas about the privileged position heterosexual love ought to occupy. Whoever wins the hearts and minds of that middle third wins the ballot initiative.

For those of us who support these unions, it is absolutely vital that we personalize this battle. Each and every voter who goes into a booth in November needs to understand that they are taking part in a referendum on the rights of other human beings to pursue happiness. They need to be viscerally aware that a “Yes” vote on this initiative is, in effect, a deliberate and conscious choice to invalidate the joyous marriages that have already taken place. If we can make this case, then I suspect that most of the middle third will say something like “You know, in my gut I still am uncomfortable with same-sex marriages. But these folks seem so happy, and I’m just not willing to stop anyone from a shot at a lifetime of joy together.” That’s the reasoning we want to foster. And I’m willing to bet that when forced to make a decision, 51% of California voters are unwilling to break the hearts and shatter the dreams of so many of their neighbors — and family members.

I don’t think marriage should be entered into lightly or inadvisedly, as the BCP says. But the more same-sex couples wed, the better. It’s easy to oppose gay marriage when it’s an unreal abstraction — it’s harder to undo what has already been done. Most voters don’t want to be the “bad guy”, even when they remain troubled to one degree or another by homosexuality. So the more happy, smiling faces we can put out there, the more examples of gay and lesbian couples embracing domestic bliss and fidelity we can sear into the consciousness of Californians, the more reluctant many of those voters will be to undo what has already been so joyously done.

It’s a battle for hearts and minds, baby, and with civility and grace towards those on the other side, I’m ready to fight it.

We’re gonna win, 51-49. Bank it.

Divorce, gay marriage, and disillusionment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 13, 2008
in GLBTQ and Marriage
. 15 Comments

Starting next week, same-sex marriage will be legal here in California. Despite the reluctance of a few registrars in inland, more conservative areas, each of California’s 58 counties will be issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples next week. I know several couples who will be getting married soon, including some who were wed in San Francisco four years ago during the brief period in which same-sex licenses were issued in that city.

And of course, I’m thinking about the fascinating conservative argument that allowing gays and lesbians to marry is somehow bad for marriage as an institution. I’m quite confident that my marriage — to a woman — will be just as strong next week as it is today, and most honest heterosexual married folks would say the same.

I work a lot with young people. I got married to my third wife in May 2001, and we separated just over a year later. The kids in my youth group threw a shower for us before we were married, and they — especially the girls — wanted stories about the proposal, the ceremony, the honeymoon, the dress, and so forth. My third wife and I indulged them. When I announced our separation in October 2002, many of these same kids were devastated. I remember that night in youth group vividly: several teens wept. Two of the girls were furious with me, one choosing not to speak to me for several months. When she finally did want to talk, she told me that my divorce had made her feel hopeless and bereft. She told me she was much more cynical about marriage as a consequence.

What this painful experience taught me is this: heterosexual divorce disillusions a hell of a lot more kids than will homosexual marriage. I’ve seen how my divorce(s) hurt the young people in my life; I’ve never seen any evidence of a young person being “damaged” by their awareness of a same-sex union. Yet no religious conservative tried to stop me from marrying again (and again, and again.) The divorce rate among evangelical Protestants in this country is famously as high as it is for their secular brethren, of course, so most pastors are keenly aware that the condemnation of remarriage after divorce will lose them their congregation lickety-split. Gays and lesbians are a safer target. In this sense, those within the Catholic tradition who refuse remarriage after divorce are on more consistent ground when they oppose gay marriage than those within most branches of American Protestantism, who allow multiple “do-overs”.

Of course, I’m a fan of multiple do-overs. And so too is the God I worship, a God whose grace and whose table are open to all who have stumbled again, and again, and again, and again. That grace is alive and well in this, my fourth and final marriage. If I can be wed four times, despite the chaos inflicted by three earlier divorces, surely my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve a chance to treat the institution of marriage with more care than I until recently evinced.

Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Marriage, Men and Masculinity and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 27 Comments

Amber Rhea gets the hat tip for this article in New York Magazine: The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage. That’s the title in the magazine, anyway, but when you click on the link, the title that comes up is What Makes Married Men Want to Have Affairs?, which is a very different sort of question. Asking why men want what they want is never, ever, the same question as why men do what they do.

The author, Phillip Weiss, gets us off to a depressing start:

When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine; it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’d only talked about my issue with any honesty over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and a therapist, they are all men.

So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. When people at dinner parties cried out, “What was Spitzer thinking?” I whispered to a friend that I knew damn well what he was thinking: He wanted some “strange,” to quote the old Kris Kristofferson line. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes. Straying, wandering eye, a blowup. If you have a pulse.”

What situation is that, I wonder? The situation of the middle-aged married male, caught between his promises and his urges? Apparently. Here’s Weiss’ stunner:

An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. “I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t,” says a forward-thinking friend. “There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity.” But like other of my male sources, he didn’t want me to use his name. “Don’t get me divorced!” was the refrain. All of these guys nursed a fantasy, as quaintly surreal as an old tinted postcard, of a perfectible world in which we might have sex outside our primary relationships and say that it doesn’t mean anything.

Yikes. Let’s just say, the piece goes down hill from there. The bold emphasis above is mine; it illustrates the classic fallacy of what I call the “myth of male weakness”. Here’s how the fallacy works:

1. Men naturally desire sexual variety.
2. That desire for sexual variety is very strong.
3. That desire is, in fact, so strong that it can never be resisted, and in the end, will always trump the will. It’s only a matter of time. Continue reading ‘Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue’

Three divorces, four successful marriages

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2008
in Divorce and Marriage
. 12 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.

Mildred Loving

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 6, 2008
in Marriage and Race
. 2 Comments

Mildred Loving has died. It was Loving — born Mildred Jeter — who with her husband Richard challenged Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, and eventually won the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia in the year I was born, 1967. She and her husband were lucky in love and lucky in their surname, but not lucky in longevity. Mildred Loving was but 68 when she died, and her beloved Richard died decades ago in a car accident.

I’m keenly aware that there was a time within living memory when my wife and I could not have been married in most U.S. states. Sixty years ago this October, the California Supreme Court struck down the Golden State’s laws against mixed-race marriages, leading to their gradual repeal across the country and the final victory in the Loving case nineteen years later. If my wife and I were the age of my grandparents, our marriage would have been invalid under the laws of this state and most others; if we had been the age of my parents (who married in 1964) and living in Virginia, we might too have faced arrest or “deportation” of the sort the Lovings faced. It’s a queer thought.

So many of my students today happily date across racial lines; so many successful marriages in my family today are between folks of widely disparate backgrounds. I rejoice that this blending of color and culture has become so easy and so natural. I rejoice too in the sacrifice and the courage of couples like Mildred and Richard Loving, and am happy to think of them together again — at last — this day.

I am happy also to note that in her last public statement, as reported by the New York Times, Loving, with her unique moral authority on the subject, called for the right to marry to be extended to gays and lesbians.

The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Christianity, Marriage and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 14 Comments

Jeremy Pierce posted an interesting piece yesterday: Sex and Duty. He’s taking issue with some aspects of my take on the 30-Day Sex Challenge. My basic point was that desire and duty are mutually exclusive, particularly where sex is concerned. I argued that the Pauline doctrine of mutual submission and the apostle’s words in 1 Corinthians 7 do not constitute an obligation to be sexually available to a partner when one is not in the mood.

One mistake I made in the original post gives Jeremy an opening to challenge my position. Casually taking Matthew 5:41 completely out of context, I wrote: Challenging spouses to “go the extra mile” for each other is a biblically and psychologically sound notion.

Jeremy jumps on that:

This Pauline view can be easily motivated by Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly by the Golden Rule (do to others what you’d want them to do for you) and the extra mile (if someone asks you to carry something a mile, do it for two miles, and if someone asks for your coat offer up your shirt too). Jesus speaks as if this sort of thing is a typical characteristic of his followers, and those who don’t do this are failing to be like citizens of the kingdom of God out to be. I can see how someone would apply such statements to the case at hand by arguing for a duty to have sex even when one isn’t interested for the sake of the sex.

