One Year Monk

xkcd on the public serivce of Valentine's Day

If you aren't reading xkcd regularly, you should be.

Valentine's Day? Shrug.

The One Year Monk is not that crazy about Valentine's Day, but he honestly doesn't really care. It's so totally never had the slightest impact on his life, that he kind of forgets it's happening. Whatever. have fun, I guess, if you're into that stuff. 

 

Some links on commitment

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by Sandra Tsing Loh, in The Atlantic. Ms. Loh confesses to an infidelity that led to divorce. She makes a strong argument for doing away with marriage, but, as in the case of Against Love, the problem is what you do -- especially with children -- without marriage? There's the proverbial rub. Ms. Loh attempts to offer a sort of modest proposal at the end, but it's an obvious rush job with no practical value at all. At least not now. Not yet. It's a fun read, though. I laughed at this paragraph:

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Marry Him! By Lori Gottlieb, also in The Atlantic. A video in the attached depicts the editor of the magazine who says that this essay caused more letters to the editor than anything printed in the magazine in the last decade. The One Year Monk has a pretty different reaction to this piece than most others. The question isn't whether or not Gottlieb has it "right" or "wrong" at all. What are people so threatened by? She's offering her perspective for younger women.

In the video, she says it really well. She says, looking back on her 20s and 30s, she passed up on some guys who were definite 8s, when she's come to doubt that the 10 even exists. It's a compelling argument.

Anyway, The One Year Monk, you might imagine, has gotten some pretty harsh reactions when he has questioned the notion of having children or getting married. Saying things like that really threatens people. Folks, step off. We all have a right to live our lives the way we want. We also have a right to offer a bit of advice based on our own perspectives and life histories without you getting all up in our Kool-Aid about it.Especially if we offer it in the pages of a magazine that you can choose to read or not read.

Gottlieb had a funny paragraph, too. Here you go:

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

Anyway, let's hear from the other side before we give Gottlieb too many props.

For our first try in the counter-Gottlieb set, I went to Liesl Schillinger at The Daily Beast, who wrote Give up on Mr. Perfect? Executive summary: FAIL. Schillinger's vitriol here is transparent. She doesn't like that Gottlieb questioned feminism. She buys into the whole gospel. No critique is welcome. Fuck you very much, Gottlieb, she says. It's a silly little essay that falls prey to the same fallacy as most romantic advice writing: she generalizes.

Most of page 2 is devoted to the notion that there are some older single women out there that are living it up and happy to be solo. She thinks this is some kind of gotcha. Please. I guarantee you I know what Gottlieb would say about that, because she didn't write the book for them. She wrote the book for women who want to be married. I mean, in fairness, Gottlieb posits in her original essay that any single woman over 35 is getting anxious. I suspect they are, but some are also anxious and not-anxious at the same time. Some have chosen to ignore the anxiety and live it up. Good for them. That's how The One Year Monk hopes to go out, too. He is also anxious. He is also trying to ignore it.

But just because Gottlieb advises women who want to get married to think about Mr. Pretty-Great over Mr. Perfect does not make her a Feminine Benedict Arnold. Sigh. No funny paragraph in this one.

Jessica Grose in Slate is a whole other story. Her piece, What Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him got wrong about single women, is considerably more compelling. She focuses on the statistical data to see if Gottlieb is making much ado about nothing. She points out that college-eduated women are seeing diminishing divorce rates, that women who marry later get divorced less and that women who are married and have been get depressed more often. All interesting.

I don't think it helps if you are one person in this sea. You're not a statistic. You're lonely. You want to be married. Again, The One Year Monk argues that you'd be more content if you didn't fall back on love for your fulfillment. You don't have to live that way.

That said, I think Grose's piece shows the most sensitivity (even more than Gottlieb) to the notion that different people need different things from life. Compound our inherent American individuality, then, with the facts of our condition in life. It's a bit of hash. Anyway, Grose's last sentence is good for a laugh, so give it a skim if you're curious but read every word of the last paragraph. Nice payoff.

All of the four pieces really come down to this question: how can we construct society so that we'll all be less sad. It's not: how can we be happy. It's: how can we ease off the misery-acceleration-pedal? The One Year Monk, but he thinks that all four pieces assume that the answer lies somewhere in how we construct the arena of Love.

The One Year Monk doubts we'll find the answer therein.

The problem of romantic advice

The problem of all romantic advice columns, from Dear Abby to Carolyn Hax's "Tell me about it" to Savage Love, The One Year Monk contends, is this: they assume we all have the means to succeed in love. 

