Marriage is hard work.
You often hear that as a cliché from married people, some who appear
blissfully happy and others who are battle-worn and weary. You also hear it from divorcees justifying
their failed marriages. Most importantly
though, you hear it from everyday people facing everyday struggles. Every partnership bends to stress over time
and the stakes grow exponentially higher the more personal the
relationship. Spouses know exactly how
to support and to put down each other and are capable of each at any given
moment. At moments of stress individuals
make choices, which are followed by a chain reaction of other choices.
I believe that each partner in a marriage defaults to a
certain amount of self-centeredness. The
“ME” in marriage is the classic id, the part of the psyche that
is completely unconscious and operates based on instinctual needs and drives. It is self-serving and self-protecting, but
also self-defeating. When “ME” is
unsatisfied a host of behavioral problems manifest into ill-conceived emotions
or behaviors. Perhaps this is also where
insecurities come bubbling to the surface and salt gets poured into open wounds. Another analogy is the cork popping off the
bottle of pressurized emotions. It is
commonly thought that interpersonal communication is key to resolving such
breakdowns. Perhaps so, but equally tempting
and more immediate are avoidance, denial, silence, and rebellion, none of which
is particularly effective, but the “ME” perversely enjoys them all.
The solution then rests in a person’s
ability to adjust the automatic defaults that come so easily in our hard-wired
unconscious to interpret the world through a different lens of self that is more
empathetic and generous in nature. In
other words, it is necessary to act less selfishly and avoid seeing only the
“ME” in marriage. Translated into
action, that involves swallowing pride on occasion and focusing attention
outwardly toward other people’s needs and desires.
In a twist of tragic irony, this concept was articulated
beautifully by Claremont professor and acclaimed writer David Foster Wallace who
gave a commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College about
self-awareness, empathy, and narcissism, three years before taking his own life
in his own home on Webb Canyon Road, leaving behind his wife of four years. Wallace writes, “Everything in my own
immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of
the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We
rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's
so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.
It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.”
He continues offering the following alternative: “People who
can adjust their natural default-setting are often described as being ‘well
adjusted,’ which I suggest to you is not an accidental term… The plain fact is that you graduating seniors
do not yet have any clue what ‘day in, day out’ really means. There happen to
be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in
commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty
frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm
talking about.”
“By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you
get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine
or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out,
and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a
couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next
day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you
haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so
now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's
the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store
takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket
is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other
people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's
hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate
pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get
in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's
crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky
cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course
there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD
kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be
polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your
supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes
open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is
incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury
out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and
pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a
machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is
the absolute voice of death,
and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your
cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags
in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll
around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way
home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is
exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and
crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't
make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm
going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my
natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really
all about me, about my
hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to
seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these
people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and
cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at
how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the
middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really
hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and
unwind because of all these stupid
g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of
my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being
angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers
and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of
gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper
stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles
driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are
usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just
twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our
children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and
probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we
all are, and how it all just sucks,
and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do --
except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this
way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I
experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm
operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the
world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the
world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to
think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles
stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in
SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so
traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy
SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me
off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the
seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way
bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force
myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's
checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these
people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do,
overall.
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is
and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your
default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that
aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how
to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually
be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type
situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that
lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not
that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T
True is that you get to decide
how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has
meaning and what doesn't.”