Selling the New Job to Men

I read in the New York Times the other day that it is still hard to get men to do their share of the work at home and I want to think about that a little today. Just to give you a sense of how this is going to line up, let me say that as a political scientist, I have studied power relations for many years. Since “micropolitics” was just getting popular when I was just starting doctoral work, I studied a lot about power between persons. Also, I have been attracted for some years now to gender studies. The fact that some persons are men and some women makes a huge difference in how problems come up, how they are defined, and how they are resolved.

Now I want to start somewhere else. Imagine that this is a “sermon” on power and gender and that I am going to start with three important texts.

Text 1: Vaseline makes skin products for men and for women. They are advertised separately to men and to women, which suggests to me that Unilever knows something about how products are chosen than ordinary mortals do. The Vaseline products for women claim to make women’s skin soft. The Vaseline products for men claim to make men’s skin strong.

Text 2: John Gray has developed a special relationship with gender. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was first published in 1992. Today, nearly twenty years later, it’s hard to tell whether he is changing any minds any more or whether people who like the way he handles gender—different but complementary—eventually find his books. In any case, Gray knows what Unilever knows. Men buy products—and arguments—for different reasons than women do. Not all kinds of arguments, probably, but arguments that bear on values or behaviors that are associated with being a man or being a woman.

Here’s Gray: “The instincts that sent warriors boldly into battle to defend themselves and protect their loved ones come into play when a modern man tries to listen to a modern woman. To prevail, he must learn to duck and dodge.” [For context, the issue here is how men should respond when they are receiving blame and criticism from women. In this setting, he probably has husbands and wives in mind.] “Instead of reacting to blame and criticism, a man learns to hear the correct loving message in her words and responds in ways that diminish friction and conflict. Ducking and dodging allow a man to keep his cool and respond respectfully to a woman’s need to communicate.”

Just to make this easier to visualize, picture the “blame and criticism” as a rolling pin. The woman is beating on the man with the rolling pin—this is her blame and criticism”—but he is not getting hurt because he is ducking and dodging. This is something evolution prepared him for, you see. Going boldly into battle and surviving requires that you learn how to duck and dodge. Nothing is said here about counterthrusts. And if you duck and dodge successfully, you will “prevail” just as your warrior ancestors did.

Text 3: Let me introduce the author first this time. This is Peter N. Stearns, Heinz Professor of History at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1979, when this book was published. Here are the beginnings of several consecutive paragraphs. “While men returned to the family in a real sense in the twentieth century, they did not return in traditional male style for several reasons. It was obviously difficult to regain control over children who were substantially trained in school and lured by the company of their peers.” And a few lines later: “A rethinking of paternal purpose was almost inevitable when the continuity in work between father and son was disrupted. And in the larger setting it was easy to think of one’s sons, and daughters as well, as people to woo.”
“The renewal of familial interest among men inevitably encountered the entrenched position of women in the home. Even women dissatisfied with their domestic role or those who had entered the workforce could attempt to exclude the husband from the day-to-day authority in the family—including, of course, authority over the children—that served as their power base and the most obvious source of their self-definition.”

Those are the texts: Unilever, Gray, and Stearns. Let’s take as the problem to be solved, the problem Stearns describes. In the modern era, the men “come home” from the previously exclusive focus on their jobs, and find that they don’t know what to do. The men are now “sharing the breadwinning function” in a sense. He works at Nordstroms and she at Weiden and Kennedy. And the women are now “sharing the homemaking and childrearing function” but this is at the same place. One place. The breadwinning business takes them apart, but the homemaking/childrearing business throws them together. And on this field, the women are the home team, complete with loyal fans, and the men are the visitors.

The women aren’t any better prepared for the presence of the men than the men are to define themselves by their time at home. At a retirement presentation, either mine or Bette’s—I’ve forgotten now—the speaker warned the women that when their husbands retired, they would have “twice as much husband and half as much kitchen.” There was laughter throughout the crowd, but it wasn’t uproarious laughter. The women’s first reaction is to be delighted to have the help. The work is set up as it had been, the decisions are hers (as they had been) the standards to be used are hers (as they had been) and the manpower is doubled. Does anything about that definition of the situation look unlikely to you? No? Then wonder whether it would look unlikely to a man who had spent his adulthood studying gender relations and the uses of power.

Two questions remain: what are the options and how can they be sold?

The question of options looks simple at the beginning. If the question is about what work—from here on out, “work” will include both maintaining the house and raising the kids—is to done at home, then he decides or she decides or they decide. It’s easy to look at that list and pick “they decide” as the best one, and it might be. Even so, there are good decisions and bad ones and if “they” decide by compromising their separate standards, the result will be ugly.

You would think it wouldn’t be that hard, but each of these adults is used to making decisions. And each comes from a history in which certain tasks were done in certain ways and belonged to certain roles within the family. It doesn’t make any sense to think that will all go away, particularly if the two central options—the ones on the basis of which the compromise will be crafted—are my way and your way.

Fortunately, there is another kind of compromise. The man and woman can set aside their own ways, as best they can. It won’t be very good. Then they can devise a problem that needs to be addressed. The crucial characteristic of the problem is that it is over there. We are here and “it” is there. The problem no longer lies between us, as if the game were tug-of-war. It is now a problem of our devising and we will succeed together or fail together.

So that’s how to decide it. The remaining question is how to sell it. At this point, I’m going to collapse the question and deal with only one side. Since the original question had to do with housework, I’m going to say that the man is the one it is going to have to be sold to. Part of the work has already been done. Women who are eager to have their husbands share the work must be willing to share the power.

Let’s say the question involves cleaning up the kitchen. I pick that one because Bette and I have had some conversations about it. The questions that follow haven’t been culled from any transcript of our conversations; they are just things I thought of at the time. By when does the kitchen need to be clean? Within half an hour of the end of the meal? Before we go to bed? Is tomorrow morning good enough? What is the value of clear counters as opposed to clean counters when only one can be done? How clean is “clean?” What products are going to be used to get the job done?

Sharing the power and sharing the work are two aspects of the same transaction.

The gender problem Stearns addressed has these elements: men respond to the new definitions (new since the end of the Industrial Revolution) of work and domesticity by coming home to a setting they don’t understand and with highly suspect skill levels. The children have nothing to learn from him so the traditional power base is gone. There are “peer groups” now. He is going to have to sell himself to his own children as a “good guy” and hope they like him. He is going to have to either negotiate a power sharing with his wife or withdraw from the work at home so he won’t have to be dictated to.
What does Unilever know that would help us? They know that men, by and large, will not buy a product that promises them softer skin. They are hanging on to their masculinity with one hand already; they don’t need softer skin. Stronger skin, now, is another matter. It’s not too hard to persuade a man that being strong is a good idea. Nor would it be that hard to define any number of tasks by the strength they take rather than by the skill they take. I remember when men started carrying babies in “backpacks” as if they were burdens. Men are all over bearing burdens. It might be the woman’s job to “carry the child” but it is the man’s job to “bear the burden.” I expected any day to see a baby carrier with racing stripes.
What does John Gray know that would help us? The same thing, really. The reason I treasure Gray’s picture of the husband/warrior ducking and dodging so that he is still in the fight when his wife has worn herself out with the rolling pin is that it is so terminally silly. Men need to be smart enough and strong enough to absorb whatever punishment their wives are going to dish out in the first fifteen minutes. Knowing that accepting it without hostility and without retaliation will allow their wives to say what they really want to say, makes it worth doing. This woman has important things to say, she just isn’t able to say them first and if her husband goes away or turns it into a contest, she will never get it said and he will never hear it.
Listening to her long enough to hear what she has on her mind is the smart thing to do and the loving thing to do. What Gray has decided is that smart and loving aren’t enough; it has to be “the manly thing to do” also and if it is the manly thing, a lot of husbands will do it who would not do it otherwise. The warrior/husband seems way too much to me, but I would be a fool to put my notions of what will sell the product up against Gray, who has, after all, sold a lot of product.

