Monthly Archives: January 2011

Arizona links

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Like so many others, I’m heartsick about the shootings on Saturday in Tucson. I know people who went to school with and were friends of Gabby Giffords when she was at nearby Scripps College, and I join millions of others in praying hard for the full recovery of the youngest woman ever elected to the US House. As for her politics, I was and am more of a fan of her colleague in Southern Arizona, the feisty environmentalist, Rep. Raul Grijalva. But Giffords is perhaps the closest thing to a progressive who could win in the deeply divided 8th district. May she have many years of service ahead of her.

Here are five pieces on the shooting I think are worth reading:

Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing in the Washington Post, on what matters: the violent imagery at Palin’s Web site should be of less concern than the real cross hairs of guns readily available across the land; the vitriol of politics of less concern than the shrinking opportunities in our economy; the passions of partisans less dangerous than the absence of help for the mentally unstable among us.

Larry McMurtry, a Tucson resident and so often a voice of reason and calm in the West, writing in the New York Review of Books

William Saletan, writing in Slate, on how the ubiquity of guns just makes things worse rather than having the potential to end tragedies like Tucson

James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, on the cloudy politics of political shootings

Jill Filipovic, writing at Feministe, urging fellow liberals to pursue a more civil dialogue without falling prey to the siren song of restrictions on speech

And my own post from 2007, written in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, noting that the system that failed Cho Seung-Hui, Jared Laughner and their many victims does sometimes work.

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It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly: why Amy Chua has blood on her hands

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A reader sends me a link to this piece that’s getting a fair amount of discussion this week: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. I read it twice, convinced on the first read that it was satire, but on the second, coming to the depressing conclusion that it was anything but. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale, celebrates the relentless inculcation of perfectionism, pushing back against the growing public concern about the damage that the relentless pursuit of the unattainable is doing to our children (particularly our daughters.) Indeed, Chua’s piece is so outrageous, so Swiftian in its defense of the indefensible, that part of me still suspects it’s particularly well-veiled satire.

Chua writes that we (presumably middle and upper-middle class “white” parents of the sort who make up many of her fellow Ivy League faculty) are far too concerned with our children’s self-esteem, and focused too little on what actually gives kids esteem, which is mastery of something. That’s the sort of thing that sounds good when you first read it, but becomes horrifying upon reflection — and upon comparison of Chua’s gleeful celebration of Chinese success with the reality I work with every damn day in my classes.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

About one-third of the students at Pasadena City College — a public two-year, open-admission institution — are of Asian ancestry. The plurality, if not the outright majority of those East Asian students are of Chinese ancestry. Some are immigrants themselves, many are children of immigrants, but few are more than second-generation Americans. They came from across the Chinese world and its diaspora (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, as well as the mainland itself.) Most are Mandarin-speakers.

Many of them, particularly in my Humanities and Gender Studies classes, tell me that their mothers were much like Amy Chua. Many were shamed, some were beaten, almost all were made to feel inadequate. Many, particularly from the more affluent areas of the San Gabriel Valley like San Marino, were expected to get straight As and be accepted into prestigious four-year universities. A great many didn’t, and most (despite what Chua claims) got Bs, and more than a few had high school transcripts littered with Cs. Chua peddles (one hopes, how one hopes, with tongue in cheek) the myth of the model minority, the myth in which average grades, depression, drug and alcohol problems, eating disorders and significant learning disabilities simply don’t happen to Chinese children. In her world, Chinese children don’t get rejected from Berkeley and Stanford and Princeton. But I have Chinese-American students who were not only rejected from those schools, they didn’t have the grades to get into Cal State Los Angeles.

Many of these Chinese-American students are at PCC for financial reasons, but the notion that all or even most could have gone to Berkeley if only there’d been a bit more money is also very much a myth. Many of these students were pushed and tutored and browbeaten (and beaten for real), and still couldn’t make the grades. Some marinate at home, they tell me, in the hostile simmer of their parents’ disappointment. A lucky few have parents who have adopted a more tender and compassionate model, encouraging effort rather than insisting rigidly on a perfect outcome. They are a small minority. Far more are shell-shocked, numb from years and years of the very abuse that Chua celebrates. (I not only know this through my students, but from my first wife, who was born to a Chinese mother and a Filipino father. I saw the success — but also the haunting damage — up close.)

