Ambigamy

I was married by 24 and had my first child at 25. By the standard of my parents’ generation, 24 was normal–my father married at that age–but by my generation’s standard (especially within my Northern California subculture), it was peculiar to get married so young. My firstborn child is eight years older than those of my two older brothers.

I wasn’t precocious; it was circumstantial. I was living on a commune, but we weren’t doing the usual free love thang. We were 1500 hippies the press referred to as the “Technicolor Amish” because of our combination of tie dyes and traditional values. We were sexual conservatives. No sex if you weren’t engaged. No dating nonmembers or anyone who had been a member less than six months. Marriage is sacred.

Some of what motivated us was philosophical. We were feminist, pro-life, and compensating for the sexual lassitude that had created so many irresponsible hippy parents.
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“Don’t say I don’t care. I do care.”

Like many words, care means different kinds of things. It has its descriptive meaning–its denotation: Caring is a certain kind of behavior. But it also has its prescriptive meaning–its connotation: Caring is good. You should care. Being uncaring is bad.

Combining denotation and connotation you get a rule: if caring, then good; if uncaring, then bad. Someone who calls you uncaring speaks with the authority of simple description–but smuggled into the description is an accusation that can make you feel guilty.

When you stop to think about the implied rule that caring is always good, it’s obviously absurd. If caring is always good, you should never stop caring about anything and anyone. You should always care about everything and everyone.
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“Excuse me, my unfocused words. I was flying blind. If you can find it in your heart . . . if you’ve got one. . .”
“Shame,” by Randy Newman from the album “Bad Love”

Decision theory recognizes that any yes/no question entails the prospect of being right or wrong, and that means four possible outcomes: A right yes, a right no, a wrong yes, and a wrong no. Thus there are two ways to be wrong: Saying yes when the answer is no (called a false positive or Type I error) and saying no when the answer is yes (called a false negative or a Type II error).

We’re all pretty good at reducing both types of error, at saying yes when we should say yes and no when we should say no. Indeed, all adaptation and learning is aimed at reducing wrong yeses and nos on life’s pressing questions.

It’s easier to minimize wrong yeses and nos when your situation is stable than when it’s changing. Think of wrong yeses as aiming too far left and wrong nos as aiming too far right: if the target is standing still you’ll hit it more often than if it’s moving. When it’s moving, you’re likely to shoot too far to either side of it.

Likewise when life-circumstances are in transition your ability to make the right decisions declines. When a child is in a teenage growth spurt, parents will over- and underestimate the child’s maturity a lot more than when the child is very young. Going through the reverse growth spurt from adulthood to senior citizenship, we over- and underestimate how old we are. Fast-moving targets and rapid transitions naturally mean more miscalculations.

Some rapid transitions are intrinsically disappointing, frustrating, and humiliating. When your child becomes surly, when your beloved loses interest, when your status is in decline, the losses are simply no fun. On top of that then, the increase in error that comes with aiming at a moving target adds insult to injury. When a partnership becomes strained on the way to estrangement, the strain is no fun, and it’s frustrating how often we misinterpret the changing relationship. After all, one of the joys of partnership is the ease you feel with the other person, the sense that you can do no wrong. As the partnership starts unraveling, it becomes hard to find the right words and actions, in part simply because the relationship is in rapid transition.

One effect of the adjustment by fits and starts to something both intrinsically disappointing and rapidly changing is what I’ll call the sorrytaliatory cycle—an oscillation between remorse and retaliation. On the yes/no question “Is it my fault things are suddenly so hard?” it’s easy to fall into an oscillation between strong yes and strong no responses. It’s my fault. No, it’s not—it’s his fault. We apologize and resent it. We lash out and regret it.

Sorrytaliatory cycles are the strained effort to draw new boundaries when the relationship is in transition, when you can’t tell where the boundaries belong and you wish you didn’t have to redraw them anyway.

Parents fall into sorrytaliatory cycles. Shocked and insulted by their child’s surly behavior, they lose their temper and in a fierce voice threaten to impose some draconian punishment. When they’ve calmed down or when the child bursts into tears, these parents feel remorse and apologize profusely, offering lavish concessions for having gone too far. Then, feeling taken advantage of all over again, they lash out once more.