Emotional Fidelity II, the Inside Game

In Part I, I argued that there were things married partners could do outside their marriages to increase the chances of emotional intimacy within their marriages. It was complicated, but it wasn’t that hard to write. In this one, I am going to try to say that emotional fidelity within the marriage is the richest and best sharing of the “within-most” of the partners.[1] And when I am done impaling myself on that stake, I am going to try to say that there is a third thing—a kind of setting, an agreement, a commitment—which represents what the relationship needs. The simple way to say it (this is the only simple thing about it) is that “it,” the relationship, has needs that are not identical to his needs and her needs.

It is worth remembering that our word intimacy is built from the superlative form—the “best” in good, better, best—of the Latin intus = within. What is “intimate” in this understanding is what is “the very most within” part of us. That might seem incontestable, particularly since I backed into it from the etymological side, but it is not. The crucial question it covers over is this: does “us” mean you and me, taken as individuals or does it mean “us” as a couple?

This is actually a familiar problem in grammar. “Within,” in the context of a person, means within the person. “Within,” in the context of a group of persons, means “among the persons. It is something that is “within” all of them, not “within” each of them. Following that clue, it makes sense to look for a “within me” kind of intimacy and a “between us” kind. So I will.


Let me just drop a small scheduling item here. Even starting with the solutions (that is plural because there is one for him and one for her and one for them) is going to make this too long for a blog. I’m going to try the his and hers solutions here and work on the “their solution” later. I hope not too much later.

And two small reminders of context. The first is that we are considering emotional intimacy within the context of a marriage. I’m not denying that it can occur elsewhere; I’m just more interested in marriages. Second, I am defining emotional fidelity the same way I defined sexual fidelity: doing whatever you can within the relationship to bring about the most robust and mutually satisfying intimacy between the partners.

The classic dilemma in American marriages is that the wives want to be more intimate than the husbands do. I don’t think that’s true, but let’s play with it a little. We’re going to need a practice couple. I’ve got Albert and Sally here.[2] The job today is to solve their problem formally, i.e., not practically.

In the marriage described above, Albert will begin by feeling intruded upon. Sally wants to get closer to him than he wants her to be. Whatever he is going to do, it is going to have to be something he can begin to do while he is still feeling intruded upon?


Albert’s Problem


The first thing Albert might think of is just to tough it out. Just get through it. This is particularly true if it is early in the relationship and she is seeking romantic intimacy and he is seeking erotic intimacy. That is one of the many good reasons not to seek erotic intimacy early in the relationship, by the way. It complicates something that is already pretty complicated. In any case, Albert puts up with what feels like emotional intrusion by Sally, thinking either that it is worth it or that there is no need for him to admit that what Sally wants from him seems genuinely bizarre.

Toughing it out won’t work. Sally will know she is not achieving the intimacy she desires and will try harder. Albert may think he did pretty well in getting through the first round, but he really should know more about tournaments that that. The later rounds require a considerably better game than he put up in the first round and he's not getting good coaching.

The next thing Albert will do is to blame her for wanting more than she should want. Wanting “more of me,” he might say, or, if he watches TV, “violating my personal space.” This won’t work either, of course. She is not going to start wanting something different because he disapproves of what she wants. And Albert almost certainly misunderstands what she wants—there isn’t a guidebook, you know, and if there were, he wouldn’t have read it. Too much time watching TV.

So step one for Albert is this: find out what she wants. Sound easy? Try it. Try it, especially, beginning from Albert’s feeling that Sally is intruding on his rightful self-space. To start down this road, Albert will have to be willing to admit that he doesn’t really know what she wants. She is speaking a language that is, at very best, a second or third language to him and he is missing some of the grammatical fine points. And the next thing Albert must do is to stop blaming her for the fact that he is feeling intruded upon.

Two really hard things, just to start with. But it gets worse, so let’s go on. In Step 3, Albert needs to let her into this space (which he has maintained very carefully since adolescence or before), trusting her not to do any damage. But, of course, she will do damage, because she’s never been in there before and doesn’t know what she’s doing—so far as this particular man is concerned—and she’s going to hurt him. At that point, Step 4) Albert is going to have to say that it hurts. Sally will be offended, but there is no help for that. Albert is going to have to say that it hurts (or was uncomfortable or scary or however it occurs to him to characterize it) without blaming her. He will also have to be open to the idea that he might get used to this and then come to like it and then come to take it for granted. If it gets to be a really good experience for him, Albert can always remember that it was his idea originally.

Sally’s Problem

Four really hard things already and I am calling these the irreducible minimum in the first steps department. Now let’s look at Sally’s problem. Assuming, still, that she wants to be “closer” than he does, Sally is going to move in to “just the right distance.” When she does, Albert will move away because she is “too close.” Sally’s feelings are going to be hurt by his moving away from her. And right then, when she is feeling hurt, she is going to have to do two really difficult things. She is going to want to push even harder for what she is calling emotional intimacy because she has not yet achieved it. She is not going to wonder why he keeps pulling away; she is going to keep on trying to achieve “the closeness we both want.” Hard thing number one: Sally is going to have to stop that.

The second thing Sally is going to want to do is to blame Albert for not wanting to be emotionally intimate with her. That’s not the right thing either although it will be immediately satisfying because it reaffirms the rightness of what Sally wants and establishes the wrongness of Albert's response to her. So hard thing number two is: Sally is going to have to try to understand, rather than condemn. That’s always hard to do, particularly when you are being held away from an intimacy you think is only right, but for Sally, nothing else will work. Besides, there will always be time to condemn after she understands him. Or to mark up helpful articles from self-help magazines and leave them on his reading table or on the back of the toilet.

Let’s pause to note the symmetry here. Sally’s job is to find out what Albert doesn’t want. In finding out what Albert doesn’t want to happen, Sally will have to forego further and more extensive efforts to achieve emotional intimacy. He can’t just tough it out; she can’t just push harder.

The second thing Sally will have to do is to forego blaming Albert for pulling away. It’s obvious that blaming him isn’t going to help him stop doing what he is doing and it isn’t going to help her understand why he is doing what he is doing. So steps one and two are, again, obvious; but doing what is obvious when you are feeling rebuffed and humiliated isn’t easy.