The One Year Monk spent the last few hours writing in the Project's book. The book is so much different than this blog. The book is personal; the blog is a crusade. The crusade I'm waging on here is for the ugly folks, the awkward folks, the self-conscious folks, the non-sexy. I'm crusading for those who are doomed at Love. There is an answer: give up. Life has a lot to offer you. Let go of this one pursuit. Win more. Do more. Feel more. 

You don't have a shot at Love? So what. You don't have a shot at the NFL either. You going to mope about that? No, you're not. You can deal with that, so deal with this the only way that makes sense.

So much of the advice out there is given by attractive people who have had lots of amorous success and succeeded with lots of people. They know that until very old age sets in they will always be able to find someone. They will not be alone.

If this blog resonates with you, though, it's because you don't feel that way. You don't really think you can find someone. It feels somewhat hopeless. You know what? Maybe it is. And even if it isn't, the last person you need to listen to is someone who's never had your problems. This is the myth behind romantic advice columns: that courting is a skill you can learn. For some of us, there's no getting better. It's something you got or you don't.

No one wants to say that out loud, though. But I'll say it. When I write in my book, it's those moments as a guy that just can't make it happen that I dwell on in there. So on here, as I read the little blog posts and newspaper stories by hot people trying to help the lumpen, well, I want to scream. And that's what I do. On here, I scream a bit for those of us who weren't born quite as gifted as they were. 

Don't listen to them. If you're like me, they've nothing to say to you. 

Linky Winky: Some blog posts I checked out today

Read-dating. Speed-dating with a bibliophilic bent. As silly as any other dating idea, but not bad.

Manly advice on putting a guy in the friendzone. It's true: the only clueless person in this story is the woman who believes a guy she keeps hanging out with ought to "just know" she isn't into him. Women. 

I was an abstinence only guinea pig. Curse you, George W., and your silly penchant for fear-mongering.

Teens all think they are going to die. OK, that's an overstatement, but there is evidence that they have a severe morbidity. Yet they keep screwing. Why? Talk amongst yourselves. 

Sex addiction: is it real? Or, is this the stupidest question posted on the internet today?

How to get over someone - advice from a guy and a girl. Caution: this advice is only useful for hot people. But who cares about non hot people, right?

My twitter page.

Robots can also be unlucky in love

In case you are a human being who feels like love is really hard, it may make you feel better to know that some robots have trouble finding girlfriends, too. Yes, even Transformerz.

You are not alone.

Sex>Romance>Love: Continuously darning the air in the same spot

The One Year Monk has two pieces he'd like to put in front of folks today. I found both of these through the magic of social networking. People I know posted them and I ended up following the links. One really blew my mind. One seemed to deal with the same phenomenon with a lot less sympathy. Still, it's worth reflecting on.

The first one has, undoubtedly, been read by thousands and thousands around the world. New York Magazine has been running this on-line feature for about three years now. The One Year Monk didn't know about it until he saw this essay. In it, each Monday, a New Yorker will blog their sex life for a week and then post it up all at once on the magazine's website. The magazine assigned a freelancer to read all the posts and all the comments and see if he could discern some themes. The Sex Diaries - A Critical Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits & Anxieties -- New York Magazine, by Wesley Yang.

Similarly, in The Daily Nebraskan, Jake Meador observes that Americans may not be that well served by all their sexual options and has an answer for us all: get married. Sexual culture proves addiction, not liberation. Meador's tone is know-it-all, simplistic and completely unsatisfying. On the other hand, he didn't depress The One Year Monk, I just felt a little embarrassed for him. He should really read his columns aloud to himself before going to print.

Yang, on the other hand, is not judgmental. He does not have answers. He has observations. He has a journey that he's taken, and some well chosen slides to bring back and show you. It's just that the slides will break your heart. Folks are out there leaving themselves on the backburners of other people's romantic priorities, looking at people like they are dishes on a menu and guarding themselves against any real sincerity. Clearly sex and its self-righteous big brother, love, are what everyone wants. It is the subject that's easiest to get people talking about. It's the subject that became a sensation on this blog. It's the news we most like to read.

But be careful about admitting it.

Meador's piece begins to lure you in a little at the beginning by pointing out that Conservatives have been wrong to patrionize sexuality by treating it as dirty or shameful. Instead, he goes on to patronize sex by mystifying it.