Breakups, for me, have always been marked by at least the impulse toward sorrytaliatory cycling, and typically some acting on that impulse, which declines over time. I first noticed the pattern when my marriage ended ten years ago. I’d feel deep remorse for having manipulated my former wife, and then great resentment for the way I felt manipulated by her. At first, the sorrytaliatory cycles came hard and fast, then every month, then every few months. Then, noticing the pattern, I gave it a name. That in itself made for a very marked decrease in the cycle’s frequency and severity.

To name it is to tame it.

Last week I discussed the relationship between the questions “How can I succeed?” and “Can I succeed?” The two questions form a loop.

In one direction, ambition inspires you to ask, “Can I succeed?” To answer that question, you ask, “Well, how can I succeed?” Then you explore particular plans to do so. If you find a promising plan, you answer “Can I succeed?” in the affirmative, at which point you burrow into the hard work of implementing the plan. In this direction, the loop starts with the question “Can I succeed?”

In the other direction, it starts with an answer to “How can I succeed?” A feasible plan inspires you to answer the question “Can I succeed?” in the affirmative. You then implement the plan and stick with it, at least unless and until that plan proves less promising than you thought it would be. At that point you may be popped back out to the higher-level question, “Can I succeed?”

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Last song in a series of three, here’s one whose target audience is not the middle-aged but rather the young and restless. It was inspired by an argument I couldn’t get started with someone who only wanted to talk about how the media was to blame for youth culture’s slide into promiscuity. I agreed with her about the media but thought other factors also contributed to shifts in attitudes toward sex and love. The friend would hear none of it and so I wrote this song. It mirrors ideas in an article I wrote a year ago called Mid-wife Crisis (more…)

Think back to a time when you fought really hard for something. Back then, how sure were you that you were right? How sure are you now that you were?If you’re like me, you pick your battles, and sometimes you pick wrong. You also intuitively track how often you changed your mind later about your choice to fight. I don’t mean meticulously-I probably remember more clearly the times when I was right than the times I was wrong to fight. Still, in some cases I’m glad I stood my ground. In others, I wish I hadn’t. So now when I confront people, I do so under the shadow of the accumulated evidence that I’ve made mistakes.That kind of shadow can cramp your fighting style.

One of the main things we focus upon when we launch into a confrontation is who is the more determined, stubborn, or steadfast. Uncertainty can signal weak resolve, and knowing you’ve been wrong before causes uncertainty. (more…)

You’re in love, or so you think. You certainly feel in love, but now that you’ve been run through the mill a few times, you wonder what the feeling really means.

You love being loved. But think about it, why does this person love you? What’s the motivation? When someone says, “I love you,” what does it represent? That you’re perfectly matched? That it turns out you’re a god after all? Is it just some kind of hormonal certainty driving this person? Lust, neediness - a pathological hunger? What’s their angle?

Why do you want to know? After all, what difference does it make what motivates someone to love you? Don’t question love. Love works in mysterious ways. Trust the process.

Trust the process to do what? To lead to happily ever after - or to run you through the mill again?
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Sure, at some level you’re open to anything. Que sera sera. But you live mainly on a lower level where you don’t welcome all possibilities with equal enthusiasm. You’d really prefer not to be run through the mill again.

You care what this “I love you” really represents because you want the partnership to be functional for the long haul rather than blowing up in your face, covering you with disappointment again.

What a behavior functions for - its “for-ness” - is what the relationship represents. We look to such for-ness or representation as a cue to function, to whether the relationship is viable. If the love is “true” - that is, for, or representative of, healthy desires, then you surmise that the love will be functional into the future.

In all relationships we monitor motives - what behaviors represent - because we believe they indicate functionality. Dysfunctional relationships are ones in which the partners’ representations of each other are unhealthy. “Ulterior motives,” the sketchy things that love and kindness can represent, are considered bad signs when it comes to assessing a relationship’s prospects for long-term functionality.

Funny thing is, relationships can stay functional even if what they represent changes over time. Most long-term partnerships, romantic or otherwise, come to represent different things over their course.