In Step 3, what Sally needs to do is to take as much as Albert can freely offer, trusting him to give more when he can. Sally needs to cherish everything Albert offers, every token of his emotional self, and let him know how valuable it is to her. Sally will want to say, “how valuable even this small part of him” is, but she is going to have to find a way not to say that part. Even under those circumstances, Albert is going to be reluctant to trust her and give more of himself because where she wants to go—into his intimus—hurts sometimes and he doesn’t know if he’s doing something wrong or if she’s just clumsy or if emotional intimacy is a bad idea. “That’s why,” says Lord Peter Wimsey, in only a slightly different context, “there are men’s clubs and that’s why they’re popular.” [3]

Furthermore, since this is Step 4, Sally is going to have to say that she wants more intimacy than Albert was able, even in trying his best, to provide. Sally will have to admit that it was not enough for her, that it was not what she really wanted. She will have to do with without blaming Albert and she will have to remember that what is “too little” now, may become in time, just the right amount.

Precipitous Conclusion

So this is what Albert should do, and not do, and this is what Sally should do, and not do. Is this a solution? Not even close. It is something really good, however. It is the direction in which all the solutions like—his and hers and eventually, theirs—and pursuing these first steps will help them take other steps.

This may not seem like much to you, but let me point out what has already been achieved. Albert has rejected the strategy that came first to him (it wouldn’t have worked for long anyway) and has refused to blame Sally although she is, in fact, the proximate cause of his discomfort. He has committed himself to learning what she really wants, knowing that when he learns it, it will be in her language, not his. He has chosen to say honestly that it makes him uncomfortable. He has forgiven her for the discomfort she has given him, knowing that it is inevitable if the relationship is to flourish, and he has allowed the possibility that the feelings he now has, which are uncomfortable, might become comfortable if he can adapt himself to them. Albert is a hero.

Sally has rejected the strategy that came first to her (for the same reasons Albert did) and has refused to blame him although it is he, in fact, who is refusing her what she wants and which she really feels would be best for them both. She has committed herself to learning both what he really wants (“respect” is going to come in there somewhere) and why he pulls away from her. She has committed herself to receiving graciously what Albert feels he can afford to give her and she has let him know she is grateful. At the same time, she has honestly said that it is not enough. And she has forced herself to look clearly at the possibility that in time, it may come to be enough for her, if she can adapt herself to them. Sally is a heroine.

Al and Sal, having done these things, have headed down the road to what I am calling “emotional fidelity.” The one with the greater intimacy needs (Sally, in the example) has not blamed, but has treasured her husband’s need for “integrity.” The one with the greater integrity needs (the Albert, in the example) has not blamed but rewarded his wife’s needs for “intimacy.” They are not whole or perfect human beings, but they have achieved emotional fidelity.

These few steps are, one more time, the road that leads to the solution. They are not the whole solution although just these few steps go beyond what I have seen in many marriages. Besides, the most fundamental and necessary human understanding is that the world other live in is not the same as the world that I live in. These others are not delusional, as I first thought; they are just different from me. And, furthermore, they have the same problem with me that I have with them. This one understanding is monumentally important and it isn’t about being married; it is about being human.

Teaser

The next shot to be fired will be about a solution to “their” problems. What is emotional intimacy for Albert and Sally is like a garden that both tend. That’s an analogy my friend Sharon likes. The garden has needs that are not Albert’s needs or Sally’s needs. The garden is an “it,” just as the intimacy of their marriage is an “it.” Whatever Albert and Sally might like, the garden needs to be watered and weeded and fertilized and all that. And if they serve it well, it will serve them well.

Or, to use another analogy, is there a kind of emotional intensity that is exactly the fuel their particular marriage runs on best? Is there a way of acting that either balances Albert’s need for integrity with Sally’s need for intimacy? Or is there a way that transcends both integrity and intimacy, as they understand it, and that takes them as a couple to an entirely new area where they become people they are only learning they can be?

[1] So by “emotional fidelity,” the analog to sexual fidelity, I am going to mean doing the things that will identify, pursue, achieve, and sustain the best and most satisfying emotional intimacy possible between these two particular people. “Best” is different from “most.” My view is that “most” is not always “better,” but that “better” really is always better.
[2] Just to be clear, Bette has a sister Sally and this is not her.
[3] Lord Peter didn’t mean strip joints. He means clubs for gentlemen where everyone keeps just the proper distance and where no one intrudes.

Emotional Fidelity, Part I

Recently, I wrote a post about sexual fidelity. It wasn’t all that hard to do. I played off of author Andrew Greeley’s well-polished incredulity that “fidelity” was the only virtue defined entirely by what you did not do. So far, so good. Greeley followed up with some ideas about what sexual fidelity could mean in a positive sense—actions you are committed to taking, not actions you are committed to not taking--and gave a breathless chapter or two on what such a relationship would look like.

I drafted comfortably behind Greeley in his rejection of the negative standard and his notion that sexual fidelity mostly meant putting your mind and your heart, not just your plumbing, into the project. So I liked that too.

But then I got to thinking. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

And then, to make matters worse, some people who read the blog asked me to push the relatively easy case for sexual fidelity over into some aspects of marriage that involve “fidelity” just as much, but that are harder to think about. I’m choosing “emotional fidelity.”
What is emotional fidelity? Greeley said that sexual fidelity is not doing, outside the marriage, anything that will damage the husband’s and wife’s sexual intimacy with each other, and doing, within the marriage, whatever it takes for the sexual relationship to be robust and mutually satisfying. [Footnote one] When you look at “sexuality” as “that element in a host of social relationships that bears on sex,” you see instantly that it is a complex web.

Emotional fidelity is a good deal more complicated, but I think it follows the same contours. One of the best movies I ever saw about this phenomenon is the 1984 “Falling in Love.” This sense of starving the relationship—this happened in two couples at the same time—was not something that occurred to me in retrospect. I experienced it while I was watching the movie.
Streep and DeNiro are drawn slowly toward each other, although each of them thinks it is a bad idea. There are two reasons for this outcome. One is that each has a “friend” who is pushing this match, more for their own entertainment than out of any genuine concern. The man and the woman do encounter each other casually during a commute to “the City,” as they say in Connecticut, but nothing would have come of it without the pushing of the friends. That’s one reason. The other is that there is nothing at all going on in either marriage. I’ve lost track of who the other partners are, but Streep, in her marriage, and DeNiro in his marriage, and not seeking the intimacy that will make the relationship whole and strong. They are resting on their oars while the boat drifts over the falls. Here they are meeting on the train. I really do wish you could hear Dave Grusin’s music in the background.

In the next essay, I am going to call that emotional infidelity because the partners do not seek the emotional intensity they should seek—the “not too much, not too little” level--with their mates. In this essay, I want to call it emotional infidelity for another reason. Each seeks emotional comfort outside the marriage rather than inside.

In this case, neither Streep nor DeNiro is finding in the marriage enough intensity to make the meter tick over at all. But let’s imagine it another way. Let’s say that Streep’s need for emotional intimacy is very great and DeNiro’s is not. In a situation like that, what would the standard I am developing for “emotional fidelity” imply? It seems to me that it is Streep’s job to do whatever she can outside the marriage to reduce her intensity needs to levels that her husband can accommodate. It seems to me that DeNiro’s job is to do whatever he can outside the marriage to make him ready both to want more intimacy with his wife. [Footnote two]

I’m not saying what, outside their marriage, would have those two highly desirable effects. For one thing, anything I think of could be turned into a horror story and I don’t want to be responsible for that story. For another, “what would do that” for Streep and for DeNiro is impossibly varied. If collegiality among his fellow workers sharpens his appetite for emotional intimacy with his wife, fine. Fine, especially, if he knows about that effect and does it, in part, for that reason. If exacting pursuit of an art project burns Streep’s intimacy needs down to a level where she can share them with her husband, rather than inundating him with them, fine. Especially if she does that with the knowledge that reduced level it is a gift to her husband as well.

