I'll admit, since the breakup of my friend's marriage, I haven't stopped probing the supposedly immutable dynamics of male-female relationships in our time. And worst of it, all my efforts accompanied by the dubious blessings, wisdom and counsel of YouTube. Talk about absorbing far more heat than light.
What most disturbs me is what seems to be the entire ethos of the current dating market. But in particular, how demands for a certain narrow and ungenerous - if not un-Christian - kind of perfection have evidently never been more strident in determining criteria for one's choice of life-partners. As if each one of us, male and female and everything purportedly in between, were now free as never before (or rather, obliged as never before) to be everything we are capable of being. Including a good many things we're NOT capable of being. Except, of course, ourselves. Not to mention anything warmly and companionably (much less compassionately) human.
In short, it never fails to amaze me the creatures we make ourselves to be, in order to be attractively, desirably strong. As if we were acting on the premise that the most inexcusable quality - or at any rate the biggest turn-off - in any human being was vulnerability. Think of the superhumans - if not pagan demigods? - we pose as, and the postures we maintain! And all for the sake of projecting a certain air: an air of power and control, of dauntingness and intimidatingness, of steely self-composure and unstoppable will. Plus a host of kindred traits that might best be summarized by that venerable American word (and tradition) we call "coolness." Just what is it, do you suppose, that drives us to pretend that this set of "strengths" - so vital, supposedly, in dating-partners - is somehow going to equip them for lifelong marriage? Or even marriage of a decade or two? Much less the rearing of children? "Oh, but he'll (she'll) change eventually. He's got to." Really? And just how can we be sure of switching gears - whether our own or our spouse's? And with the right measure? And the right timing? And what if, even then, we somehow find ourselves totally "turned off" by the end product?
That's surely the central problem with what passes for courtship these days. We make ourselves so short-term enticing, and so long-term unendurable, not only is it a miracle that anyone should want to see us day in day out, much less live with us: it's almost the height of presumption, on our part, to expect that they should want to.
And yes, I know marriage has often been described as the triumph of hope over experience. I just never thought I'd see the day when it would become something more like the triumph of self-importance, and baseless vanity, over any rational hope.
And think of it: All because two people, in the courtship and formative years of their marital project, had succeeded in something at which all of us, always, should be only too happy to fail. They had succeeded in making themselves, and maybe even each other?, so formidably, dauntingly attractive - they had, between the two of them, created such an excess of dramatic tension, and CONtention - that any "cooling off" period, any relaxing into the normality of life was all but sure to prove the most insipid anticlimax. Not, mind you, that even the most fiercely attracted couples have any choice but to relax, or be pacified, sooner or later. For who can live constantly at fever-pitch levels of "romantic" tension?
So what do people most urgently need from each other, and today more than ever? I would begin by saying they need permission to be themselves. And in particular those aspects of themselves that they're least sure of. Or maybe even - for a variety of complicated and largely unreasonable reasons - least proud of. In short, they need permission to be themselves in their entirety. And not just to the extent that they're "self-confident": i.e., NOT just insofar as they stand up for, and assert, and exert, and even impose themselves upon others, and against others. As if this latter Self were somehow the only kind worth having. Or worth respecting and cultivating. By anyone. Especially when you consider that it is precisely this arrogance in us - precisely this Self whose weight we most like to "throw around" - which is the most unnatural, the most de-Edenized, the most un-souled part of us: the side that bears least resemblance to the creature we were created by God. Or (and to look at the matter from what seems to me a yet more Scriptural standpoint), it is that part of us which is most ashamed of having any regrets. And so is least humbled by what others (or, indeed, any rational outside observer) would call its mistakes. Including some very ancient, and ancestral mistakes. If not primordial ones. Like eating a certain forbidden fruit, for instance. It is, in a word, that most radically corrupted Self in us which feels most justified, most emboldened, not only not to look back, NOT to regret that we were once expelled from a certain Garden. It feels even prouder - to say nothing of relieved - at having lost all hope of its intimacy, its delight, its peace, ever being restored.
Which peace, if I remember correctly, was once shattered by a man and a woman, and at the very genesis of their building a life together. And of course (as no less a moral exemplar than Lady Macbeth reminds us), what's done cannot be undone. Still, I can't help wondering: If we their children go on refusing to draw hope from the full memory of our origins - yes, even unto the garden we've lost - just how are we ever going to give hope to the children we cultivate?
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