Maybe that couple celebrating their 25th anniversary first fell in love because they each represented sex, affirmation, or status to the other when they were young and restless. Now that they’ve been together for a quarter century, the relationship represents other things - security, the children, companionship. Continuous functionality sustained it even as representation changed.

It’s natural for us to think of function and representation as intrinsically linked. But if a continually functional relationship can represent different things over time, then the link between representation and function must not be a simple one-to-one lock-step correspondence. And of course this must be so; otherwise the uses and meanings of things - what they represent - would never change. Next week I’ll discuss how in all evolution, from life forms to language, things can remain functional even as what they function for changes.

Being of two minds about sex, love and romance:

Deeply romantic; deeply skeptical

Receptive reluctant

You love others so you give of yourself; you love yourself and withhold from others.

At times sex is deeply meaningful–significant of profound love and compatibility; at other times it seems as innocuous as dancing.

Are you an ambigamist? Here are some ways to tell:

• You prefer your own company to incompatible company
• You vacillate between wondering whether you’re even capable of committing in relationship and wondering whether it’s even smart to commit. Yes, you value commitment but it’s got to be with the right person.
• Unlike simpler romantics you’ve been in and out of love often. You’ve shopped around. You wonder if you’re a pathological love shopper but for the most part you’re glad you didn’t commit in those past relationships you’ve left.
• You’ve played all roles–the one who leaves the one who is left. You know the drill, not that it feels like a drill when you’re in it. Still, because you’ve been around the block a few times, even in a relationship’s deepest mergings, it’s no longer inconceivable to you that the relationship might end.
• You’re not simply casual about sex and love. You’ve proven capable of intense commitment. You can be loyal and constant. You have mourned the loss of love and romance intensely.
• You miss the simplicity of pure magical romance where it just clicks. You still want that but over the years by trial and error you’ve also accumulated a list of pretty clear specs about what would and wouldn’t work for you in relationship. During moments of pure romance the list doesn’t loom, but the moments of pure romance are no longer so sustainable that you can ever simply ignore the list.
• Ultimately you’re a pragmatist and love is a negotiation toward compatibility, not a magic fusion between soul mates. To some that makes you seem crass and unsafe, but you actually think it’s safer to date people who realize this than ones who will use soul mate idealizations to bully you into surrendering to them.
• You’ve gotten pretty good at living alone. You’re accustomed to the flexibility. You’re aware of your preferences.
• A lot of your relationships don’t settle into the second phase when the high emotions settle down. As a result, you’ve ended up harvesting the front-end richness off of various relationships, which increases your expectation of relationship being about that initial thrilling buzz.
• If you’re older, you do wonder about the sustainability of this. The game of musical chairs is winding down. You don’t want to be left alone when you lose your allure. Then again you don’t want to be strapped with an incompatible but dependent partner in your later life.
• If you’re a woman you vacillate between wanting to protect yourself from casual or incompatible boys by not committing too soon. At the same time you worry about being too loose.
• If you’re a man, you vacillate between bravado about how you don’t need the grief of long-term relationship and feeling shallow for not more readily committing.
