I wrote this post in March 2007, nearly two years before becoming a father. The cousin whom I wrote about here died six weeks after this post appeared.

Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).

I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.

This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.

What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.

Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:

They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue. Continue reading →

From January 2009

As we get back to post-inauguration blogging, I’m turning to an email I got from a woman last week. “Tara” wrote another in the series of missives from young (21) year-old women contemplating a relationship with an older (36) man. The trick on this one is Tara is interested in a married fellow, one who claims, as so many do, to be in a less than fulfilling marriage. Tara asked me a couple of other questions, but finished with this one:

…do you think that the decision to cheat lies within the hands of the involved person, or does it share a weight equally with the “other woman”? am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision (as to whether a sexual or emotional affair happens.)

The simple answer is that cheating is cheating, and that anyone who knowingly enters into a relationship with someone who is pledged to another through marriage or another sort of monogamous arrangement gets a full and equal share of the blame. That’s perhaps the response of our age, though a history of adultery and its prohibitions reveals that that has not always been a universally held position. In different times and places, only the married cheater has been blamed, or only the woman. And some folks like to parse out differences between what is “adultery” and what is “infidelity”, even though most of us use the former to refer to the extra-marital subset of the latter. But while the history of Western law and religion makes clear that our sense of what kinds of extra-marital or pre-marital sex are wrong is a moving target, the modern received consensus is that having sex with someone who is pledged to another is bad.

For many of us, the real offense of infidelity (I use the term broadly, to encompass emotional as well as sexual affairs) lies in betrayal. The very word means to “break faith”. To be cheated on is painful enough, but to be lied to is, in a very real sense, worse. While most cheaters cover up their behavior through active lies or lies of omission, the real deceit lies in the betrayal of the original promise to be monogamous. Whether as part of a marriage ceremony or simply an informal agreement to “not see other people right now”, most (not all) relationships make their way towards some sort of mutual pledge of fidelity. To cheat is to break that pledge unilaterally. And once we’ve cheated, we’ve in a very real sense called into question every other aspect of the relationship; our pledges of fidelity aren’t just about what we promise not to do with our hearts and bodies, they are pledges about the effort we intend to put into this particular bond.

When I was going through the Twelve Steps with a strict sponsor many years ago, the subject of my many infidelities in my first marriage came up. I offered to Jack my “reasons” for cheating on my first wife. He snorted at all of them, and explained what I have come to see as the modern way of understanding the problem of infidelity. “Hugo, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. You need to understand, when you cheat on your wife, you’re not just betraying her, or any God you happen to believe in. The greatest problem with cheating is that it turns you into a liar; on a soul level, every time you sleep with another woman behind your wife’s back, you know you’re breaking a promise you made. No one can break his own promise and be happy.” I was in a pedantic mood, and snapped back that that sounded less modern than Aristotlelian, to which Jack — who wouldn’t have known Aristotle from Adam –replied that it didn’t matter what it sounded like, it was simply true. And of course, Aristotle was right, and Jack was right. One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life. Continue reading →