Monthly Archives: June 2009

More on avoiding infidelity

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Following up on the recent posts about fidelity and marriage and the possibility of platonic friendship, I’d like to build on something a commenter wrote below yesterday’s piece. I’ve included several links to older posts as well. A former student of mine writes today:

until both men and women realize that being faithful is a choice one has to make everyday for the rest of their life and not just some mountain top romantic promise, the temptations will always win out.

I think there’s some good sense in that. Being monogamous comes “naturally” for some, and presents more of a challenge for others. I don’t suggest that lifelong monogamous commitments are best for everyone, and while — as I’ve said almost ad nauseam — I do think marriage is a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth, I don’t think it’s the only such vehicle. Certainly, one of the ways in which marriage presents this opportunity to grow is through the practice of active fidelity. And fidelity is, as the commenter says, a choice one makes every day.

I know very well how affairs happen, having been recklessly unfaithful in earlier marriages. As someone who “performs” for a living, I know all too well the particular temptations inherent in this and similar professions. My wife and I are exhausted much of the time; these days, we’re busy raising our precious baby girl, co-parenting as best we can, working on our respective careers, finding time to volunteer. This week, we’re also in the throes of moving, buying one house and selling another. It’s very easy for the obligations to pile on top of each other until it seems as if every waking hour is about doing the next task, responding to the next call to duty. And while my wife and I make time to validate and connect with each other, we don’t have the leisure we might once have had to do much mutual soothing and reassuring. There’s too damn much to do, not to mention a little creature in the house who really does need lots of soothing.

So if I’m not careful, I can start to feel a bit crestfallen. If I’m not careful, I might start to think “My wife doesn’t appreciate me the way she once did”. (She might say the same about me.) With my body suffering the effects of not working out as I once did (there is very little time for exercise), my ego might begin to look about for some source of validation, something or someone to tell me how good and wonderful and handsome I still am. And of course, I work as a college professor surrounded by young people; I blog and Facebook and interact with colleagues in my usual ENFP way. Lots and lots of people see the “surface Hugo”, and the surface Hugo can come across rather well. And without being conscious of asking for it, I get lots of validation from students and colleagues and readers and friends who don’t know me as well as my wife does. Continue reading →

Men, women, friendship, and fidelity: revisiting the issue

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In the aftermath of the Mark Sanford debacle, Laura at the conservative Pursuing Holiness blog asks the old question: Can Men and Women be Friends? Her answer is the expected one: no.

Can men and women be friends? Certainly. My husband is my best friend – the ultimate “friend with benefits.” But it is unwise in the extreme to invest your emotions and build an intimacy with someone with whom you can’t complete that intimacy. Even if you are never physically unfaithful, is there any way to have an intimate friend of the opposite sex without depriving your spouse of the emotional investment to which they’re entitled?

I wrote a post four years ago on this subject. I re-read that piece of mine this morning, and as is so often the case with my “older” musings, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself in equal measure. As I mark eleven years clean and sober this week, I note that my own spiritual journey since 1998 has been a rapid and occasionally turbulent one — and as a result, my thinking on a variety of issues continues to evolve and shift as I grow and learn. The posts I put up in my first two years of steady blogging (2004-05) tended to be much more conservative in tone than the ones I’ve put up more recently. Four or five years ago, I was only just coming out of what I call my “boundary-learning” stage; after so many years of what might best be described as exuberant transgressiveness, I was until recently perhaps over-sensitive to the potential for a sexual charge in virtually any relationship. I’m glad I practiced that level of caution; it was a needed corrective to an earlier way. I note that by last year, when I put up this post about controlling boyfriends, my views had already begun to shift.

But in light of Laura’s post, and my own words from 2005, I’d like to revisit — briefly — the issue of male-female non-romantic friendship.

First of all, like Laura, in my 2005 post my approach was blindly heteronormative. If men and women can’t be friends because of the possibility of sexual attraction, then it follows that lesbians and straight women can’t be friends, nor gay men and straight guys. And bisexuals? Clearly a group for whom radical introversion and isolation is the only possible course. One mistake we make around these issues, over and over again, is that we can predict with certainty what sort of people we are going to be attracted to. The anecdotes are legion of women and men falling in love with people of their same sex after living — in many instances, quite happily — in heterosexual relationships for years and years. As a man who has been generally drawn to women throughout his life, I’ve been surprised once or twice by an unexpected twinge of attraction to a male friend. It is culturally imposed homophobia rather than biological hardwiring that prevents more men from admitting the same thing. Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Moxley’s “Epithalamium”

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In any list of great living American poets, native Californians are well represented: Kay Ryan (America’s poet laureate) and Sharon Olds have appeared on the TSP more than a few times. One of the rising stars of American poetry is surely San Diego’s Jennifer Moxley, whose recent verse displays a dazzling command of different forms as well as a passionate fusing of the personal and the political.