For Christians, then, the point about sex is not that it’s evil – despite the fact Focus on the Family and every traumatizing daddy-daughter purity ball says, “Sex is bad and shameful… so save it for someone you love.” Rather, the point is that the beautiful image given to us through sex is cosmic in scope, and so it should be revered and adored and, therefore, guarded.

Cosmic in scope? Oh do fuck off. Are you kidding? Cosmic. The One Year Monk may not have had the best sex life in the world, but he's reasonably certain that his various acts have never suggested anything that would ever yield any "cosmic" revelations. In fact, The One Year Monk has never felt quite so un-cosmic as he has in time spent rutting.

Cosmic.

Bloody hell.

But it's not like this is Conservative balderdash exclusively. Hardly. In fact, the liberals have really cornered the market on sex as a window into greater spiritual richness. Geishas. Tantra. Sex therapists. Kama Sutra. All that gobbledygook. We are, as you might have guessed, a bit given to the mystical here at The One Year Monk. There is a certain mystical logic in the idea that in a universe with an omnipresent God, he might be revealed in anything. Sex, could, perhaps, be as good a way as any to find Him.

But it sure as hell isn't any better. In fact, it seems like a lot more bother.

The point where Yang and Meador meet, tho, is here. We have entered an age of sexual ambivalence brought on by overstimulation. This seems to me to be true. Yang doesn't offer a judgement. It's just one of his observations. For Meador, the only sexual arrangement that Christians can embrace is marriage. Only in marriage can sex have real meaning.

The One Year Monk suspects that we'd all be better off if we quit looking for meaning in sex or the meaning of sex. The One Year Monk suspects that sex is a bad place to look for any sort of answers. It is certainly no place to look for fulfillment.

Sex is a very persistent yearning. It's an itch that we must scratch as few of us have the will to resist that urge. We need a companion (or two, or three). Without it, we may not be able to focus enough to be fulfilled. In that way, it seems plausible that sex is necessary for fulfillment.

But Yang's befuddled informants and Meador both seem to believe that sex>romance>love, with the right alchemy along the way, are both necessary and sufficient for fulfillment. The One Year Monk suspects this is wrong. This experiment is testing the proposition that love isn't a blessing to attain but a burden to cope with. It's not a place to journey to, it's a place to start from.

AGAINST LOVE: and the One Year Monk's answer

Oh for Heaven's Sake, I give up. This book doesn't have any point at all. I tried and tried to find any point at all in Laura Kipnis's Against Love, but I can't find any. That's why I am just lumping her last two sections together here. It's all gobbledygook you already know, anyway. It's a book about how marriages have a way of falling prey to adultery. How people get bored with their sex lives, feel empty inside and get irresponsible. It's also about how people seem to have very similar relationships to their spouses that they do to their jobs: people don't really know that they want them anymore, but they are stuck with them and need to work hard to stay there.

The question Kipnis seems to be raising is, well, why? Why work so hard to maintain something you don't really like any more?

She doesn't really raise any interesting answers. And don't even hope for her to come up with any sort of alternatives. She doesn't even try.

I didn't learn anything in particular from this book, but I guess I did figure out something sort of interesting about myself. Kipnis drones on and on about the emptiness people feel after spending a certain amount of time in a relationship.

The One Year Monk has never felt empty. The One Year Monk knows why. The One Year Monk has never been with anyone anywhere close to long enough to feel that emptiness. He just can't identify.

So I can't really judge how important the issue is at the heart of this book.

That said, I can make this judgement: there aren't any answers here. Maybe if you're cheating and looking for a kindred spirit then this book might be for you. And maybe if you're wondering whether or not this new love you've found will keep its meaning in a way that the love you've betrayed didn't, Kipnis does have a pretty good answer for that: it probably won't. She doesn't quite seem to think that that means you shouldn't try, though.

In some ways, Kipnis's little polemic reaffirmed the One Year Monk's commitment to staying a monk for one year. Here's what The One Year Monk suspects: the problem isn't love dying; the problem is living for love.

On AGAINST LOVE: "Domestic Gulags"

Kipnis is starting to win me over. 

If you're just joining us here, the One Year Monk has kicked off his 2010 study of love's discontents by reading 2003's Against Love, by Laura Kipnis. I still don't know quite what her point is, but I'm starting to get a little more on her team. 

Well, maybe.

Like I said, I don't know what her team is, quite, but she certainly sees a lot of problems with the current construction of love, marriage, coupledom and sex. Here's where my confusion lies: it's not that I think most people would disagree with her, it's just that they don't see any better way of living. 