But this is not duty for the mere sake of duty. It’s duty for the sake of the other person. If a person motivated by love for another person has a duty to do what’s loving for the other person, there may well be times when that involves having sex when one otherwise wouldn’t have been interested, and Jesus’ teaching does seem to include cases like that. I’m not sure why cases of voluntarily being willing to have sex when one isn’t interested should be exceptions to the kinds of loving acts he commands in those passages.

Of course, as Walter Wink and other theologians have pointed out, much of Matthew 5 is concerned not with how we treat those whom we love, but those whom we hate. Wink points out that the challenge to go the second or extra mile had a specific meaning:

Jesus’ third example, the one about going the second mile, is drawn from the relatively enlightened practice of limiting the amount of forced or impressed labor (angareia) that Roman soldiers could levy on subject peoples to a single mile…

It is in this context of Roman military occupation that Jesus speaks. He does not counsel revolt…

But why carry his pack a second mile? Is this not to rebound to the opposite extreme of aiding and abetting the enemy? Not at all. The question here… is how the oppressed can recover the initiative and assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed. The rules are Caesar’s, but how one responds to the rules is God’s, and Caesar has no power over that…From a situation of servile impressment, the oppressed have once more seized the initiative. They have taken back the power of choice…
Continue reading ‘The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”’

Off on America’s latest spring break, and a Friday reprint

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 11, 2008
in Housework, Male feminists, Marriage and Men and Masculinity
. 15 Comments

It’s a crazy Friday, and I’m not sure how much time I will have to post over the next ten days. I’m off on Spring Break next week (Pasadena City College has America’s last spring break, I’m nearly certain), so posting will be intermittent (but not entirely absent) between now and April 22.

Here’s a reprint of a 2005 post: Relinquishing Control: Some Thoughts on Men, Women, and the Domestic Sphere.

The comments below this post continue to come in, and there’s an interesting exchange worth following up on.

Stacer wrote:  it can be very hard for women to relinquish control over what is traditionally her domain, especially if she was raised traditionally and/or has family members who pressure her in that regard.

I replied: Helping wives to relinquish that sort of control is a task that men, especially those who also come out of a conservative background, ought to consider embracing.

Caitriona asked in response: Uhm, just how do you propose that men "help" their wives relinquish control in these areas?

This is getting into some tricky stuff.  Let’s see if I can wade through it.

I’ve known a fair number of women who have been raised with the notion that the home is their domain.   The cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, and the general presentation of the household are things they see as entirely, or nearly entirely, within their bailiwick.  While many feminists have rightly asked their boyfriends and husbands to "step up" and take an active role in domestic tasks, many traditional women have not.  In some instances, they don’t ask because they don’t expect their male partners to be interested or willing to help.  But in other cases, these women have bought in to the notion that their very identity as wives and mothers is inextricably linked with how they "keep house."

Again, it’s difficult not to share too much from personal experience.  I’ve lived with quite a few women (some to whom I was married, some not).  They came from widely divergent social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.   In some of these relationships, my partner and I agreed to live in a kind of low-key slovenliness.  (I’m a bit of a slob, as anyone who has seen my office can tell you!)  In other cases, we agreed to keep the house or apartment up to a "higher standard", and we either shared the labor or (more recently) hired help to do it for us.

Continue reading ‘Off on America’s latest spring break, and a Friday reprint’

The enemy of desire is duty: against the 30-Day sex challenge and “Relevant Church”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 20, 2008
in Christianity, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage and Sexuality
. 31 Comments

Marvin Lindsay sends me a link to the 30-Day Sex Challenge, famously initiated last month at the Relevant Church in Tampa, Florida. The challenge was simple: all married couples in the congregation were asked to have sex with each other each day for thirty days. These days were specific, mind you, running from February 17 to March 16. Presumably, the couples of this congregation are resting up this week for Easter? (Marvin’s take on the whole thing is here.)