The Yale professor may have daughters who play instruments beautifully and got near-perfect scores on their SATS. I had a student in 2008, the daughter of immigrants who owned a dry cleaners, who tried to kill herself by drinking cleaning products when her transfer application was rejected by UCLA. I’ve heard many other stories of suicide and suicide attempts. If we’re gonna get anecdotal, no ethnic group in the multicultural melting pot that is PCC has had as many self-reported incidents of self-harm per capita as have my East Asian students. That’s based on more than 18 years of community college teaching and mentoring, including five years as advisor to the overwhelmingly Asian honor students’ society, but it’s also based on the reality that Chinese-Americans 15-24 are much more likely to kill themselves than are white teens, a statistic that’s remained depressingly consistent since the 1980s. None of my Chinese students have taken their lives while my students, but I hear more stories of attempts — and the deaths of friends and siblings — than I do from any other ethnic group.

Chua’s assumption — that the pressure cooker of perfectionism will cause short-term pain but long-term success — simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. Let her come and meet my queer Chinese-American students who’ve been hit and humiliated and disowned. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students with dyslexia who’ve been called stupid so often the light has faded from their eyes. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students who are overweight, including the young woman whose mother only lets her eat cabbage and water at home and rifles through her room, looking for the sweets she’s convinced her daughter is hiding. I’m not for a minute suggesting that Chinese-American parents have a monopoly on the cruel inculcation of perfectionism; that is, as even Chua admits, a multi-ethnic phenomenon. But to assume, as she does with staggering myopia, that a little adolescent suffering invariably leads to long-term success, simply isn’t backed by the evidence.

Chua knows this, of course. She knows that Chinese-American children don’t all go to Yale or its equivalent. Many have parents who pushed them relentlessly, but for any number of excellent reasons, the straight As did not appear. There are more Chinese and Chinese-American students in community colleges than in the Ivy League, and I’d venture that since I started teaching here in 1993, I’ve taught at least 4000 of them, probably more than she has or even ever will. But she knows, surely, about the higher rate of suicide as well as suicidal ideation and depression — and she probably knows those rates are particularly high among Chinese-American young women. If she does know — and if this isn’t Swiftian satire — then she’s guilty of celebrating not only a falsehood, but a lethal one. Chua deserves not mere polite disagreement, but repudiation and scorn for perpetuating an ideal that is directly and unmistakably linked to suffering and self-harm. I’ve seen too much suffering in my years of teaching and mentoring — and been too convinced of the cause by unmistakable evidence — to let a fear of being labeled culturally insensitive blind me from my obligation to say three words to Chua: Shame. On. You.

Fortunately, the repudiation is coming from many quarters, including some wonderful and important bloggers like Angry Asian Man.
 May it continue to come.

On Dick Winters and “grandfather hunger”

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Dick Winters has died. Winters, an American major with the 101st Airborne Division in the Second World War, was the central figure in the 2001 HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers. Portrayed by the English actor Damian Lewis, Winters played a key role in almost every episode as the series told the story of the 506th Parachute Regiment, Easy Company, from 1943 to 1945.

I’m not a war movie buff, and wouldn’t have watched the show at all were it not for my third ex-wife, Elizabeth, who had grown up in a military family, the daughter and granddaughter of career Air Force and Army officers. Elizabeth was very close to her grandfather, a World War Two veteran and former Lt. Colonel who died in the summer of 2001, just before the HBO series debuted. Hungry to connect to the stories around men like her beloved Grandpa Lane, she was eager to watch Band of Brothers. I quickly got hooked on the series as well, and particularly on the remarkable figure of Dick Winters, whose modesty and decency and courage were exemplary without ever straining credulity.

The 9/11 attacks took place not long after the series went on the air, and as the story unfolded on Sunday nights throughout the autumn of 2001, the aftermath of what had happened on that terrible Tuesday brought an immediacy and an urgency to the show that might not otherwise have been there. Headed into a new war in Afghanistan, a show about what most regard as the most necessary war in living memory was particularly relevant.