So as dicey as this proposition is, the outlines are simple. Deal with your appetite for emotional intimacy, in your life outside the marriage, in a way that will give you a better chance to share emotional intimacy with your partner inside the marriage. I am hoping that the simple good sense of that will carry the day.

On the other hand, I’m not naïve. I know that it is much easier to blame your partner for not being “what you need” than it is to work at needing what your partner has to give. First, blaming is easier than doing anything about it; but beside that, it is true that you the “too muchness” or the “too littleness” of your partner in the marriage and at the time. It is pretty sophisticated to say, while you are experiencing the conflict at home, “Oh dear, this is not good. I’m sure he (I flipped a coin to see which sex was going to be the example) is doing the best he can right now, but he has not been able to nurture at work, the feelings that would be expressed here at home as a desire for emotional intimacy with me.” This would have to be something she said to herself; saying out loud would be like kicking him where it would really really hurt.

On the other hand, what I am calling emotional fidelity really can be affected positively by planning for your time with your mate and using the time away from him (still using the same example) to help you bring home an emotional appetite that will be a gift and not a demand. And it really cannot be affected by blaming your partner for not having the same kind of emotional needs you have.

So if there is an outside facet to emotional fidelity, it is this: doing, outside the marriage, the things that will support the most rewarding and satisfying sharing of emotional intensity within the marriage. Not doing that is infidelity. Not caring enough to do it is infidelity. Not knowing how to do it, is just work to be done, but refusing to take the trouble to learn what will work—I think that’s emotional infidelity, too.

[Footnote one] I should remember to add, every time I write one of these, that I know these questions come up in relationships that are not marriages. I am presuming marriages when I write these because I am more interested in these issues as they appear in marriages.
[Footnote two] It might be worthwhile to point out here that it is not at all uncommon for the husband to need more emotional intimacy and to be better at giving and receiving it than his wife is. But it is wearisome always to be making both cases when I am arguing that the contours are symmetrical, and the relationship in which the wife wants more intimacy than her husband is more common. At least, it is more commonly written about.
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Marital Fidelity

As a guy who pays more attention to language than most people do, I find I often oppose the inflation of adjectives. In Oregon, not too many years ago, there was a campaign against a ballot measure, the tag line of which was "It's Too Extreme!" Too extreme? If it were a little less, would it be "just right" extreme? And then with a little less, it would be "not extreme enough?" Really? And then there's "just a little paranoid." And "experiencing a little trepidation." Not to mention "awesome," meaning even less, now, than "yeah, OK." ********************************************************************************** I admit it was my generation or a generation somewhere before mine that separated the terror from terrific and the fable from fabulous and that turned luxury from one of Dante's deadly sins to a major selling point. I/We did all that. But I learned all those as a child and I learned them as proper uses, so I don't really feel too guilty about them. Today, I'm on the other side of the axis. I'm going to be arguing for a very demanding notion of marital fidelity. The charge I am laying myself open to is that I have set the bar so high that everyone who attempts it will fail. In this case, I don't think that would be so bad. But I also don't think it will happen that way. I am going to define marital fidelity as a single unitary concept, one that has integrity and clear borders--as a concept. In practice, the borders go away for sure and it might be that the integrity goes away as well, because I am arguing that married couples [see footnote 1] who like this notion will define for themselves how they will achieve it; what it will look like; what to do when the "check engine" light comes on. *********************************************************************************** I started thinking about this in the 1970s, when I read Sexual Intimacy, by Andrew Greeley. Here is what he said that first caught my attention. "It is interesting that the almost universally accepted definition of marital fidelity focuses on whether one engages in sexual activity outside of marriage. The faithful person is one who does not have intercourse outside of marriage. In no other context is fidelity defined in such narrow and negative terms. Indeed, normally, the word conveys a highly positive connotation; but in marriage, fidelity merely means that one doesn't do certain things." ************************************************************************************ I knew at once, when I read that, that it was true. "Fidelity" was, in this context, the word you used for the things you didn't do. Pathetic! As I hinted earlier, this is a word I want to put way out on the end of the axis. If we fail in our attempts, which we will, we gain more from seeing the goal clearly than we lose by our failure. This standard means that my own marital fidelity is suspect, as well as that of every other married man and woman I know. It means that "unfaithful in his/her marriage" is a stone that can be thrown at anyone. I hope that will make using it as something to throw considerably less attractive. I hope too that the people in the relationship will continue to find it useful. ********************************************************************************* It seems to me that it raises two and a half really interesting questions. If you think of a marrige, as I do, as a relationship with a blend of collegiality and intimacy, in which, borrowing C. S. Lewis's physical cues, the collegueship is the side by side part of the marriage, where the partners are pursuing the same goal and value each other as contributors to the effort and in which intimacy is the direct, face to face, part of the marriage, then we have the two questions in our sights. If the couple pursues goals, as colleagues do, then fidelity is doing what you can to achieve your common goal and helping your partner do all she can to achieve that goal. [footnote 2] ********************************************************************************** In intimacy, the face to face part of the relationship, fidelity is sharing his "inwardness"--intimus, the superlative of intus. "within," is the source of intimate--and being most fully "who he really is." As I am using the term, fidelity is a goal without any mitigation at all. More is better. But that is not the way I see collegiality and intimacy. For those traits, it is what is best that is best, not necessarily what is most. More fidelity, in other words, is always good, like "more love." But more collegiality is not always good--or maybe it is just harder to measure--and more intimacy is, in the same way, not necessarily good. There is a level of intimacy and a "kind," almost a "flavor" of intimacy, that is just right for a couple. Getting the flavor right is what is good. More intimacy might be good, but it might not. Some flavors are too strong to enjoy and must be endured. ********************************************************************************* And the half question? Sexuality. I see the erotic relationship of a couple as a part of their intimacy. I think every husband has the privilege of making his wife a wonderful lover of him. I think that every wife as the privilege of making her husband a wonderful lover of her. "Wonderful lover" means what they decide it will mean for them, but letting such a powerful part of their life drift aimlessly away because no one cares enough to save it is probably infidelity. Not daring to do, to save that special kind of intimacy, what needs to be done is not being faithful to that part of the relationship. *********************************************************************************** That is, in fact, the part of the relationship Greeley had in mind when he pointed out how absurd it is to give "fidelity" as the name for "the things you don't do" outside the marriage. His point, and mine, is that it is what you actually do inside the marriage that makes your behavior faithful or not--in addition, of course, to what you do not do outside it. It is not taking the time and not taking the risks and not leaning what you need to know that are unfaithful. Those are the failures of fidelity. It the same way, the failure to be fully and optimally collegial is an infidelity. It is not appreciating, not delighting in, what your partner brings to your common effort that is unfaithful. It is refusing to allow your partner help you refine your own skills and to take the risks necessary to help her refine hers that is unfaithful. ************************************************************************************* That is why I think that "marital fidelity" is a term that deserves to be placed where I put it, wa-a-a-y out on the high end of the axis of meaning, where most of us will fail most of the time. With that kind of clarity, it becomes a kind of North Star for the relationship. It isn't that you can get there. It is that knowing where it is means that you know where you are and how to go in the direction you and your partner have decided to go. [footnote 1] There is no reason this notion can not be legitimately extended in a number or directions I will not consider. It could be applied to "committed relationships," for instance, entirely without reference to marriage. For that reason, it could apply to gay/lesbian relationships, straight relationships or (oddly) to some mix of the two. I am focusing my attention of sexual fidelity within a heterosexual marriage because it is the only kind I actually know anything aobut. [footnote 2] To simplify the grammar and to draw most closely on the part of the relationship I know most about, I am going to presume the perspective of the husband. This is a convenience only. I believe that wives have exactly the same duty and privilege of collegiality as husbands, and exactly the same duty and privilege in intimacy as husbands. The particulars will vary, of course, not only with gender, but with the actual persons involved. The symmetry I am describing is only a formal symmetry.