First off, the name “Relevant Church”. I can’t think of a name for a Christian gathering I’ve liked less; it’s pandering and patronizing and offensive. It’s one of those terms (”Enlightenment” is another) that immediately creates unnecessary barriers by implying that if you aren’t with us, you’re the opposite of whatever virtuous thing it is that we proclaim to be. It’s one thing to call yourself a Christian Church, as that term doesn’t automatically imply that all others aren’t; to call yourself “Relevant” reveals the disdain you hold for the poor folk down the street at “First Baptist” or “St. Timothy’s”. I think I’m going to start a congregation called “Good Looking Hipster-People Church”, and see how that goes over.

Anyhow, on to the sex. Continue reading ‘The enemy of desire is duty: against the 30-Day sex challenge and “Relevant Church”’

Shared ambition, shared humiliation: some thoughts on women, marriage and public betrayal

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 12, 2008
in Feminism, Marriage and Relationships
. 32 Comments

With complete predictability in the aftermath of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the media has begun a frenzied analysis of how exactly it is that wives ought to respond to their husbands’ very public infidelities. The Los Angeles Times runs a story this morning about Silda Spitzer, connecting her to the suffering political spouses before her: Wife puts troubling face on the Spitzer scandal. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Joe Garofali asks Why do political wives stand by their men? And Dr. Laura, whose ability to find fault with women for everything is near-legendary, suggested on the Today Show that wives “share the blame” for their husbands’ philandering. (Next week, she explains how women’s materialism led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis!)

The feminist response to Spitzer himself is fairly straightforward: anger, shock, disappointment. But the media — and ordinary folks — seem eager for those who identify as feminists to offer up a “protocol” for how a “real feminist” woman ought to respond to the revelation of her husband’s betrayal. And the frustrating thing, of course, is that the spouse is immediately placed in a no-win situation. If she appears in public by her husband’s side (as so many have done), she risks the accusation that she is a “doormat”, or that she is willing to sacrifice her dignity for the sake of her husband’s career. If she doesn’t appear, she’s unsupportive, abandoning him in his hour of great need and crisis. She garners sympathy, but that sympathy tends to be contingent upon how well the wife lives up to the observer’s expectation of how a wife “ought” to behave. If she deviates from the script, the scorn that awaits her from all sides is as great as that directed towards her husband — if not greater. Continue reading ‘Shared ambition, shared humiliation: some thoughts on women, marriage and public betrayal’

My wife is not my daughter: a response to April Bleske-Rechek

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 3, 2008
in Friendship and Marriage
. 7 Comments

What is it with the two great Timeses (as it were), and their strange categorizations of stories? Jill complains, rightly, that the “grey lady” stuck an article about anorexia, addiction, and celebrity in the “fashion” section of yesterday’s paper. Meanwhile, today’s Los Angeles paper (truly a shadow of its once-splendid self) offers this article in the Health section: Married, with “just friends.” (The other feature article in today’s Health section has to do with seniors living on their own, which makes much more sense.)

The “Married, with just friends” piece mixes a few bits of solid insight with some whopping cringe-inducers. The author, Susan Brink, interviews some experts on the topic of opposite-sex friendships and heterosexual marriage. One such oracle of wisdom is April Bleske-Rechek, psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. Bleske-Rechek, musing on the notion that spouses are right to be mistrustful of one another’s opposite-sex pals, says:

Wary husbands and wives have an uneasy sense of the temptations out there, even if they trust their spouses. “It’s like when your teenage daughter goes to a concert dressed like a slut,” says Bleske-Rechek.

“She says, ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ And her father says, ‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’ “

Bold emphasis mine. No, professor, it’s not “like” that.

I tremble for the good professor’s students, truly I do. Continue reading ‘My wife is not my daughter: a response to April Bleske-Rechek’

“The rights of desire”: a professor-student romance makes the local news

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2008
in Marriage, Older Men & Younger Women, Sexual ethics and transformation, Student crushes and Teaching
. 13 Comments

This story popped up on my radar screen today: Professor, ex-student tie the knot.