But what struck me about Band of Brothers was less my reaction than that of so many of my students at Pasadena City College and the kids in my high school group at All Saints Church. That fall, a dozen or more — all but one boys — came up to me to talk about the series and how much it resonated with them. Some loved the graphic combat action, but more were drawn to the character of the young men of Easy Company. Neither sanitized nor overly sentimental, there was something undeniably heroic about the “band of brothers.” Yet their heroism was only part of the appeal to the young men I worked with; they were enchanted by the cameraderie, by the sense of purpose. And they bought into what historians know is one part reality, four parts myth: the notion that this was the “Greatest Generation” that paid a higher price than perhaps any other since at least the Civil War.

A lot of them, I came to realize, had “grandfather hunger”: the longing for a man in their lives like Major Winters, strong and certain and dignified.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, not least because it tends to gloss over the problematic aspects of the past and overemphasize the problems of the present. And as an historian who teaches courses on gender, I was both impressed and troubled by the deep attachment so many guys I taught had to “Band of Brothers.” I was impressed because of the fundamental decency (though a complex decency) of Lewis’ portrayal of Major Winters, and was glad that the boys I knew found that so compelling. I was troubled because, of course, it’s so easy to lionize men who go to combat and so difficult to conceive of true heroism that isn’t intimately connected to killing.

I was troubled too because of what occurred to a lot of us when “Saving Private Ryan” came out: the fascination with the Second World War in particular is not just linked to the passing of the so-called greatest generation, but also to a campaign to idealize a time when gender roles were more rigidly defined. “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers” are noteworthy for almost the complete absence of female characters. These are all-male spaces, exclusive (if extremely dangerous) boys’ clubs — unlike today’s military, into which women are increasingly integrated. (And inevitably, that integration will include combat, as a report just this week confirms.) The more uneasy and uncertain we become about the growing fluidity of gender roles, the more we tend to idealize the most recent time and place where male and female spheres were radically separate. (This is, of course, part of the great appeal of “Mad Men.”)

By the late 1990s, the aging World War Two veterans were septuagenarians or octogenarians whose contemporary fragility only served to enhance the memory of their handsome, heroic youth. We were fascinated with them because they had fought in a war that was (to all but the most determined of pacifists) perhaps the last truly just conflict. Not for them the moral anguish of Vietnam or Iraq. And they had fought in racially and sexually segregated units, allowing us to watch an uncomplicated world of all-white, all-male heroes, something that had undeniable appeal to those discomfited by gender and ethnic pluralism. There was more to the show’s appeal than that, but that simple vision was surely part of it.

But perhaps most importantly, the men of Easy Company — and Dick Winters in particular, apparently in real life as well as in the hands of Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Damian Lewis et al — were grown-ups while still very young. In a world in which middle-class American male adolescence has turned into a quarter-century project, there’s something immensely appealing about seeing such clarity of purpose, such maturity, and even such grace in so many twenty-something men. Of course, we looked at the dignity our elderly grandfathers (or the men we wished were our grandfathers) and projected onto their youthful selves that same gravitas, unwilling to see that they might have been as unsure and as impulsive and as frightened as ourselves. That says more about our psychological hunger than about the men who actually fought the Second World War.

No generation is greater than any other. But in each generation, a few individuals are clear exemplars of the kind of heroic virtue that we all acknowledge is desperately needed. Dick Winters didn’t need Hollywood to lionize him; he was evidently an exceptional and remarkable man. In the end, I’m not sorry that so many young people were captivated by his story. I give thanks for his service and for his good fortune to live a long and happy life of service. I wish him a joyous reunion with those whom he left behind so long ago.

Now I know a little of what he knew: on fatherhood and leaving a crying child

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On Wednesday, our daughter Heloise started pre-school. She’ll be two on January 26, but the place we’ve wanted to send her enrolls little ones at 23 months. (And please, let’s not have this be a thread about the ideal age to start school. Like vaccinations or breast-feeding, it’s one of those issues likely to send privileged and anxious parents — I’m in that category myself, no doubt — into paroxysms. Plenty of other fora for that discussion.)