Moxley’s not a sentimentalist by any means. This is one of her gentler pieces, but it has its own bite.

Epithalamium

This union shall not be a contract,
the joining on whim in a frightened time,
entered solely for the benefit of those
who would wish their mistakes visited
upon the bright and the young.
This union shall not take place
beneath a passive veil of fear.
This union is a reunion — the crown
on a longed-for joining –
the final touch on the temporal cage,
the material completion
so many times dreamed of
in the cold sheets of critical youth.

In ancient times, Aristophanes described
three types of mythic beings
joined together at the back (two men,
two women, a man and a woman).
They wobbled through the primordial world
happy and whole, devoid of culture,
until they were violently split asunder
by what could only have been
an arbitrary and lonely God. The halves
thenceforward drifted through history,
riven by emptiness, passing for whole.

Yet you, in defiance of this tragic
history, have found each other anew.
Now you may dwell in the vision
of the face you felt you lost forever.
Stand before each other, self, but other,
separate yet one, a missing measure found,
a mirror in which no flaws reflect:
join and quell this exhausted drifting,
join that your kiss might align the stars
and stop the planets from their wandering.

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A note on cornerstones and the heresy of marriage worship

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Note: I wrote this post before Governor Sanford of South Carolina, another staunch social conservative, admitted his affair today. The field for 2012 to run against Obama is being winnowed fast as those who wish to deny marriage equality for all are quick to break their own pledges of fidelity. One is trying, oh how one is trying, to avoid schadenfreude.

Summer school is upon us, we’re planning a move from Pasadena to West Los Angeles, and dear little baby is back to waking up several times during the night. I certainly spend more time lecturing than sleeping, and as a result, whatever dim wit I normally have with which to blog has grown even, well, dimmer. I’m not complaining, of course; this is the exhaustion that comes from happy duty, not grim obligation. But still, when I sit down at the computer all I seem to want to do (when I’m done returning legions of emails) is read the news.

The comments below yesterday’s post in response to Kathryn Lopez got sidetracked into a discussion of “cornerstones.” A bit more explanation of the image is needed. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the reference to cornerstones goes back to Psalm 118, verse 22: The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. In the Jewish or Old Testament context, the rejected stone is a reference to King David himself; for Kabbalists, it’s a reference to the Shechinah, the feminine aspect of the divine. Continue reading →

Of hypocrisy and hairshirts and John Ensign: a reply to K-Lo

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Kathryn Jean Lopez, who will soon be leaving the National Review Online for other, yet-to-be-named pastures, has a piece up this week about John Ensign (the latest in a long line of GOP senators whose public pronouncements proved to be wildly at odds with his private predilections) and the nature of hypocrisy.

We on the left, you see, frustrate K-Lo with our suggestion that Ensign’s infidelities undermine the case for the traditional and limited marriage franchise, a case near and dear to both the senator and the arch-conservative pundit. K-Lo wants us to know that Ensign’s inability or unwillingness to remain faithful is a private failing that ought to have no bearing on the public discussion about the meaning of marriage. She writes:

A politician’s failings do not render the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. Facts remain. Marriage is a cornerstone. Under a bastardized and unfortunately widespread understanding of hypocrisy, it is “hypocritical” for someone who is not a perfect person to ever make a statement grounded in conscience, morality, or natural law. Presumably, then, all Christians should throw out their Book. The Bible is and always has been directed to sinners. And, save for the star of the show, the preaching comes from sinners, too. Christ warned Peter in Gethsemane, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” In Romans, Paul said: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” Men (and women) believing something and falling short has a long history.

I agree with all but her third sentence in that paragraph. The history of marriage, as any scholar will tell you, is less cornerstone than constantly shifting sand. And cripes, enough already with the idolatry of marriage; calling it the “cornerstone” — a term with Christological significance — is sloppily inaccurate at best and blasphemous at worst.