It's like how Winston Churchill said that democracy wasn't much of a way to run a country, it's just better than every other way we've tried so far. 

Her book only has four long chapters and a prologue. I just finished the second, "Domestic Gulags." The case she makes in this section is that coupledom, for all its benefits, curtails personal freedom. The part of the book that haunted me as I read it (and I fear may haunt the One Year Monk long after his year of trial is over) was her long list of things that people in couples told her that they couldn't do in their domestic relationship. Her list were all actual interdictions given by actual partners. Nothing on it seemed at all unbelievable to me.

I have spent much of my life alone. I've never lived with a partner. This is the part I always worried about. The domestic aggravations. How much I would get aggravated with a partner's ways? How much would I would aggravate them (fair bet: a whole lot)? I have always suspected that I just might not be selfless enough to face coupledom, as much as it might seem really nice in theory. I might be too selfish to wed.

Which brings me to the question I most want to ask Kipnis at this stage in the book: are you more concerned about the health and well-being of the individual or of society? 

Two questions continue to leave me pushing back against Kipnis: 1) Isn't it true that, no matter how taxing or even soul-crushing partnered domestic life might be to most people, society works better as an amalgamation of messed up families than of free, willful and self-actualizing individuals? 2) Individuals may have a lot more fun in a world where love is treated as brief, passing and disruptive, one where a person may move from partner-to-partner-to-partner over the course of their many years, but won't most people end up alone and very empty feeling at the end of that chain of affairs, especially when they can no longer attract some new love? 

I suppose most of us die lonely anyway, and, Kipnis might say, better a solitary loneliness than living trapped in a home with someone you hate. Not that that's how most people end up with their final spouse. Though some do. 

I'm just not entirely persuaded that, on balance, for all its foibles and faults, for most people, long-term coupledom isn't the best thing for most people. 

At least for myself, though, maybe I'm not fit for marriage. I am very, very confident that society won't break down if I decide to remain a bachelor. The trouble is sex. Sex is much, much riskier than Kipnis has accounted for here. She doesn't even mention the diseases and the babies spread about by too much sexual liberty. Those are the two easy to account for dangers. Then there are the social dangers (which would only become more prevalent in a society where affairs lasted no longer than the passions that started them): obsession, gossip, bitterness, betrayal, accusation, legal hullaballoos, employer implications, intrigue and reprisal. 

Sex is so much safer within the bounds of a long-term relationship. The One Year Monk, as you might have gathered, is a careful person. He already feels like he's lived his life a bit recklessly up to this point. He's not sure that sex for the sake of sex has a lot more to offer him in this life. He has his memories for that.

But if the One Year Monk walks away from coupledom for good, does that mean he walks away from shoulder-blade-balanced mambo, too? He's not sure if he can, but it seems like he should. No? 

Maybe Kipnis's next section, "The Art of Love," holds an answer. Probably not, but maybe.  

AGAINST LOVE: Love's Labors -- first section down

In my senior year of college, when all my friends were spending much of their time reminiscing about a time in their lives, that, in retrospect, had no sooner gotten started than it came to an end, many of the memories they recounted to me included a similar story: that time my significant other and I had sex in the library. Apparently, this was normal at my school. People had sex in the library. Lots of people. Lots of sex.

Who knew?

Everyone but me.

I feel like I am in a similar place as I grow older. As the break-ups of my friends accumulate. As their desire to be free and play the field wanes and anxiety waxes. Somewhat suddenly, come to find out, it turns out that sex is awfully important to people. They really just can't stand the thought of a life without a lot of terribly good sex, for a very long time. I had no idea. Sex is very important to Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love, a book that I began to confront here. I'm 51 pages into her book and I'm not sure what problem she's trying to solve. She has discerned that people are often unhappy in marriage and that they often stray.

True, true.

She seems to applaud adulterers, without quite recommending it. She definitely believes that coupledom profits society and its economy more than it profits any individual person. Is that her problem?

Is the right society, in Kipnis's mind, one that most profits the individual? Maximum individual freedom, whatever the social cost?

It's funny that I'm fighting Kipnis so hard here. I know it's ironic. Her project and mine seem to be fellow travelers, if not quite the same. At least complementary, no? Her resistance is sluttiness and mine is prudishness, sure, but we're both problematizing the status quo. No?