Searching for the Concept 2

As you know, I have been trying to work with a collection of half-baked formulations with only one little curb—it’s not about me—to tell me when I’ve gone too far. There ought to be a way—other than the one Trail Blazers example I offered—to talk about subordinating the role of the individual to the success of the team without talking just about sports. I’m particularly interested in how that focus can sustain a marriage.

I try to clarify this notion in the context of teaching. I think that works as far as it goes. Then I try to define courtship in a way that opens it to the distinction I am working with. Then, finally, I take that courtship distinction and apply it to a marriage where the partners have and pursue a goal that is both intimate and collegial and which—the curb, again—is not about me. This essay takes me as far as I have thought about this. It ought to be a little while before I venture back.
I said I wanted to try teaching next. It is not hard to imagine a classroom setting where the interests of the teacher and of the students are opposed. The best the students can do is “we win some and he wins some.” But every gain of ours is a loss for him and vice versa. It is, more briefly, a zero-sum relationship.

I imagine there will always be some of that around the edges, but I can think of a way that it need not be at the heart of the relationship. I’m thinking of a classroom relationship that might be called coaching. In this relationship, I am the professor and “they” are the students. We agree that a certain skill—let’s say telling the difference between the axis on which an argument turns and the positions that define that axis—is something they want to learn and that I am both willing and able to teach.

So I set up a series of tasks that will both teach this skill and measure the progress of the students toward mastery. Then I teach them lesson one: an axis is the name of the argument you are proposing. They want to learn this skill and I want to help them. They make mistakes; I correct them; they are grateful for the help. They go back at the task and make fewer mistakes. I verify the correct answers and indicate just what it is about the incorrect answers that makes them incorrect. They go back at it and establish their mastery in this skill.

They are satisfied; I am satisfied; we are satisfied. Every advance on their part is a win for me as well as a win for them. They drink in both the praise and the criticism because each, in its own way, moves them toward achieving the goal we both have. That’s what I had in mind by coaching.

Once you are in that kind of a relationship—a relationship defined by mutual commitment to a task—it all just flows. But there are so many ways of not being in that relationship. I don’t want to teach them in the way they learn best. They don’t want to be there at all. They want to be there so long as “the performance” is entertaining, but not longer than that. If they don’t have a goal that is out there, then I can’t help them reach it and they have no reason to accept my part of the process, particularly the criticism, at all. Inside this relationship, they throw off the potentially discouraging criticisms as just another way to make progress. They accept but don’t focus on praise as just another way to make progress. They don’t take the positive things as good in themselves or the negative things as insulting. They could feel that way, in another setting, but here in this relationship, those feelings are accepted just as steps to our common success.

I’d like to look at a more complicated relationship now. You could call it “dating,” but I am going to call it “courtship.” In my way of thinking about it—admittedly not the only way—dating is what you do so you can decide whether you want to court her and by which she decides whether she wants to be courted. There is, or might be, a common goal in courtship. The only common goal in the relationship I called “dating” is the collection of information necessary to a well-informed and wise decision.

I cued this up to some degree in the last post.

I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.

The piece of this relationship that is most like the coaching I described above is the collegial part. The romantic couple has a common goal and each values the other at least in part for what the other can contribute to the common project. Imagine an Audubon Bird Census in which George says, “I want Mary on my team; she is better than anyone I know at identifying juvenile gulls.” Now let’s just take George at his word. We are not considering any other aspect of his relationship with Mary or where they will have to go at what time of day in whatever kind of transportation to see these gulls. He values her for her contribution to a project that means a lot to both of them.

But if George and Mary are the ones courting/being courted and this is all there is in the relationship, it isn’t going to be much of a relationship. And we could add half a dozen other more broadly plausible common goals, like playing soccer or campaigning together or going to a party or planning a bagel party or reading to each other aloud or listening to a complex piece of music and having surveyed all those activities, we would not have added anything at all to the relationship beyond collegiality.

So, let’s consider intimacy. As I picture collegiality side by side, I picture intimacy face to face. The questions I ask in an intimate relationship are, “Do you know who I am?” and “Do you like who I am?” Crucial questions, obviously. And, for a long term relationship, there is the matter of still knowing who you are twenty years down the road, twelve of them consumed by childcare, and still liking who you are. So it isn’t a one-time question.

But if that’s all there is, there is a very rapid, very fragile feedback loop set up in which the understanding and affiliation of the partner are all that matters. I breathe in your approval and take sustenance from it as I would take oxygen from the air. Every time I breathe in this intimate relationship and get no oxygen, there is a momentary panic. I have to have it and I have to have it all the time and I always know whether I am getting it or not.

There is no common goal here. There is deep, immediate, and fundamental nourishment. It’s vitally important. But it’s fragile. When I am that fixed on you and don’t get what I need, how to I react? Do I withdraw, discouraged or confused? To I redouble the effort to get something on the next pass (and maybe frighten you)? I don’t just not react.

Let’s go back for just a moment to the teaching situation. Professor criticizes student. Student does not attend to the criticism—it’s not about him—but to the meaning of the criticism for the mastery of the project. There’s no fragility here. It’s not about me; it’s about how to make “it” better. But in intimacy, there is no “it.” It’s just you and me and my needs and your needs and my hopes and fears and yours.

So in a friendship—a relationship in which there is both collegiality and intimacy—how do you set goals that allow me to take what I learn in the intimate part of the relationship and make it not JUST about me. It’s about me; it’s intimate. But it’s about something else too. Maybe it’s about who I’m slipping into being with you without knowing it. Maybe it’s about my missing a chance to engage in some part of your life that is really important to you. Maybe everything I say gets “taken the wrong way,” and only afterwards do I realize that I was angry about something and that’s why “you misunderstood what I was saying.”

Those are all pretty common events in a close relationship. What do we need to rescue them? We need something like an “intimate goal.” Nothing I have said so far has put those two words together. The goals I described didn’t have intimacy and the intimacy didn’t have any goals. But how about “being the person for you that I promised I would try to be?”[1] Let’s say I want urgently to be that person for you. It is deep in my heart to want that. I want it more than I want to be approved for whatever it is I am doing. If I had a goal like that, I could—I could; it would be possible—take your criticism with grace.