Muata Kamdibe and Crystal Domingues aren’t looking for anyone’s stamp of approval - not from their resistant families, curious colleagues, or a gossip-prone public.

For two months, the couple managed to keep their romance a secret from everyone, knowing the kinds of whispers and judgments their 18-year age difference would spawn - as well as the fact that Kamdibe, 36, a Rio Hondo College professor, first met Domingues, 18, when she was a student in his class last fall.

But it all publicly tumbled out two weeks ago, when Domingues was reported missing by her family, then tracked down by a private detective Feb. 7 to Kamdibe’s home in Irvine.

Well, that’s one way to start off with the in-laws. Continue reading ‘“The rights of desire”: a professor-student romance makes the local news’

Poking, plucking, popping: a note on the compulsive grooming of one’s beloved

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2008
in Body, Marriage and Relationships
. 23 Comments

Though it is not available online, my post about Andrew Gomez, my student who became the first female-to-male transgendered Homecoming King in the USA, is in the new issue of XY Magazine. XY in America is not to be confused with XY Online, the Australian pro-feminist site run by Michael Flood ( a site, coincidentally, where I have an article or two available). It’s nice to see Andrew’s remarkable story continue to attract attention.

It’s a busy day, and I’m trying to finish a couple of writing projects that have March 1 deadlines, so not much time to blog.

What I did want to touch on is a lighter subject: picking.

I’ve been married four times and lived with a couple of other women for extended periods. (I never did single well, evidently, from the time I was seventeen). And just about every one of the women with whom I have lived in or out of wedlock has developed a fascination with grooming me. Whether it was searching my back for acne or patrolling my beard line looking for ingrown hairs, virtually everyone with whom I’ve been in a long-term relationship has had a strong desire to explore, poke, pluck, and pop various parts of my body. I have never once felt even the remotest desire to reciprocate.

Mind you, I like my wife’s grooming. Though it’s periodically painful to have tiny hairs torn out, zits punctured and so forth, I take it as evidence of affection. It’s obviously a behavior we humans share with a wide variety of our fellow animals; everyone from primates to penguins seems to delight in removing impurities from a loved one’s skin, fur, or feathers. Despite more than twenty years studying or teaching gender and sexuality, I’ve never given much thought to the cultural or psychological implications of this behavior in humans. In my experience, at least, this sort of grooming in heterosexual relationships is rarely reciprocal — it seems to be initiated mostly by the female partner, and is submitted to with varying degrees of willingness by the male. (In the animal kingdom, it does appear to be a gender-neutral behavior, and enthusiastically mutual.) Continue reading ‘Poking, plucking, popping: a note on the compulsive grooming of one’s beloved’

On “engendering” change

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 21, 2008
in Feminism, Links, Marriage, Quoting and Relationships
. 3 Comments

J.K. Gayle has a fine post up summarizing the history of women who have run for office. I knew all but one of the names; I learned today for the first time of Frances Farenthold. Good stuff. Also, see Reclusive Leftist for an excellent take on the “unconscious bias” that favors Obama over Clinton.

At Feministe, and at Elaine’s place, discussion has broken out over the question of how a married woman can best introduce her well-meaning but at times infuriatingly sexist husband to the basic insights of feminism. (The conversation is broad enough that it need not be limited to those who are married, and indeed, another thread has started about how to raise very young feminist daughters.) Despite some attempts at hijacking by the usual trolls, the discussion has been excellent; do check out Elaine’s post and the Feministe threads.

The last time I got involved in a discussion like this in the blogosphere, I said something idiotically pompous (perhaps at Punkass Blog, perhaps at Violet Socks) about being a “professional” who “did feminism for a living.” It was one of my many low points on the internets, and I do repent of it. The fact that I am paid to teach gender studies courses means that I am privileged enough to earn money for doing justice work, but it hardly makes me either wiser or more personally invested in the cause than other activists. But what all of these years and years of teaching feminism to often suspicious audiences has taught me is that there are indeed a few effective ways to “reach” the well-intentioned but misguided. Continue reading ‘On “engendering” change’

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 9, 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’