Her little school is five blocks from our home, and for the 2 year-olds, runs 8AM-12PM. I’ve been worried and excited for weeks, remembering my own mixed experiences of very early childhood education (I attended Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School in Santa Barbara from 1969-1972). And on Wednesday morning, I was the stereotypical wreck of a father as we took Heloise to school. I sniffled as we packed her little Dora the Explorer backpack and filled her little Minnie Mouse water bottle. I had a lump in my throat as we walked into the classroom to chat with the teachers. And though my gregarious little one immediately ran off to play and barely noticed our departure, I was in full-fledged tears by the time we made it back to the car without her. My dry-eyed wife patted my arm. “They told me all the Dads cry on the first day, honey. It’s okay.” Great. This is how the gender studies professor finds one way in which he’s an utterly stereotypical male.

This morning is Heloise’s third day at the school, and somewhat predictably, she burst into tears (something she hadn’t done the first two days) when we left. We’d been told that was normal too — the first day or two are wondrous and new, and it’s only when it starts to seem routine that the upsets come. I walked out of the classroom while my daughter collapsed into the endlessly comforting arms of Mrs. Shanaz. My own tears were welling up well before I made it to the front gate. One of my friends, a father with two boys slightly older than Heloise, was leaving at the same time. He read me in an instant, and said gently, “Man, I know that face. That’s the ‘I just dropped off my crying kid and I feel like the biggest jerk in the world for abandoning her’ face.” It made me laugh.

Why do men cry more than women at moments like this (if they do — the evidence is indeed anecdotal)? Perhaps it’s because of our fears of being the sort of father who abandons his children. Even if we ourselves were raised by loving and present dads, most of us are keenly aware of the reality that men famously leave their children. Most of us know what it’s like to have had a man we loved not be there when we needed him. And we very badly don’t want to be that sort of father to our own kids. So it’s devastating the first time we walk away from our weeping child, forcing ourselves not to respond to the cry of “Papa, Papa!” I wanted to scoop Heloise up, rush her home, promise her that she and her Daddy would never be separated. I know of course the damage that fathers can do to daughters by putting them on pedestals, or by being over-protective. But all of that knowledge has to confront the reality of my indescribably intense love for my child. Continue reading →

Friday Random Ten: music for drying out Los Angeles edition

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“You’re so white”, a student of mine commented after a quick perusal of my iPod music. And yeah, this FRT gives no evidence to the contrary. Jesse Thomas is one of my favorite discoveries of the past year (and The Avett Brothers may have had the best album of the past half decade), while at different times in my life, #1 and #10 were great sources of comfort. (The background vocals on the first track make it one of the most beautiful pieces of ear candy of the pop era, IMHO. Nicely used by Honda.)

The bonus tracks are the songs that have been in my head all week.

1. “The Only Living Boy in New York”, Simon & Garfunkel
2. “Video”, Aimee Mann
3. “For Love”, Robert Earl Keen
4. “Please Don’t Leave Me”, Pink
5. “The Fuse”, Jackson Browne
6. “Ten Thousand Words”, The Avett Brothers
7. “Saturday Night”, Eagles
8. “Shine”, Jesse Thomas
9. “When Sal’s Burned Down”, Dar Wiliams
10. “Don’t Give Up”, Peter Gabriel

Bonus Track One: “Far Away Eyes”, Rolling Stones
Bonus Track Two: “Only Tongue Can Tell”, Trashcan Sinatras

Deeper than the “hard core”: the triumph of love over rage

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Sometimes you read something so breathtaking in its wrongness that you’re reduced to incoherent spluttering. The Atlantic Magazine has been on quite a roll in producing that reaction in reasonable folks, with Lori Gottlieb’s dreadful “case for settling for Mr. Good Enough” (I responded here); Sandra Tsing Loh’s myopic assertion that since her marriage failed, no one else should bother (my response here); Hanna Rosin’s perverse misreading of the evidence to suggest that feminism is destroying men (my response here). But they’ve topped themselves with Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s dismal offering Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women.