I could say that “it isn’t about me;” it is about my deep desire to be this kind of person for and with you. You might say that is splitting hairs, but I think I can see a little daylight between “me” and “that person I want to be for you.” And if so, then I can take your criticism the way the students took my criticism. With this goal, I take her criticism in my hand as if she had handed me a hammer so I could finish up a project we were both working on. Which is exactly true. My being this person for her is, in fact, a project we are both working on and on behalf of which she dares to make the criticism and I dare to receive it as a gift.

I know that can be done. I have seen it done. I have even done it myself a few times. I have done it enough, at least, to know how hard it is to do. I think it does take the marvelous robustness of collegiality and introduce it into the fragile glory of intimacy.

But I still don’t know what to call it.

[1] If the promise was part of a marriage ceremony, I slipped out of the courtship phase, but it doesn’t have to be. People in courtship make promises. Don’t they?

Not Fooled by Infatuation

Bette and I went to see a one-man show of The Screwtape Letters (TSL) last week. Well…one devil and an imp. It was pretty good, considering that Screwtape himself has the only speaking part and that his correspondent, Wormwood, is only a red flash in a tube, coming down (from Earth) and the reply going back up. It was good to see, though. Screwtape was so polished and urbane, yet he let you see what a voracious chaos lay beneath that surface.


It reminded me of my plan, once I got really retired—that was in 1997—to spend some time on Screwtape and play around a little with ideas that have become more important to me since I first read it, probably at college in the 1950s. I have come to care a lot about causal attribution, for instance. Screwtape cares about it too, but I didn’t have it firmly in mind when I first read it. I’d like to make a project out of this reconsideration of TSL


But not today. Today, I want to think a little about Letter 26, which you can see here. Since most of the people I write to are old, I am often the person in the discussion who has dated most recently and married most recently. So it hasn’t been as long for me as it probably has for you that these ideas really needed to be considered.


I won’t stop here to sketch in much background. Wormwood’s “patient” is a human being who has recently become a Christian. That was bad, from the elder tempter’s (Screwtape’s) point of view and confusing from the younger tempter’s (Wormwood’s) point of view. Worst, the man has just met a Christian girl and all kinds of bad things—deference, charity, patience—are going on between them. But Screwtape is an opportunist and gives Wormwood some instruction on how the present situation might be turned to their advantage. Here is the passage I’ve been thinking about.


Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity. Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word ‘Love’: let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment. While it lasts you have your chance to foment the problems in secret and render them chronic.

There is between this man and this woman an attraction that Screwtape calls “enchantment.” I would call it infatuation, meaning nothing bad by the word. I’m going to abuse it fearfully in a little while, but I’m fine with it for right now. They call this infatuation “love,” and conclude from their present concord that they have solved problems that they have only postponed. It is this conclusion that reminds me that the English word comes from the Latin fatuus, “foolish.”

It gets worse. Here’s another passage from the same letter.

The erotic enchantment produces a mutual complaisance in which each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of the other. They also know that the Enemy demands of them a degree of charity which, if attained, would result in similar actions. You must make them establish as a Law for their whole married life that degree of mutual self-sacrifice which is at present sprouting naturally out of the enchantment, but which, when the enchantment dies away, they will not have charity enough to enable them to perform.

Screwtape is evil, of course, but he isn’t careless. This couple, being infatuated with each other, treat each other extraordinarily well and are happy together. So far, so good. But two crucial mistakes have already been made. The first is that they have mistaken their infatuation for love, a state which is far into their future and which will be secured only by their mutual intention, discipline, and willingness to laugh at themselves. The second is that they conclude that their present state, in which “each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of the other,” is evidence of their love. And a third mistake is just over their horizon. It is that they expect to be able to continue, when stone cold sober, the quality of relationship only their present intoxication allows.
What to do? What to do?

I have some suggestions. All these are grounded in my own experience and a few of them are treasured memories from those few moments when I actually did what I was trying to do.

First, enjoy infatuation. It is glorious and it is real. It isn’t representative, however. It is not a good clue to how things will be when you have sobered up. It is not, for that reason, a good time to make binding commitments that are based on the notion that these feeling will continue forever. The promises you make feel absolute when you make them, but turn out to have been contingent when you try to keep them. So I think the smart thing to do is to enjoy every moment of the mutual infatuation, but plan for the life you will live together after it has receded.

Second, use the early times to put in place a set of understandings that will serve you in the later times. The state you are in is euphoric and transitory. Promising to feel that way forever is naïve. But using all that good will to lay out realistic common goals and common procedures for handling conflict isn't naive at all; it's nearly sophisticated.

Some things you can do, by using this approach, and some you can’t. You can’t lay out a way to be loving when you are angry at each other; you can lay out a way to limit the damage when you are angry with each other. You can establish routines that require only good will, not positive emotions. You can talk, at least, about what the first steps back toward intimacy will look like. You can do that when your intimacy reigns supreme—it’s a good use of that time—but only when you know it will not always reign supreme.

Third, you can work together to establish a "canary," whose death will alert you to bad things to come. I think of it as a dashboard light that comes on when things are not on course. The light doesn’t come on when things are bad and go off when things are good. Good times and bad times happen in a marriage, which is why they feature those very engaging antitheses in the marriage ceremony. The light comes on when the things that sustain the intimacy are not being done or are not being done with generosity and enthusiasm. When we are not doing, with all our hearts, the things you can do whether you feel cuddly loving or not, the light comes on.

You have to talk about it because the list of “those things you can do” is a different list for Bette and me. And doing those things “with enthusiasm and generosity” looks and feels different for Bette and me. That means when I feel I have been treated thoughtlessly, I have to be willing to say so and Bette has to be willing not to feel as if she has been charged with something. I have to treat my feeling as if it were an indicator that “we are no longer doing what we said we wanted to do.” It really isn’t about me. And Bette has to treat what I say to her not as a complaint, but as a signal that “we are no longer doing what we said we wanted to do.” So it isn’t about her either.

Those things will always be hard to do, but I really believe that the alternative is the gradual taking for granted of the gifts that were once both dazzling and empowering. Learning to do those things will take discipline, good sense, good manners, and a sense of humor. And a long time. But deciding to do those things is best done at the beginning.

Doing this work when we can will mean that our prospects are very good. Screwtape's prospects remain abysmal.

Marriage, "red in tooth and claw"

I started thinking about this when I ran across the article, “Housewives of God” in this morning’s New York Times Magazine. It’s worth reading if you are interested in marriage, evangelical conservatism, biblical interpretation, or what author Molly Worthen calls the “biblical-womanhood-industrial complex. That phrase is when I started really liking this article. I attached the whole article and if you want a fair account of it, you should click here. For me, it’s just a launching pad.

I react strongly to the positions taken by Priscilla Shirer, the person on whose life and views the article is focused. Strongly, but not in the same direction for each position. Shirer holds, for instance, that the Bible describes a kind of marriage that is God’s way and that is therefore incumbent on all Christians. The feeling I have for that argument comes very close to revulsion. If I gave all the reasons why, I’d never get to the point I want to make. Most of them are in my Page on biblical interpretation, which is here.