I can't help but think that her essential ideas are so horribly right-wing. At least, insofar as the Right has always been so Capitalistic. That they have always placed the right to a shot at supreme and all-conquering wealth above the rights of the masses to three square meals and freedom from fear of being trampled. In other words, individuals before the commonwealth.

That's why it's always been odd, to me, that, socially, Right-wingers are so prudish. Sure, sure, let a man gobble up all the property he wants , pay workers a dollar an hour and pump his shit into the river everyone used to swim in. What's the problem? But let one dude bang another dude in the privacy of their homes? Gross. No way! That's gotta be stopped. 

Ironic.

Flip-flop the two, and you've got the Left.

Why is that?

I like to think that I'm a little more intellectually consistent. I want a state and a society that provides for security from want and, more importantly, from irresponsibility (though, if a dude wants to bang another dude it's fine with me -- I'd just rather he picked one and stuck with him). I especially want a state that will absolutely crush you if you betray other people over, take more than your share, break your contracts or just act like the sun rises and sets on your hind-end.

Let me take a crack at the Constitution.

That would be something.

Especially once I break the year of no-sex mark. Yeah!

Oh, right... sex is what I was writing about, wasn't it? OK. Back to that. Kipnis's book dwells on the fact that when "l'amour" fades all a couple has left is rather liking each other. Wouldn't it be better, she asks, if you could feel that excitement forever.

Am I alone in answering: not really?

If all you care about is the way you feel, then, sure, I suppose. But isn't there more to life than feeling good? To everything there is a season, and all that? Isn't that love and lust and horrible torridness a wonderful part of youth we're meant to love and enjoy and thrill in but ultimately move on? And be better for it? When I was child, I played like a child. But now I have a grown and put away childish things... and all that?

Am I crazy?

Lately, friends, acquaintances, people on trains have been telling me that their sex lives have lost that zing and they aren't sure what to do about it. I am just flabbergasted that they didn't see this coming. Has it ever, in the whole history of mankind, lasted for any couple? And why would you want it to? Doesn't the time come to quit boffing and discuss whether you can afford for one of you to go to grad school?

I am crazy. Fine.

Kipnis posits an unconscious conspiracy to keep us locked in coupledom or at least guilted into keeping up its appearances. I don't quite disagree, I'm just not sure that our growing tendency to fail in keeping up such appearances is necessarily hinting to a better world. It strikes me that more and more people today really do seem to yearn for those feelings of youth to go on forever.

Could it be that once upon a time people didn't have those kinds of expectations? I don't want to call those different expectations "realistic," because of the pessimistic connotations that word conveys. No, a simpler, older word, I think, in this case, applies. Couples of yesteryear were, I daresay, on balance, a bit wiser.

I am struck by this in Kipnis's polemic: she's the first writer I've ever come across that recognizes Ambivalence as fundamental to the human condition. Most people think of ambivalence as a weak sort of indecisiveness. I don't. I think the ambivalence that defines us is one of powerful internal conflict. We hunger both for that adrenaline rush of good sex and and early love and also for that touching familiarity that is only afforded by time. It's not like deciding whether you want the cake or the pie. It's like deciding between hanging out with Mick Jagger or Albert Einstein.

Most writers, I find, believe a person needs to "Know thyself." That is, "decide what you really want." In all serious matters, I believe (and maybe Kipnis would, too) that this is wrongheaded. I believe the best we can do is clarify everything we want, make a decision and accept the trade-offs.

Why must their be trade-offs??? The modern (especially the liberal modern) cries. Because there are fucking trade-offs. Get over it.

So you want security sooner-rather-than-later and the money to have fun? Guess you better use that Accounting degree and be an accountant rather than moving in with your bandmates and making the proverbial go-of-it. In this sort of clear-headed, no-nonsense decisionmaking, I believe, lies real wisdom. You live life relishing both your profits while accounting for your costs.

Well and good.

Kipnis seems to understand Ambivalence. She just doesn't seem to understand that ledgers can and should change.

Anyway, anyway... my point in bringing up the question of ambivalence is just to say this: the very fact that she acknowledges it earns her a pass with me (Thank God, she sighs, what would I do if One Year Monk wouldn't give me a chance? Fear not, milady, I will). I'm willing to wait to see what sort of alternative she proposes or at least what question she settles on. I hope, in the end, she at least acknowledges the notion that perhaps, perhaps the success or failure of a relationship can be judged my more yardsticks than simply the steaminess at bedtime.

We'll see.