• In moments of vulnerability you feel the social pressure to be non-ambigamous. Many of your married or more romantic friends think that ambigamy is your problem and that you need a major attitude adjustment. In social settings you sometimes end up being the odd cog for not having settled down. Sometimes you feel like you’re a member of some shameful sex/love subculture. Ambigamist can be as shunned as gays in the ‘50s.
• You’re a romanticynic, half of you is profoundly romantic. Half of you is skeptical to the point of wanting to keep your sober distance from romance’s powerful effects.
• You’ve got a life. You have many things you like or need to do and so you don’t want to compromise just for compromise’s sake.
• You know a few seasoned ambigamists, people who never did settle down, aren’t bitter about it, still date, but with a calmed appetite and a clear head. They have active social life and hobbies. They seem contented and well-adjusted.
• You recognize that in all partnerships there aren’t just two loves. There are at minimum four: I love you. You love me. I love me. You love you. Managing and coordinating those four is much harder than managing the more commonly held two (I love you; you love me) but you can no longer pretend there are only two so you resign yourself to managing them.
• You experience sex two different ways: You have proven capable in some contexts of treating it casually, like a sweet dance, a good meal. In other contexts it becomes intensely symbolic, an indication of a deep bond or trust.
• You’re ambivalent about commitment. Sometimes you wonder you commit too easily sometimes if you’re too slow to commit.
• Yes, you don’t commit out of fear but you don’t consider fear an unreasonable emotion. You know that partnership is about the most intense form of influence ever. You tend to care a lot about not disappointing your partner and so, in relationship you are sure to be shaped by your partner’s values. That’s a great thing when your partner brings out the best in you. It’s a terrible thing when your partner brings out the worst in you, especially if the partner who brings out the worst in you is attractive, because attraction has extraordinary sway and influence over you.
• You’re intensely ambivalent about attraction. On the one hand, it moves you strongly; it works upon you powerfully. On the other hand you don’t trust it. You have noticed that attraction is not highly correlated with compatibility and that sex is not tightly correlated with the likelihood of a fine partnership.
• You may end up single. You don’t want to, but you don’t want to end up coupled inappropriately either.
• You sometimes feel like it’s generous to not try to partner too quickly. Partnering is largely faith in expectations that the other person will be a certain way. You don’t want to come at someone with a cookie-cutter. You appreciate the value of finding appropriate psychic distance in relationship and can’t make partnership the ultimate moral value.
• Recognizing that partnership is a choice between freely consenting adults and that you have opted out of traditional or formal approaches to relationship, you relinquish the option to use moralist bullying to coerce those who disappoint you. When you find the partner of your dreams and they don’t feel the same about you, you recognize that there is no more of a moral issue here, than when in business interactions someone seeks a better deal elsewhere. You may be upset. You may feel and even act a little on some selectively moral claim for justice but you get over it quickly because claiming the moral high ground in such situations is unjustified.
• Ambigamist policy
• Platonic until proven ambigamous: You don’t kiss non-ambigamists-people who are looking for their soul mates or by temperament or appetite or more casual about falling into intense romantic bond. You would rather go without romance than set them up for disappointment and frustration. You’re not a player or a user of potential partners. You’ll flirt a little but you hold the default value as friendship.
• Ambigamous until proven compatible: Even when you do kiss you try to remember that you’re both ambigamists and that a kiss is not a contract. In relationship your default value is ambigamy, not couple. You don’t ask “why not marry?” you ask “Why?