I do not feel at all uncomfortable with the marriage the Shirer’s have. It looks pretty good to me. By the evidence given in the article, they have a kind of marriage they both value, they love each other a good deal, and they are full partners in pursuing the goals of the marriage, which includes raising wonderful children. Take away the rationale for the marriage and just look at the marriage itself, and what’s not to like?

I’m pretty conservative about marriage—an odd thing for a man to say who in on his third wife—but the argument I would make to feminists who have nothing but scorn for marriages like this, is a liberal one.[1] Tolerance. I preach tolerance. The Shirers like it. It works for them. Priscilla Shirer’s ideology is not like yours and if they are successful in raising their children to value the family tradition, their children will not be the kind you like, but I say tolerance is a good thing. A certain social diversity is a good thing. And maybe just the smallest sliver of ideological self-doubt. is a good thing too.

The range of marriages I have seen that I would call “good marriages” is absolutely astounding. I have seen a husband and wife who dearly love each other divide the bill for a shared lunch into “his” and “hers” and negotiate about the tip. I have seen women who are substantially more powerful and more whole “submit” to their husbands out of a certain knowledge that “being who she is” would break him into tiny fragments. I have seen men substantially pad their lives with rewarding projects and relationships so they will have the resources to continue to love women who would otherwise exhaust them.

None of these marriages are the kind I would like to have myself, but they are marriages where the partners truly love each other and arrange their personal competences as they may (examples one and two) or who are making the best marriage that can be made under circumstances that would defeat lesser spouses (example three). I honor these marriages. I learn from them as I am able. But I don’t aspire to have a marriage like them and I don’t.
I am against “equality” as a goal in marriage mostly because it takes too much accounting to maintain it. I think equality in marriage should be a presupposition. If you get to comparing the fundamental worth of one partner to another, you will end in disaster no matter the conclusion you reach. And what is worse, it is silly.

On the other hand, equality isn’t similarity. It is true that the only way to police “equality” effectively, is to define the roles within a marriage as identical, but if you have a marriage where policing is the first priority, you don’t have much of a marriage. I like complementarity in my marriage. That is the kind of marriage I proposed to Bette and the kind to which she was attracted. If the equality is presupposed and the differences are developed over time as we choose within a gracious and thoughtful relationship, then Bette and I can afford to emphasize complementarity and we do.

But we have the kind of marriage we have because it is the kind we want. Neither of us thinks God has commanded us to have this kind of relationship. Neither of us thinks our marriage requires a “head of the house.” Neither of us thinks that marriages that are affirming and effective are “bad marriages,” no matter how much unlike ours they might be.

There seems to me no good reason why the contemporary turmoil over “what a marriage should be like” must be “red in tooth and claw.” Nature is “red in tooth and claw” and it must be. Marriage doesn’t have to be. In cultures like ours, predicated on individualism; in cultures like ours, in which romantic attraction is the green light for marriage; I simply can not see why marriages that work should not be celebrated by us all.

I hold that marriages should not be judged by what a collection of scripture fragments, each deprived of its context of meaning, defines as good. You can have any kind of marriage you like, so far as I am concerned, if you will just keep your notions of a divine marriage template to yourself.

[1] The bad guys in this accusation are not “feminists.” They are “feminists who have nothing but scorn…” Sometimes, with just a little attention paid to punctuation, you can say exactly what you mean. Not all the time.

Mars and Venus 2, grieving

I want to write today about grieving. I've done some, myself, and have read a good deal about it since then. I look at the trajectory of my life and realize I'm probably not going to get any smarter about this, so if I'm going to write about it, this is the time.

In my middle sixties, I experienced my first real grieving. My wife, Marilyn, died very quickly from a metastasized cancer. The first month was bad the way being sea-sick is bad. There hardly seems to be a “you” at all separate from the nausea and the disorientation. After that, the real grieving started. I grieved for the loss of Marilyn and I began to cope with being alone.

It's that process, coping with being alone, that I want to think about today. By "alone," I don't mean "without friends." I had wonderful friends; they cared for me wisely and well. I mean "without an intimate of my heart;" for me, that meant "without a wife." That's just me. I'm not knocking other arrangements.

I celebrated Marilyn's life and our life together and grieved my loss of her all at the same time. But grieving is a process; you never really get done with it. You can, with clear focus and hard work, move it from the center of your life to the periphery and that is what I have done.

It took a while to understand how I, personally, needed to work on it and a little while longer to actually get the work done. The beginning of the good part of this process was my hearing an interview on NPR. One of the co-authors of a book on grieving, Terry Martin or Kenneth Doka, was being interviewed. The book, it turned out, was Men Don't Cry, Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief. The point he was making when I tuned in was that there are two distinct styles of grieving: the instrumental and the intuitive Then he went on to make the point that hit me hardest. He said that the intuitive mode of grieving is "the gold standard in the mental health business." We're going to consider the two modes, below, (If you want to assess your own style, I've cyber-appended the survey here.) but I want first to say why this second point hit me so hard.

It meant that if I came naturally to my own mode of grieving, the instrumental mode, and went for help to someone in "the mental health business," I would have two difficulties to deal with instead of one. I would still have the slow heavy toxicity of my emptiness eating away at me. AND I would have the additional difficulty that I was grieving the wrong way! And in learning to grieve "the right way," I would be forsaking all my natural strengths and trying to learn a dependence on emotion of which I had always been wary and at which I had always failed. And the two problems, the grieving and the failure to grieve "properly," would mix together making the mixture more baffling and the outcome harder to bear. That’s why the point meant so much to me.

The intuitive mode of grieving was, in fact, the presupposition of all the self-help books I had found or that had been recommended to me. Now, suddenly, it wasn't a trouble of grieving, but a trouble of grieving "in that way." It was like learning that I wasn't allergic to "food," only to cheese. It was clear to me that I was going to need some help and that the help I needed was to clarify the implications of the instrumental mode and to get on with the job of working it.

What are the two modes like? The intuitive mode accepts the feelings of loss as the crucible where the important work will be done. The feelings of sadness and loss are accepted and processed, are made compatible with other emotional commitments. The instrumental mode regards feelings of loss as something to be grasped, to be comprehended. Understanding what is going on and deciding what is to be done based on that understanding is the task to be accomplished.

The most important lesson of the whole "Mars and Venus" genre is that there are, in fact, two cultures. If you don't know there are two cultures, you will certainly think your friend, whoever it is, is doing "it" wrong. "It" presumes that there is one good way and observation tells you that your friend is not following that way. If there are two ways and if they both work, then you need to know what your friend is trying to do before you can judge whether he or she is doing it well. That makes a lot of difference.

And it's true about grieving, too. If there is only one right way to grieve, you are certainly doing "it" wrong because the process is taxing and the outcome unsatisfactory. But if there is more than one way, the first thing to do is to look at who you are; mostly, at who you have been. When it comes time to evaluate yourself, do yourself the favor of evaluating your progress in the mode that will work best for you.

