I received the above quote as a motivational message for Monday morning. I did find it somewhat motivating. But, I see a lot of danger in this quote, especially with parenting.
In the contemporary context, there are two pitfalls with this advice; things that happen when this quote is misinterpreted, which strike me as especially unhealthy.
#1: “The purpose of life is not to be happy” does not mean that being unhappy is indicative of a life well lived. Being unhappy could indicate that one is not doing enough to be useful, honorable, compassionate, or significant. Being unhappy also could indicate a rotten attitude.
#2: Happiness not indicia of spoiled children. Happy children have developed the skills to set realistic expectations and to cope with unmet expectations.
This is normally the point in an essay were the author says “I will discuss each of those in turn.” Except that I’m beating around the bush.
Let me describe the big fight that married people have. I alluded to this topic a few posts ago, so I’ve been beating around the bush for a while now. Picture this:
A couple. An important decision will be made.
The decision tends to be something major like having kids, where to live, or even about whether to get married in the first place. But there is no fight over the decision. The scope and scale is too broad and pervasive for either person to fully apprehend. Instead, there is a fight about having scrambled eggs.
The birth of this conflict originates from one person feeling unhappy because of unmet needs. These unmet needs arise from having unaddressed reservations about the decision. Those reservations metastasize into resentment. But the core element of the whole conflict is unmet needs; long-frustrated desire.
Desire has a lot of versatility, it can attach itself to a range of things: everything from longing for sex with attractive strangers to longing to pierce a sunny-side up egg yolk with a crisp triangle of buttery toast in order to soak up its yellowy goodness. The point is the intense feeling, not the object of infatuation.
The instinct that I see, particularly for Americans, is for people to dwell on whether the decision that got made (about the desired thing) was the right decision. But because the object of desire doesn’t really matter, I also believe that the decision doesn’t really matter either.
The longing, the coveting… that is the problem.
If you aren’t “done” wanting to have sex with lots of different partners, then the solution, for many Americans, is to treat monogamy as a “fixable issue.” The thought process goes something like: I am so clever, and this is the land of the free. Therefore, maybe freedom and ingenuity can combine in a way that will allow the decision itself to be re-engineered such that we can obtain an outcome wherein I can have sex with other people and not have any consequences.
This deeply American idea — that one can have everything both ways, frequently turns into challenging premise of there even being a decision to make. Eggs are so versatile! Why can’t one egg be scrambled and the other be sunny side-up? Freedom!
But a spouse is not a short-order cook, and the person thinking up this idea isn’t motivated by “civil rights.” Rather, the main motivation for these mental gymnastics is a deep conviction that one ought to be entitled to have every desire fulfilled. Such is the present condition of the American psyche.
I mention this, on Independence Day weekend because I am reflecting on the time I spent in England. I noticed that the ambition to satisfy every desire is an aspect of American character that the English find particularly vulgar. I am sure other countries do too.
This sounds like a set-up to say that one must learn to cope with disappointment, but my idea is apparently more radical than that. It certainly got funny looks from my ex-wife, my ex-therapist, and others.
Making a decision means changing what you want, as part of committing to that decision. It is not okay to choose scrambled eggs and still want a runny sunny-side up yolk.
When I say, “not okay,” I mean morally. It shows disloyalty of the heart to long for things fundamentally antithetical to the nature of what was chosen. The solution is not to try to have an “open marriage” or a “chaste marriage.” The solution is to choose scrambled eggs or runny eggs or heterosexual monogamy and then to also choose to be content.
I hear the objection: “Oh… but that is living a lie”
The hell it is. People have free will, and people change their minds about what they want all the time.
“Oh… but nobody should force me to want or not want something”
More accurately, hypothetical stupid straw man with whom I am arguing for rhetorical effect, is that nobody should have to force you to have feelings strong enough to overcome your contrarian desires.
Given the MMTL context of this blog, I may sound like I’m making an argument condemning gay ex-spouses for being gay. Not so. People don’t choose to be gay, any more than they chose their gender, eye-color, or handedness. To move the analogy from brunch to baseball, you can force a lefty to bat righty, but its just better if you have the person swing the way they are supposed to swing in the first place. Sometimes you can’t figure that out because certain leagues have ridiculous constraints about where and how to draw the batter’s box, either by putting it on only one side of the plate, or by having one side called the Batter’s box, and the other side called the “Ballplayer who is committed to hitting but refuses to be on the correct side” box in the vain attempts to play ball while also satisfying misguided baseball purists who have a hang-up about the so-called “traditional meaning of the word Batter”.
Stop blaming America, Cranky, this is about your lesbian ex-wife.
I concede that it is about my ex-wife, stupid straw man. But it is not about my ex-wife being a lesbian. I never fought with her about “the gay thing”; there were no “Get thee back into the closet!” pronouncements. I didn’t know she was gay, and finding out didn’t change the her personality. This is, and has always been, all about selfishness. My ex-wife being an astoundingly selfish person was something I knew about from “Hello.” I knew it, but I made excuses for her, all throughout the 13 years that I knew her.
So I guess, what? It appears that I am still making excuses for her. Did I just rationalize that she was an extremely selfish person, but that the flawed moral character of America is really to blame? I think I did. And I think I just lost an argument to the rhetorical straw man which I created.
In your face, Cranky!
...All my darkest hours talking like this... 