There is such stigma around “players” and people who “fear intimacy” that it borders on a sexual prejudice.  Ambigamists are intelligent responsible people who are quite understandably and appropriately of two minds about sex, love and romance.

Are you an ambigamist? Here are some ways to tell:

• You prefer your own company to incompatible company
• You vacillate between wondering whether you’re even capable of committing in relationship and wondering whether it’s even smart to commit. Yes, you value commitment but it’s got to be with the right person.
• Unlike simpler romantics you’ve been in and out of love often. You’ve shopped around. You wonder if you’re a pathological love shopper but for the most part you’re glad you didn’t commit in those past relationships you’ve left.
• You’ve played all roles–the one who leaves the one who is left. You know the drill, not that it feels like a drill when you’re in it. Still, because you’ve been around the block a few times, even in a relationship’s deepest mergings, it’s no longer inconceivable to you that the relationship might end.
• You’re not simply casual about sex and love. You’ve proven capable of intense commitment. You can be loyal and constant. You have mourned the loss of love and romance intensely.
• You miss the simplicity of pure magical romance where it just clicks. You still want that but over the years by trial and error you’ve also accumulated a list of pretty clear specs about what would and wouldn’t work for you in relationship. During moments of pure romance the list doesn’t loom, but the moments of pure romance are no longer so sustainable that you can ever simply ignore the list.
• Ultimately you’re a pragmatist and love is a negotiation toward compatibility, not a magic fusion between soul mates. To some that makes you seem crass and unsafe, but you actually think it’s safer to date people who realize this than ones who will use soul mate idealizations to bully you into surrendering to them.
• You’ve gotten pretty good at living alone. You’re accustomed to the flexibility. You’re aware of your preferences.
• A lot of your relationships don’t settle into the second phase when the high emotions settle down. As a result, you’ve ended up harvesting the front-end richness off of various relationships, which increases your expectation of relationship being about that initial thrilling buzz.
• If you’re older, you do wonder about the sustainability of this. The game of musical chairs is winding down. You don’t want to be left alone when you lose your allure. Then again you don’t want to be strapped with an incompatible but dependent partner in your later life.
• If you’re a woman you vacillate between wanting to protect yourself from casual or incompatible boys by not committing too soon. At the same time you worry about being too loose.
• If you’re a man, you vacillate between bravado about how you don’t need the grief of long-term relationship and feeling shallow for not more readily committing.
• In moments of vulnerability you feel the social pressure to be non-ambigamous. Many of your married or more romantic friends think that ambigamy is your problem and that you need a major attitude adjustment. In social settings you sometimes end up being the odd cog for not having settled down. Sometimes you feel like you’re a member of some shameful sex/love subculture. Ambigamist can be as shunned as gays in the ‘50s.
• You’re a romanticynic, half of you is profoundly romantic. Half of you is skeptical to the point of wanting to keep your sober distance from romance’s powerful effects.
• You’ve got a life. You have many things you like or need to do and so you don’t want to compromise just for compromise’s sake.
• You know a few seasoned ambigamists, people who never did settle down, aren’t bitter about it, still date, but with a calmed appetite and a clear head. They have active social life and hobbies. They seem contented and well-adjusted.
• You recognize that in all partnerships there aren’t just two loves. There are at minimum four: I love you. You love me. I love me. You love you. Managing and coordinating those four is much harder than managing the more commonly held two (I love you; you love me) but you can no longer pretend there are only two so you resign yourself to managing them.
• You experience sex two different ways: You have proven capable in some contexts of treating it casually, like a sweet dance, a good meal. In other contexts it becomes intensely symbolic, an indication of a deep bond or trust.
• You’re ambivalent about commitment. Sometimes you wonder you commit too easily sometimes if you’re too slow to commit.
• Yes, you don’t commit out of fear but you don’t consider fear an unreasonable emotion. You know that partnership is about the most intense form of influence ever. You tend to care a lot about not disappointing your partner and so, in relationship you are sure to be shaped by your partner’s values. That’s a great thing when your partner brings out the best in you. It’s a terrible thing when your partner brings out the worst in you, especially if the partner who brings out the worst in you is attractive, because attraction has extraordinary sway and influence over you.
• You’re intensely ambivalent about attraction. On the one hand, it moves you strongly; it works upon you powerfully. On the other hand you don’t trust it. You have noticed that attraction is not highly correlated with compatibility and that sex is not tightly correlated with the likelihood of a fine partnership.
• You may end up single. You don’t want to, but you don’t want to end up coupled inappropriately either.
• You sometimes feel like it’s generous to not try to partner too quickly. Partnering is largely faith in expectations that the other person will be a certain way. You don’t want to come at someone with a cookie-cutter. You appreciate the value of finding appropriate psychic distance in relationship and can’t make partnership the ultimate moral value.
• Recognizing that partnership is a choice between freely consenting adults and that you have opted out of traditional or formal approaches to relationship, you relinquish the option to use moralist bullying to coerce those who disappoint you. When you find the partner of your dreams and they don’t feel the same about you, you recognize that there is no more of a moral issue here, than when in business interactions someone seeks a better deal elsewhere. You may be upset. You may feel and even act a little on some selectively moral claim for justice but you get over it quickly because claiming the moral high ground in such situations is unjustified.
• Ambigamist policy
• Platonic until proven ambigamous: You don’t kiss non-ambigamists-people who are looking for their soul mates or by temperament or appetite or more casual about falling into intense romantic bond. You would rather go without romance than set them up for disappointment and frustration. You’re not a player or a user of potential partners. You’ll flirt a little but you hold the default value as friendship.
• Ambigamous until proven compatible: Even when you do kiss you try to remember that you’re both ambigamists and that a kiss is not a contract. In relationship your default value is ambigamy, not couple. You don’t ask “why not marry?” you ask “Why?