This is just as helpful if you happen to be married to someone whose style of grieving is different from yours. Many intuitive wives have accused their instrumental husbands of "not really caring" about the loss of a parent or a child or a job. Many instrumental husbands have accused their intuitive wives of "wallowing" in their feelings rather than "doing something” about the situation. But whatever your own style, your job as a loving husband or a loving wife is to help your spouse grieve in the way that works best. If it means listening, fine. If it means taking long walks, fine. If it means getting out of the road or doing a couple of extra chores to make some time available, fine.

This is really why I like Mars and Venus. Once you get out of the notion that your spouse is really trying to do something—grieving, in this case—the same way you are, the implications for actually providing some help are much clearer.

Loving your husband doesn't mean making sure he is confronting his feelings honestly. If he grieves in the instrumental mode, it might mean helping him grapple with the ideas, if you know how to help him do that, and encouraging him to act on the basis of his decisions. Loving your wife doesn’t mean making sure she isn’t hiding from “the real world” in her recurrent attention to the feelings that matter so much to her. If she grieves in the intuitive mode, it might mean honoring the power of those feelings, if you know how to do that, and granting that grieving in her own way will make her whole in the end.

Marriage Guarantors 1

Bette and I were married in December, 2005. We met in January and were ready to be married in June, but it took as long to assemble the family as to decide to choose each other as lovers and partners. The people we asked to attend the wedding received a letter addressed to "guarantors." I'm thinking of lines 4--33 for this essay. The rest of the letter is made up of short statements of the four principles and I'd like to take them one at a time over the next few months.

The theory was that no one would be invited who did not agree to be a guarantor of the marriage, but it struck quite a few of the invitees as an odd notion and we didn't push it. This post is about why I think it was a good notion, however odd it seemed.

Bette and I agreed early on the kind of marriage we wanted to pursue. There are four essential principles to this notion and by the time I met Bette, I had thought about them for so many years that I could actually say what I meant by them. We both knew that the specific form our pursuit of these goals would take would be defined by who we were for each other and who we could become for each other. So nothing about these principles is a formula that you can fit over two people who want to become a couple and direct their growth. On the other hand, it was clear to me that we wouldn't become that kind of couple if we didn't pursue the goals.

The implications of that pursuit were pretty clear to us, which is good because we were the ones doing the pursuing. It was the question of how it applied to the gurarantors that wasn't so clear. Here are two of the difficulties, as presented by the people who were asked.

1. You want to what? Come on, people don't just do that. What a weird way to make a commitment! Why don't you just start with loving each other and see what happens?

2. You want me to what? Let's see if I get this. You want me to "get" the kind of marriage you two want and to agree to give you the feedback on it that will help your pursuit. You want my active appreciation of the things you do that will help your pursuit and my cogent criticism of the things you do that will lead you in another direction. Right so far? And you want me to agree to do these things entirely apart from the question of whether I, myself, agree with them; based only on the fact that the two of you agree with them?

You can see now why we didn't comb through the list of potential invitees, weeding out those who couldn't come to grips with 1 or 2 above. But maybe you can see, too, why we wanted guarantors and why we needed them.

I've put the objections the way the potential guarantors saw them. Now I'd like to put our desire for guarantors the way we saw them. We wanted a kind of marriage that out culture allows, but doesn't really support. We knew that if only the two of us wanted it and knew what we wanted, we would be working at it alone. It's hard to work at it alone, even when it's all going well; it's really nasty to have to do that work when it's not all going well.

We didn't want to have to choose between "supporters," i.e., people who would help us have the kind of marriage they wanted us to have and "fans," i.e., people who would agree to like whatever Bette and I wound up doing. We wanted people who understood what we were after and who would agree, as friends of the marriage, to say what they thought was helping our efforts and what was hurting them.

It's a lot to ask of a friend. Friends who are perfectly willing to share their opinions, based as they are on their own preferences, are not always willing to share their judgments, based in this case on our preferences. But we couldn't think of a way to ask for less, so that's what we asked for.

Surely it is rare for a couple to go into a marriage--this was a third marriage for each of us--hoping to have just the kind of marriage the culture presupposes and will thoughtlessly support. I hope it is rare. We knew going in that some of the practices--treating compromise as a last resort, for instance--would not be supported by a culture that treats compromises as "the way to resolve differences." But we wanted to do it our way anyway and we wanted friends to help us. To me, it doesn't seem so odd when I put it that way.

Mars and Venus I

To the best of my own knowledge, I have no friends at all who are fans of John Gray's Mars and Venus industry. Standing in their shoes, I'd have to say they have a point.

Gray doesn't have any training relevant to the kind of advice he offers--although you must admit that being the head trainer at hundreds of seminars probably amounts to a real education for the trainer. His gender schema is so simplistic, you wonder whether to laugh at it or cry. Kvetching is, I believe, the accepted middle way.

He applies his arguments so very broadly that he ends up saying "this is what (all) men are like," a claim so aggressive that not even he could have much confidence in it. And he has constructed a system in which nothing, absolutely nothing, can be counted as evidence against the truth and usefulness of what he is saying.

But I am not standing in my friends' shoes. I am standing in my own shoes and I am a fan of Mars and Venus. It's really awkward for me, as you'd imagine.

I don't have any rebuttals to make against the criticisms my friends make, nor of the legion of well-credentialed counselors and researchers who make even nastier and better grounded criticisms. And I don't want to make any rebuttals. Here is the single claim that grounds and "justifies" my commitment to John Gray's work. When I do what he says to do, it always turns out better than if I did what I would otherwise have done. Or, more briefly: it works.

My friends don't argue against that. Nor, I am happy to say, does my wife.

Let me give you an example. This is the first one that grabbed my attention. The chart to which I am referring can be found on pp. 119--120 of Mars and Venus on a Date. The section is headed "Explanations Don't Work on Venus."

He Says: I’m sorry that I was late. There was a huge accident on the bridge. The traffic was terrible. It was so hot and it took so long, I was stuck behind this huge truck…

She Hears: I have a good reason for being late, so you shouldn't be so upset about this. You should be happy that I made it here at all.

Now I am the kind of guy who really hates to be at fault. I am not the only man in my acquaintance who has that particular difficulty. All my inclinations, before I read this chapter, would be to say exactly what his schmuck said. If I were told that "she" would hear what I said as this woman has heard it, I would have argued that she doesn't have any right to hear it that way and that she really ought, in the spirit of fairness, to be more generous than that. You can see what this chart would have meant to me. It was a slap in the face.

So to the best of my ability, I say whatever it takes to enable her to hear that I am sorry to have inconvenienced her. That is really the only point worth making first. Later on, maybe, there will be time for an explanation, but by that time it will not be heard as a reason why she really should feel differently than she does feel.

So here's my John Gray dilemma. I don't like his views. I don't like his system. When I do what he says to do, it works. The cost to me, so far as this topic is concerned--you noticed, I trust, that the title of this post is M & V I--is giving up my attempts to justify myself; to show that, contrary to appearances, I am not really in the wrong. The benefit is that I say to my wife what will meet her objections and open her to hear my explanation when the time is right and open her to me right away. Those sound like pretty good outcomes, especially given that the cost is so small by comparison.

So I'm a fan. Some smaller, less noble part of me wishes that I could say about the Bible what I have said about the Mars and Venus "tracts," but in fact, the Bible is not a tract--thank God--and the behavioral implications are not always straightforward. (See Frances 1, Jesus 0).