Some years ago a friend of mine, let's call him Tony, told me a story of his father. "He was an asshole," my friend said. His blue collar family had lived in a spacious rustbelt house and being faithful Catholics, his parents filled the home with children. Tony remembered his father as taciturn as a stone but easily irritated. "He came home from work, had a beer, fell asleep in front of the TV, had dinner, went to bed." It would seem that his father lived this way without much deviation until his somewhat early death.
I have heard stories like this one many times through the years. What woman, I have always wondered, would fall in love with someone like my friend's father? I suppose we are to believe a woman meets a man like that and says to herself, "He is silent and irritable, a real jerk! I must make a family with him!" Not likely. Her husband must have undergone some kind of change. Perhaps he changed because his wife changed, and with that, his whole life changed. And in all of this business he could have taught an important lesson to his sons, but he didn't, and fathers never do.
In medical practice you become a student of humanity through reading and experience. After a few years patterns emerge and from those patterns you learn lessons and principles in life that would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to learn otherwise. In effect you live many lives, and you acquire what used to be precious but now is not highly valued: Wisdom. Wisdom demands to be shared, even if only the rocks are listening. So I'm going to tell you something your fathers never tell you. Something you really need to know.
The best thing that can happen in a young man's life is the love of a woman. Now I know there are men who prefer the romantic company of other men, and as a strong believer in secular democracy, I aggressively support their right to do as they wish. Nevertheless I can't help feeling badly for them that they do not share this experience. Maybe they say the same thing about us.
But most of you fellows know what I'm talking about. She is young and beautiful and she thinks more highly of you than you think of yourself. She is an incredible confidante. She listens to you attentively, she laughs at your jokes and she never tires of your kisses. She is astonishingly thoughtful and clever; she always smells great. She drives you mad with desire, and the miracle is you have the same effect on her. She gives you something you'll only get once in your life and only for a short time: Love that verges on unconditional.
It would be paradise for us men if we could freeze time in that lovely frame and enjoy the romance and the passion until the sun burns out. But we cannot. Women are by their very nature agents of change in our lives. It has been so decreed from Mount Olympus and there is no point in opposing heaven.
For all the violins and harp music and glasses of wine and poetry by the fireside, for all the euphoria and heavy breathing, for all the daydreams and popular songs, marriage is designed by God for the procreation of our species, not for our individual joy. And for many men, maybe most, it can at times seem like the world's greatest bait-and-switch. Let us deconstruct this process together and examine it under the cool fluorescent light of reason, not intoxicated by the hormones and pheromones of the Call of the Wild.
You put the gold on her finger and then you have a few very happy years if you are fortunate. When the children come along, however, your wife undergoes a sudden and dramatic metamorphosis. There is no deception on her part; remember that this whole process exists because we are designed to pass on our genetic material, protect our young, provide for our families and then to die. But this transformation your wife will undergo will leave you surprised and dismayed.
You will vanish from her field of awareness, you will become an annoyance. All of the tenderness that she beamed at you like a burning sun vanishes in an abrupt emotional eclipse. Your relationship, once so comforting and intimate, becomes triangulated and rectangulated and so on ad nauseam by the children, her mother, her friends. If one day, God forbid, your plane were to crash on a business trip, some weeks later someone in your house would look at your empty chair at the dinner table and say, "Whatever happened to that guy that used to sit there? The guy with the money. He was an asshole."
When he and his wife are young and full of sexual energy, a man's heart bursts with happiness. But sex is the great casualty of family life. Most women lose interest in it almost completely and even though sex within marriage is sanctioned by every culture and religion, your need for it has now transformed you into a selfish bastard. Your love life has departed on the 3:10 to Yuma! If you are fortunate it will improve to some extent as the children grow up, but it will never be as it was. This is reality for at least ninety percent of American men. It is not good, it is not evil, it is reality.
Most men react to their new lives in a few predictable ways. One unfortunate way is to take a lover outside of the marriage. Now the sexual winter of the marriage does not justify adultery; all the same it seems unfair that in the public dialogue on failing marriages, this issue is off-limits. I think that our churches and our culture apply pressure on men to regress toward some gender defined mean; our Western Civilization cannot, in contrast the Islamic world, come to terms with male sexuality. The American male's desire for sex in marriage becomes a nuisance to his wife and not only does she not consider it her duty to participate, she perceives her husband's desire for her as insensitive and so do her friends and so does her gynecologist. But please listen to me my young friends: Women are the answer to the problem of women like gin is the answer to the problem of gin. Here are scenarios I have seen played out a hundred times, you are certainly familiar with them too. These are such common patterns of behavior they call into question our assumptions about human individualism and free will.
