On failure
Many years ago a woman I had been in a relationship with for a long time went to her parents' place for dinner. The next night at my place she said, "My father was talking about you."
Not a promising opening. What came next was even worse. What he said to her was, "When a guy reaches his age and he hasn't settled down, he never will."
And then my girlfriend went to sleep and I sat up most of the night worrying. I thought that he was right. You see, I deeply admire her father and he has been a huge influence on my life. In retrospect, he was a much bigger influence on my life than she was. And it turned out that he was, as a friend of mine put it later, very close to getting it right.
The facts certainly supported his view. His daughter and I had been together for years and my life was not settled. I was only getting by and was living as if everything was on hold pending my finally settling down.
We broke up a couple of years after that and it was years before I realized that he said what he said because he was pushing her to leave me. I just couldn't see it. I just couldn't see a lot of things.
We broke up in May of 1991. I spent a lot of that summer trying to convince her to reconsider. I was so shattered, I didn't tell a soul we'd broken up until September of that year. I had put everything I had into that relationship and even saying out loud that I had failed was too much for me to do. I had dated other women but those were the sorts of temporary relationships you have in high school and college, knowing that you'll move on. This was the first time I had ever aimed at life-long love and, if you had asked me at the time, I would have bet it was my last because I thought another failure would kill me. Later that fall, the Serpentine One and I had our first date. A few years later we were married. We will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that date this year along with sixteen years of marriage.
My ex also started dating someone else that year. And then they broke up. And there may have been others. I didn't keep tabs on her. I do know that after the Serpentine One and I had been married almost ten years, my ex also got married. Her marriage lasted about five years. After that I don't know what happened. I know she lived with a guy for a while and I know she was single for a while. I saw her last winter and she was living with another guy and that may or may not be working out for her.
The thing is, both her father and I were too close to the situation to judge all those years ago. We both thought I was the one who wouldn't settle down. It was about fifteen years later, shortly after another friend told me that my ex had separated from her husband, that I saw for the first time that there was indeed someone in that relationship who wasn't ever going to have a stable life. It wasn't me though.
The funny thing is that relationship with me turns out to have been the single most successful relationship in her life so far. It lasted longer than her marriage. Or, to put it another way, the reason my life was unsettled in those days was because she was in it. The reason her life was unsettled is because her life will always be unsettled because that is the kind of person she is. All this is terribly obvious now.
There are, I think, two lessons in this.
The first is that our society reflexively blames the man. He is the expendable one. When something starts to go wrong with a couple, everyone rallies around her. It's a lot like custody battles: unless she does something really extreme, the judgment will be in her favour.
And that's okay. We're men, we are supposed to take it. Publicly.
The second lesson is the reason I started this blog and it's this: moral life is not about making moral judgments. Moral life is about becoming a certain sort of person. My ex, her father and I all assessed the situation back then in a way that was exactly backwards but that is not the life lesson here. The thing that really mattered in the longer run was not what we thought but who we were.
You can make all sorts of mistakes in moral judgments and it doesn't matter that much. What matters is your moral character.
Blundering fool that I was, I was a blundering fool who'd spent his still-young life blundering towards a settled life. I'd made mistakes and I made more after we broke up. To this day I'm not quite sure how I managed to find the Serpentine One. It feels like a miracle and I look at her with awe.
My ex had spent her even-younger life having fun. Nothing was serious. Not just her relationships, she spent her time at university having a good time and not learning. That was why she picked Queen's University, which is a party school first and only a centre of learning as an incidental matter, for her degree.
She didn't do this unconsciously. Her idea was that she'd party it up a while and then stop. But when she tried, she couldn't. She made what I now know is the most common mistake young women make. They think, "I'll just settle down later". The problem is that we form our character during those years. The time from puberty until the end of college is about a decade (and nearly half your life at that age), if you spend that time being a party girl, you'll set your moral compass for life.
Many years ago a woman I had been in a relationship with for a long time went to her parents' place for dinner. The next night at my place she said, "My father was talking about you."
Not a promising opening. What came next was even worse. What he said to her was, "When a guy reaches his age and he hasn't settled down, he never will."
And then my girlfriend went to sleep and I sat up most of the night worrying. I thought that he was right. You see, I deeply admire her father and he has been a huge influence on my life. In retrospect, he was a much bigger influence on my life than she was. And it turned out that he was, as a friend of mine put it later, very close to getting it right.
The facts certainly supported his view. His daughter and I had been together for years and my life was not settled. I was only getting by and was living as if everything was on hold pending my finally settling down.
We broke up a couple of years after that and it was years before I realized that he said what he said because he was pushing her to leave me. I just couldn't see it. I just couldn't see a lot of things.
We broke up in May of 1991. I spent a lot of that summer trying to convince her to reconsider. I was so shattered, I didn't tell a soul we'd broken up until September of that year. I had put everything I had into that relationship and even saying out loud that I had failed was too much for me to do. I had dated other women but those were the sorts of temporary relationships you have in high school and college, knowing that you'll move on. This was the first time I had ever aimed at life-long love and, if you had asked me at the time, I would have bet it was my last because I thought another failure would kill me. Later that fall, the Serpentine One and I had our first date. A few years later we were married. We will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that date this year along with sixteen years of marriage.
My ex also started dating someone else that year. And then they broke up. And there may have been others. I didn't keep tabs on her. I do know that after the Serpentine One and I had been married almost ten years, my ex also got married. Her marriage lasted about five years. After that I don't know what happened. I know she lived with a guy for a while and I know she was single for a while. I saw her last winter and she was living with another guy and that may or may not be working out for her.
The thing is, both her father and I were too close to the situation to judge all those years ago. We both thought I was the one who wouldn't settle down. It was about fifteen years later, shortly after another friend told me that my ex had separated from her husband, that I saw for the first time that there was indeed someone in that relationship who wasn't ever going to have a stable life. It wasn't me though.
The funny thing is that relationship with me turns out to have been the single most successful relationship in her life so far. It lasted longer than her marriage. Or, to put it another way, the reason my life was unsettled in those days was because she was in it. The reason her life was unsettled is because her life will always be unsettled because that is the kind of person she is. All this is terribly obvious now.
There are, I think, two lessons in this.
The first is that our society reflexively blames the man. He is the expendable one. When something starts to go wrong with a couple, everyone rallies around her. It's a lot like custody battles: unless she does something really extreme, the judgment will be in her favour.
And that's okay. We're men, we are supposed to take it. Publicly.
The second lesson is the reason I started this blog and it's this: moral life is not about making moral judgments. Moral life is about becoming a certain sort of person. My ex, her father and I all assessed the situation back then in a way that was exactly backwards but that is not the life lesson here. The thing that really mattered in the longer run was not what we thought but who we were.
You can make all sorts of mistakes in moral judgments and it doesn't matter that much. What matters is your moral character.
Blundering fool that I was, I was a blundering fool who'd spent his still-young life blundering towards a settled life. I'd made mistakes and I made more after we broke up. To this day I'm not quite sure how I managed to find the Serpentine One. It feels like a miracle and I look at her with awe.
My ex had spent her even-younger life having fun. Nothing was serious. Not just her relationships, she spent her time at university having a good time and not learning. That was why she picked Queen's University, which is a party school first and only a centre of learning as an incidental matter, for her degree.
She didn't do this unconsciously. Her idea was that she'd party it up a while and then stop. But when she tried, she couldn't. She made what I now know is the most common mistake young women make. They think, "I'll just settle down later". The problem is that we form our character during those years. The time from puberty until the end of college is about a decade (and nearly half your life at that age), if you spend that time being a party girl, you'll set your moral compass for life.
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