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.

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.

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.

Women are a drug

And I'm pretty sure I'm an addict. 

This isn't true for everyone, of course. To most men, women are people that they are sometimes really attracted to and sometimes just have sex with and sometimes have real relationships with. 

The One Year Monk is not there, though. The One Year Monk can no longer relate to women as individuals. They are objects that stimulate different receptors in his system. He's a chick junkie.

When one gets to this point, he can't think about any one in a rational way. His only thought with regard to anything she says or anything she does is "did that feel good?" or "did that feel bad?" All one can do, at this point, is to try to get the particular generator-of-stimuli in front of him to generate more good things and fewer bad things, and if she starts to create more bad than good, then find a new source of stimuli.

There are 3 Billion of them out there. 

And here is the really important point: it doesn't truly matter if the woman in front of you is generating the BEST stimuli. You know: does she love you? Are you getting laid? Does she think you're the greatest? That's all great, but as long as you're getting attention, affirmation and a tiny bit of affection then it's enough. If you're a junkie. If women aren't women but drugs with a vocabulary. 

Look, junkies like to get good junk, but failing good junk, any old junk will do. You get to a point as a junkie, I know, when you are so constantly scraping a few bills together and want the junk as soon as possible, that you don't ever get the really good junk anymore. You'd rather get the bad junk sooner than get the good junk later. So you live in a constant state of okay junk.

I know some of you could read this and think the One Year Monk is being really fucked up here. The One Year Monk is really fucked up, but it's not what he's saying that's fucked up. It's how he is. In other words, it's not that women are junk, right... it's just that he's lost the ability to treat them as anything but stimuli.

That's why he has to quit cold turkey.

When you're the sort of guy who is good at getting women to hang around him, but maybe not good enough to get them to really like-like him, then you've got a problem. Being around pretty women always, always feels good. So you keep doing the thing that makes them come around. Even if it's not as good as it could be, it's something. And if you're never quite satisfied and you always want more, then you do it more and more and it becomes a problem.

Or, at least, it has, for me. I'm doing this because I can't quite think rationally about women anymore. They can't tell that. As far as they can tell I'm just this sort of loud guy who's good at listening, says funny things and always knows what the smart kids are doing in town. Good guy to know, right?

But, from my perspective, I'm making myself crazy. I'm not fully sure that I'd be able to handle it if I didn't take this break. That's why I have to take this break. That's why I'm doing this. 

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.

Going into AGAINST LOVE

I started reading Against Love: a polemic, by Laura Kipnis, last night. It purports to be a really radical departure from the assumptions of the status quo. So far, I don't really buy it. I am trying to reserve judgement, though, because I have only just begun it. She seems to be mainly setting up the problems with love so far. I can't really disagree with her, though it does all sound so horribly self-centered.

God, of course people get tired of having sex with the same person, right? We do it because life is more than sex and we need to be able to trust each other not just to be faithful, but to understand us when we're messed up, to look after our money, to be responsible with our children and to have our backs when we are getting old and frail.

There's a great scene in Tom Wolf's A Man in Full, where the main character is bemoaning leaving his wife of many years and taking a trophy wife. He's lying in bed and thinking about the new wife and says to himself, (I'm paraphrasing): who is this person and why won't she leave?

I am hoping the book will surprise me, but here's where it seems to be heading: lifelong commitment is for the birds -- let's find a way to switch around partners as much as we need to.

Maybe she has something more innovative in mind, I don't know. Sounds like a recipe for even more heartbreak, more STDs, more unwanted children, more financial hardship and more even lonelier senior citizens. I don't see a percentage in it. The current system might be a failure, but I'm skeptical of the alternative.

And, of course, I'm always sensitive to the needs of my special interest group: the ones with trouble finding others. What will my people do in a world where commitment is a relic? They had a hard enough time finding one person. They were relieved. Now you want to greenlight their partner to leave them as soon as it strikes their fancy?

I don't know.

Anyway, maybe Kipnis has something more interesting to say than that. We'll see. For now, she's just an apologist for mid-life crises as far as I can tell.

Here's the lesson of mid-life crises, Ms. Kipnis: mid-life crises expose those who can't age with dignity to those who can. The point of a mid-life crisis is not to succumb. Those who don't will live the last half of their lives better than those who do. That's all.

I got my wish

Once upon a time... a long, long time ago... I used to read Carolyn Hax pretty regularly. She is the hip but traditional love advice columnist for The Washington Post. I have only read her intermittently over the last ten years or so, but I do tend to find her straightforward thinking about romance gratifying.

Naturally, as I got to thinking about sources I should check in with over the course of this project, Hax came to mind without research.

So I looked her page up on the Post's website and started reading a recent column she wrote about a woman trying to decide whether or not someone she knew was abusive or a control freak and started thinking: "man, I want this woman to be divorced."

Is that evil?

A part of Carolyn Hax's whole appeal is that she was famously in a pretty functional marriage, had been for a while and advised people from the position of someone who knew what she was doing. The presumption with Hax seemed to be: find someone to stay with -- that's the right thing to do.

Only she didn't.

Well, I don't think she did. I mean, I found out she's divorced from one source here on the Internet. It is old, too. I have not been following the woman very closely. I just double-checked with Wikipedia, though. Apparently it's true. She's on her second marriage. Now she has three boys.

Why is that so satisfying?

America doesn't really like people who make things work anymore. We like people who fall and show flaws but keep it together anyway. What are you supposed to learn about staying with someone from someone who couldn't stay with the person she chose to stay with?

I don't know.

But I'm really happy she's divorced.

That's totally fucked up and I know it, but there you go.

Anyway, I thought her advice about the control freak was pointless, but, on the next question, about the friend who never seemed to like anything Hax's correspondent suggested they do together: I thought that was pretty good. I might have said, "I bet the girl just doesn't like you."