K-Lo is right that a politician’s failings do not make the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. For example, think of Barack Obama’s struggle with smoking. As someone who has proved supremely self-controlled in so many areas of life, it is striking — and humanizing — that he has been unable to kick the nicotine habit entirely. But his own addiction doesn’t mean that he can’t hold a strong position in favor of regulating tobacco; indeed, his sense of his own weakness gives strength to the argument that this is a dangerous substance deserving of greater regulation. He has pointedly not called for a ban on smoking either.

But while a politician’s failings do not mean he forfeits a right to speak out on issues, his failings aren’t incidental to his politics. K-Lo is wrong to suggest that Ensign’s fall from grace is completely unrelated to his views on marriage and sexual matters. It is axiomatic, after all, that we rail and splutter with the greatest indignation against those things we loathe inside ourselves. Those who combine great political power with an acute consciousness of personal sinfulness are particularly dangerous because of the overwhelming temptation to displace their own shame on to others. Private spiritual frailty is turned into an all-too-public club with which to beat those who, in the eyes of a guilt-ridden senator, live openly at odds with traditional morality; the zeal with which he wields that club is fueled by his own awareness of how far he has fallen from the mark. The flame of self-reproach kindles the fire to burn the heretics; the Inquisitor usually wears a hair-shirt.

Self-reproach is not only a right, it is a responsibility; people — especially, in our culture, men — could do with a good deal more self-examination. If we don’t like what we find, we need to go to therapy or confession or a Twelve Step program to heal and to grow. What we don’t get to do is to externalize that self-reproach into a sanctimonious defense of the traditional values we ourselves lack the capacity to follow. This doesn’t mean that the privately virtuous have more of a right to be judgmental, of course. But as most of us have come to find, those whose private virtue is deep and genuine are, as a rule, particularly disinclined to condemning others. And as the cases of Larry Craig, John Ensign, David Vitter or any in the legion of powerful men whose public commitment to biblical values was radically at odds with their intimate lives have shown, the reverse is true as well.

The form and content of kisses

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One of my former youth group kids, “Holly” contacted me last week. Holly’s 17, an aspiring theater actress, and just landed her first lead role in a summer production. She has a boyfriend, Ferdinand — and Ferdinand isn’t happy about the part Holly’s taken. In one scene in the play, Holly’s character needs to kiss her “husband”; it’s an indispensable part of the show. Ferdinand has been in a funk ever since he found out Holly was going to do the show, and until he relented last week, threatened a break-up if she went ahead with her plans to take the role.

Holly and I talked on Friday about her relationship, the problem of ultimata, and what it meant to play a part on stage. This little quarrel raises some important issues about trust and fidelity, of course, but also about the vital distinction between the form and the content of a physical act. (I blogged at length about “form” and “content” in this post about faith and sexuality from July 2008.) To be concerned with form is to be concerned with a particular act, like kissing; to be concerned with content is to be concerned with what that act signifies to the two people involved. These aren’t mutually exclusive concerns, of course, but understanding the distinction is vital, as I explained to Holly.

For example, touching another person’s genital region generally has the form of sexual intimacy. At the same time, there’s a world of difference (one does rather hope) between the way a woman might be touched by her OB/GYN and by her lover. Even if both doctor and boyfriend (or girlfriend) touch her vagina in an act of similar form, the content of the touching is radically different. Even Ferdinand, surely, doesn’t object to Holly seeing a physician. Anyone who’s been to the doctor intuitively grasps the form/content distinction.

Another example lies in art: in a figure drawing course, one is often required to draw a a picture inspired by a live nude model. In our puritanical culture, where the body is so often concealed, steadily gazing at a naked human being has the form of something sexual. But the content of the act (drawing from a nude figure) isn’t sexual; the concern of the student artist is usually something like “How the hell am I going to get that calf muscle right?” and not “Oh my goodness, I’m so turned on right now.” That doesn’t mean sexual arousal can’t happen in a figure drawing class — it may. But sexual arousal can come in any number of unexpected ways and in unexpected places. It would be unreasonable, I think, for a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse to say to their beloved “I don’t want you taking a studio art class where you draw naked people”, just as it would be unreasonable to say “I don’t want your doctor touching your private parts.” Form and content are, in these instances, distinct.

And the same, of course, is true in Holly’s situation. Those who have little experience with acting may marvel at the apparent ease in which movie stars portray passion on the screen; one reason why actresses in particular (Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, etc.) win Oscars after making films in which they did explicit scenes is because we marvel that anyone, particularly a woman, could so expertly separate form and content. (Winslet, whose husband is the director Sam Mendes, has talked often about the inability of some folks to accept her ability — and her spouse’s — to separate the brilliant realism of her “form” from the content of her heart.)