It’s work-safe to read, but if you’re drinking a beverage, you may spray it over your keyboard in exasperation. Vargas-Cooper, like the proverbial blind squirrel finding the occasional nut, gets a few things right — and almost everything else wrong. And she’s “wrongest” in her hopelessly antiquated interpretation of male sexuality. She begins with this entirely undocumented assertion: porn doesn’t plant (ideas) in men’s minds; instead, porn puts the power of a mass medium behind ancient male desires… Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Says who? Men have always wanted to ejaculate on the faces of their female partners? Really? Show me one shred of evidence, Natasha. She’s got it completely back-to-front. Porn creates at least as it much as it reflects. The great lie is always that we’re too smart — or too hard-wired — to be influenced by culture. Were that true, none of us would be susceptible to advertising. (Most of us think everyone else is susceptible to its charms, but we are immune. That’s the kind of unjustified self-overestimation that advertisers love, because it gives us all a false sense of agency.)

It gets worse:

Yes, (sex) is a natural, human function, and one from which both partners can derive enormous pleasure, but it is also one largely driven by brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges.

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.

Never mind that even Freud recognized how much of our sexuality was malleable, and conditioned by culture. Vargas-Cooper makes the same mistake that Robert Jensen, a writer I respect but with whom I disagree, made with his memorable aphorism that “porn tells lies about women, but tells the truth about men.” Much of pornography marketed to men (but by no means all) is aggressive and hostile towards women; humiliation of a woman and male arousal are linked (as in the tremendous popularity of the sex-by-deception genre). But that doesn’t mean porn tells an essential truth about men. It tells us what they’ve been conditioned to want. Men in the Seventies expected their porn stars to be richly endowed with pubic hair; by the 2000s, they expected to see perfectly waxed genitalia. So which is the “truth” about men? That they want hair on women or not? Did some great shift happen in men’s essential nature between 1980 and 2010 that radically transformed their tastes? Or were those tastes shifted by cultural forces? Common sense and the evidence at hand suggests that porn creates and shapes desires rather than merely depicting what men have always wanted.

As a man, I was taught to connect sex and aggression. I was taught that my pleasure needed to be connected to my capacity to remain in control, and that to remain in control, I needed to dominate. I was taught that by boys on the playground, I was taught that in literature, I was taught that in the first porn I saw more than three decades ago. I’ve often quoted Timothy Beneke’s remark that there is no phrase in English that allows one to connect male lust and humanity. From the time we’re small boys, we’re taught to dissociate ourselves from our sensitive side, from our emotional side, from anything that seems feminine. When we cry, we’re mocked as “girls” or called “faggots”. When we’re older, and we talk about being in love with our girlfriends, we’re told we’re “pussy-whipped.” The message is clear: a real man demonstrates his masculinity by doing what he can to drive a wedge between sexuality and empathy. Vargas-Cooper might agree. But where she falls down is in her claim that this violence is encoded in our maleness, written so deep that culture and civilization can only momentarily obscure the lurking misogyny. We may dress as sheep, but we are all destined to be wolves, or so she claims; women had better be prepared to be eaten, and not in the good way. Continue reading →

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Ten most-linked and most-visited posts

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I’ve done lists of my favorite posts before, and reprinted some. But what I think is my best writing isn’t necessarily what’s proved most popular. Based on the statistics I’ve deciphered, here are my ten most popular posts (judged by links and visits and hits, not comments) since I started blogging in 2004. I’ve kept this list for a while, but here it is now, and I can’t always figure out why these are the ones that got so many hits and still do. In ascending order towards the most linked ever:

10. Circumcised at 37: a personal story and a rebuke to the MRAs
9. Not just consent but enthusiasm: some notes on college sex workshops and stoplights
8. Journals, and the stories of Djamila, Beth, and Julia Ann
7. Full Frontal Feminism: my students respond
6. The Clitoris and Corinthians
5. Some Thoughts on Teaching and Student Crushes
4. Age is never just a number: on “Juno” and covert older men/younger women boundary violation
3. The self-flattering fantasies of the aging man: a buddy gets his bubble burst
2. Gay marriage: good for winning championships?
1. The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation

My five most popular categories, driven heavily by search engine queries:

5. Myth of Male Weakness
4. Masturbation
3. Porn
2. Student Crushes
1. Older Men & Younger Women

Conclude what you will.