A man's wife has lost interest in him and he becomes despondent. He is also angry; he feels cheated by her for ignoring him. He meets a younger woman who makes him feel the way his wife did once and he has an affair with her. He convinces himself that she is different, she will love him without changing, so he leaves his wife and children and he and his girlfriend move in together in a small apartment. Inevitably he becomes insufficient for her, she also must have children of her own. They have one child, then two. Now he is in the same predicament he was in before, an unwelcome intrusion into the mother-child-mother-in-law closed system, but now he has impoverished himself by multiplying the number of his dependents.
Then there is the woman who convinces our American male that she is like him, she wants sex and nothing else. NSA--no strings attached! What luck! he says to himself. They have clandestine meetings full of perspiration and passion but the character of it starts to change, she becomes jealous of his wife. When Christmas comes and she is alone, her fantasies of her lover in a Thomas Kincaid home with his wife and children opening gifts fill her with rage. She calls his wife and tells everything so they can all have a terrible Christmas together.
Then there is the woman who actually does like sex as much as men. Such women are rare indeed and that is probably a good thing. For if she likes physical love as much as a man, she would effectively be doing it constantly, as all of the men in her sphere of acquaintance are instantly ready to oblige her. Her exposure to bacteria and viruses and protozoa would be therefore be similar to that of homosexual males, and the unfortunate husband who chooses her as a lover might be found out because of an infection he passes on to his wife. Imagine the damage control in that situation!
The other common choice men make is to involute, as my friend's father did. Your wife has become deeply enmeshed in the lives of her friends, her parents, her siblings and her children (and in the latter case to us their fathers it seems unhealthy). She is very reluctant to have sex with you, and if you choose to be faithful, it means you will be essentially celibate within your marriage. You will spend the rest of your life working to support your family without the consolation of the tender love of your wife, for after she has worried about her mother and her father and her brother and her sister and her son and her other son and her daughter and her other daughter, there is really nothing left. Pleasures in such a man's life are few indeed: a little quiet, a cold beer, some tobacco, a football game on TV. You develop a hard shell and even though your life is dedicated to providing for your wife and children, you will die in your sixties and your gravestone will say "He was an asshole."
How many men say to themselves: Why didn't my father warn me about this? In retrospect our American man may see his father in a new light, as a man trying to cope with the unpleasant reality of unanticipated isolation. But no father can bring himself to talk to his son about this dilemma. We cannot tolerate the thought of the act by which our parents conceived us, the act without which we would not even exist. This conversation would make the skin crawl of both the father and the son, as it is in the end a discussion with the son about the sex lives of his parents (shudder).
With this knowledge, however, young men can make informed decisions. One path is to decide not to have children. I've known a number of couples through the years who have chosen to remain childless, and they seem quite a bit happier, their intimacy deeper. What strikes me about these couples is how much they do together; they travel, they dine in interesting restaurants, they go to plays and operas and sometimes they even read the same books. My Catholic and LDS friends will object, saying that we are commanded to raise up a population on the earth and we have to do as we are told by God, it is selfish to choose not to have a family. In my opinion, however, having children in a world of almost seven billion people is even more selfish. Also, how do Catholics feel about the profligate reproduction of Mormons? How do Mormons feel about that of the Catholics? I suspect each believes that the commandment to be "fruitful and multiply" applies peculiarly to them, not so much to the mongrels of the other faith.
For men, choosing not to have children is not without risk. It is never possible to be completely confident that your wife will not change and begin to yearn for children. I recall the scene from When Harry Met Sally:
Sally: When Joe and I started seeing each other, we wanted exactly the same thing. We wanted to live together, but we didn't want to get married because every time anyone we knew got married, it ruined their relationship. They practically never had sex again. It's true, it's one of the secrets that no one ever tells you. I would sit around with my girlfriends who have kids - and, actually, my one girlfriend who has kids, Alice - and she would complain about how she and Gary never did it anymore. She didn't even complain about it, now that I think about it. She just said it matter-of-factly. She said they were up all night, they were both exhausted all the time, the kids just took every sexual impulse they had out of them. And Joe and I used to talk about it, and we'd say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment's notice. And then one day I was taking Alice's little girl for the afternoon because I'd promised to take her to the circus, and we were in the cab playing "I Spy" - I spy a mailbox, I spy a lamp-post - and she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids. And the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders, and she said, "I spy a family." And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, "The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment's notice."