An actor is as much a working professional as a doctor. Each may be called into close proximity with the naked flesh of another human being as part of their professional responsibilities.. Obviously, Holly isn’t a professional actress yet, and she isn’t doing a nude love scene: she’s merely kissing an actor on the lips. Everyone will stay clothed; it will be at most a PG-rated act. But Holly, who is head-over-heels in love with Ferdinand, is quite clear about her own ability to distinguish between the form and the content of what it is that she will do. And it seems as if her beau is slowly coming around to seeing things her way.

Of course, in a romantic relationship one generally wants form and content to go together. When we make love with a partner, for most of us the goal is to have the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts be radically congruent with what we are doing with our bodies. Though that isn’t a universal ideal, it’s certainly a widespread desire. For many of us, monogamy is also an ideal. We don’t want our partners being sexual with other people. But we need to understand what Kate Winslet understands: not everything that has the outer appearance of being sexual really is.

When two actors feign passion, their on-screen or onstage kisses and caresses are no more authentically sexual than a pelvic exam down at the women’s clinic. That doesn’t mean co-stars can’t fall in love with each other; they often do. But when two teenage actors in a summer stock production embark on a romance, it’s usually because the experience of working together on something each believes in so passionately is itself a powerful aphrodisiac. Onstage kisses are hardly the cause.

Off until Monday

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I’m off to the city of my birth for the weekend, marking my beloved step-mother’s 60th birthday and my first Father’s Day. Posting resumes on Monday, the third anniversary of my own Dad’s death and the first day of summer school.

Recent posts are once again open for comments.

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday Short Poem: Merwin’s “Butterflies”

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This TSP is from W.S. Merwin’s wonderful new collection, The Shadow of Sirius. In his eighties now, Merwin’s voice is as strong as ever, and his talent for writing about beauty and memory and time remains undiminished. This is a lovely one.

One of the Butterflies

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain

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By request, some more thoughts on feminist fathering

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Four days shy of my first Father’s Day as a parent to a human child, and nine days shy of my daughter reaching five months of age, it’s a bit premature to declare myself a master of Feminist Fatherhood. Still, each passing week brings new insight and experience, and my learning curve remains wonderfully steep.

Heloise is rolling over now, her personality and her energy shining through more and more each day. She’s growing rapidly, still on breastmilk only. And we’ve developed a family schedule that works well for us at this point, revolving around three essential caregivers in baby’s life. Our weekdays look like this:

I get up early, somewhere between 4:45 and 5:45 depending on the day. Heloise is restless at night, but often does her deepest sleeping just before and just after dawn. I go running while my wife and daughter rest. While I’m out, my mother-in-law comes over and takes the baby (if she’s up) so my wife can sleep in later. I shower and go off to school. My wife wakes up, feeds the baby, and goes to work for a few hours, coming home around noon to relieve my mother-in-law. My wife is with Heloise most of the afternoon until I get home. Once I’m home, I’m the primary caregiver; my wife gets more work done or heads out to the gym. Heloise usually goes down sometime after 9:00PM — and my wife and I get a bit of time alone together. I’m usually in bed by midnight, my wife a bit afterwards.

Heloise sleeps fitfully at times, but is usually down for most of the period between 10-7. When she wakes up in the night, I’m in charge of changing and soothing; my wife (obviously) in charge of feeding. We average two waking episodes a night now; each one lasts about 30-40 minutes. (Yes, as a result, I’m probably getting only four hours of sleep a night during the week; I get more on weekends.) And during the day, my wife, mother-in-law, and I each take an equal share of the time being the primary caregiver, though obviously my wife alone can get breastfeed; Heloise can go four hours comfortably without eating. Some days, my wife takes the baby in to work with her, and my mother-in-law is less involved.

Folks, I’m not soliciting advice about how to “do a schedule”; I’m simply sharing what works for us. There’s no one right way, surely, to work out a co-parenting routine. The point is that while it’s a bit tiring, it’s a routine that works for us right now. We get done what needs getting done, and we let slide what we can let slide, and we (my wife and I) do everything we can to make sure that we’re bonding with our daughter and meeting all of her needs and then some. And gosh, I don’t feel disposable or irrelevant! Who are these men who feel as if they have no role to play in an infant’s life? When I get home from school and see my daughter’s face light up at my return, I’m ecstatic; her sweet smile is a better antidote for exhaustion than any other I’ve known. Continue reading →