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Thursday Short Poem: McMahon’s “Honey Traps”

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Parenthood is a joy. It is also taxing at times, and that’s being said by a man whose one child is cared for by nannies and a grannie as well as by her own mother and father. In relative prosperity, and with Heloise outnumbered three (or four) to one by adults in our home at any given moment, we still sometimes feel overwhelmed. Few parents in the past have had it as easy. And for a powerful take by a new poet on the old theme of motherhood and freedom, check out this devastating Francesca McMahon piece that won the 2010 MAG Poetry Competition. (Cap tap to Jendi Reiter.)

Honey Traps

Then our mother found herself
abandoned in the fallow years
of schools, church halls, playgrounds,
swimming pools. Her sons chased
other sons, endlessly, like mice
on a wheel. Us girls caught her heels,
bound her ankles with name tape,
hair ribbon, skipping rope. At dusk,
hands doused in dishwater, discordant
noise from miniature instruments
tortured her ears; under her breath
she counted days – years and years
of them – stolen from her own life.

More and more she saw the answer
in the future, when we would all leave
home, or run away. She planned
to celebrate: set light to the oven,
solder the iron, smash up the plates.
Saw herself swimming through a tide
of spilt milk, towards freedom.

Now the future has arrived she sits alone
in a room full of people; suffers
the steady chiming of a granddaughter
clock. At four, like a cuckoo, she opens
the door, calls our names – plain ones,
long out of fashion – into the street.
The girls whisper, afraid she is a witch;
the boys point, sometimes throw sticks.
No matter. She would call those same
names over the whole world
if she thought it would bring us back.

We hold out our hands, but she sees
through us, knowing we are not the children
she is looking for, knowing we are lost to her.

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Crucibles, threshing floors, and labels

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A former women’s studies student of mine, Mariana (names all changed, of course), wrote me over the holidays. She’s been dating her boyfriend, Marco, for a year. But a couple of weeks ago, Marco asked to make a change in their relationship. Mariana writes:

Marco expressed to me that he didn’t want to be in a relationship and that he wanted to take things a step back. He also told me he doesn’t ever want to get married and have kids, which I do! He tells me he doesn’t want to deal with obligations of being a boyfriend…I don’t know how to take that…he tells me he still wants to date but not be in a serious relationship…I appreciate his honesty but I just don’t understand why he sees being a boyfriend as a burden rather than a blessing.

I got Mariana’s permission to respond here on the blog, because I think the issues she and Marco are having are fairly common. And it is “issues” in the plural, because a couple of different things are going on that we be should be careful to distinguish.

First off, there’s the set of pressures that come with the labels “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. It’s not just the baggage of exclusivity that may trouble some, it’s an entire luggage set of assumptions that comes with formalizing a relationship. The terms suggest images in the minds of the young (and not so young), images created by peers, parents and by popular culture. For example, in the minds of many, boyfriends and girlfriends are “expected” to talk a certain number of times per week, expected to leave large blocks of time open for their partners, expected to be progressing towards something (be it sex, or cohabitation, or marriage, or children.) Combine the absence of a universal definition of what a boyfriend or a girlfriend is and does with the reality that people’s expectations, fears and hopes associated with those labels can vary widely, and you’ve got a recipe for conflict. This is one of the reasons why “the talk” (the “where is this ‘thing’ headed” conversation) grows ever more awkward as the definitions of what it means to “go out” or “date” or “be in a relationship” grow ever muddier.

The old labels were confining and inflexible, but they offered at least the temporary sensation of certainty. Rigid expectations — about male and female sex roles, that dating was a preparation for marriage, and that marriage led inevitably and quickly to children — were often both misery-making and clarity-bequeathing. Young people have more options today, including increasing acceptance of alternatives to monogamy and increasing support for chosen childlessness. But of course, choices have consequences. And one of the consequences of an abundance of choices is that it can seem depressingly difficult to find a partner who shares your vision of what a romantic relationship should look like. Continue reading →