Harry: And the kitchen floor?
Sally: [sadly] Not once. It's this very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile.
So of course Sally dumps Joe like a sack of fertilizer. A man who chooses this path may wind up passing through a several relationships until he finds the woman for whom he is truly all that she needs.
Another pathway is that of life without women at all. The happiest man I ever knew was a psychiatrist who was one of our supervisors in residency. The thing I remember most about him was his bellowing laugh. He loved to golf, and he golfed every weekend, answerable to no one. He did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. He told me once that he had been married for one year and then divorced. "Marriage was the dumbest thing I ever did," he observed. Some young men reading this paragraph will say that's all well and good, but I couldn't live without sex. My friend, you have not been paying attention: No matter which path you choose you are going to be living without sex to a greater or lesser degree. There are two disadvantages to this lifestyle. though. The first is that speculation as to your sexuality will follow you constantly. "Confirmed bachelor" appears to be a euphemism for homosexual. The other, and the most important one, is the lack of abiding friendship that fortunate men have with their wives. There is no guarantee you'll have that kind of relationship with your wife however, as some relationships devolve into irritability and resentment. We have all known couples such as those! A third objection to the choice of a single life is: "I don't want to die alone." According to existential psychiatrists, everyone dies alone. Perhaps, too, it would be better not to cause so many people such bitter sorrow as your final act.
Then of course, knowing all this, a young man can choose to marry and have children anyway. The life of a family man is a good life. That's precisely why married men rarely leave their wives for their mistresses, and it's why an adulterer's behavior is often so pathetic when he is caught. Unburdened by the delusion that marriage will be sexually fulfilling, a man can enjoy the comforts of a peaceful domesticated family man's life without accumulating resentment toward his partner. Prepared for the change his wife will undergo, our young American father pursues activities that he finds gratifying and that do not require the participation of his wife. Common examples are sports, fishing, amateur radio, computers and so on. As the children get older, these activities often become a foundation for sharing time and experiences with their fathers. And having children adds dimensions to a man's life as they do to a woman's. There is pride in their achievements, fascination at the evolution of their personalities and eventually grandchildren (they provide the joy of children with much less aggravation and sorrow).
Unfortunately I have to make a disclaimer to a point I made previously. I have observed that male sexuality is accepted as normal and natural by Islamic society. The fact that there is no celibacy in Islam implies to me that they do not perceive sexual activity as an obstacle to holiness, to oneness with God. In one pamphlet I read about Islam, the author justified the practice of polygamy on the grounds that it is a solution to the disparity in sex drive between men and women. Now Americans, unfortunately, are relatively incapable of nuanced thinking. If I say I like white, it means that I hate black. If I say I favor limited government, I am a racist. In this case, the primordial binary mind of the American perceives my praise of Islam for its acceptance of maleness as a hatred of women; they assume that I believe women should be enslaved, that they should be forced to wear burkhas and forbidden to drive, that they should be beaten when they do not obey their husbands. Under what exercise of thought is that conclusion justified? I do not believe that fairness to men must equal the oppression of women, and I do not believe that the rise of women must happen by placing obstacles to men. To me it seems reasonable and necessary that our society formulate cultural practices that enhance the likelihood of success in life for both women and men, not one at the expense of the other.
Back to the original point of this essay, the purpose of it is to help young men enter into family life with the necessary knowledge of how it works. Behavioral psychologists say, in contrast to analytical psychiatrists, that emotions are caused by thoughts. In chronically angry and depressed people they often identify cognitive distortions. I can think of no better example of a cognitive distortion than the notion that wives should not change. Maybe Tony's father was an asshole because he was an asshole, but maybe it was because he entered marriage and family life thinking that his wife would always be there for him in the way that he needs. When she became psychologically and physically unavailable to him, he became depressed and angry because he felt that it should not be this way. If his father could have prepared him for what was coming, he might have adjusted better to the dramatic changes his life would undergo.
So get married and have children. When your wife assures you that she will not change and your relationship will always be the same, she is not lying because she believes what she is saying. Nevertheless is it far from the truth. You are now prepared for what is to come.
You're welcome.
Copyright 2011 Robert Albanese Presentations
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