Learning to be less concerned about what others think

Do men really prefer younger women rather than women their own age when looking for potential partners? This question came up at a recent couples' dinner party where the men sat talking together at one end of the table about cars, motorcycles and the stock market and the women sat at the other end talking about work, leadership, and eventually movies and television series. At one point one of the women brought up a recent survey that purportedly says that men really do prefer younger women rather than women their own age as partners; dating sites seemed to confirm this from their statistical data. Older women had a harder time finding a suitable partner on most dating sites because most of the men on the sites, even men their own age, preferred younger women. She thought that was very unfair to older women (namely women our age) and brought it up for discussion to the entire table of guests; the men wisely avoided the subject so the topic didn't get discussed much further. What should the men have said anyway? That it's not true? They cannot say that it's not true nor that it is true. Older men may be more interested in younger women than in older women on these dating sites, but no one really knows how the game plays out. Do the younger women actually go out with the older men? Or do they end up preferring men their own age?

What I found interesting is that any of the women sitting at that table would even care about this topic. All of them are in good relationships. All of them are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves financially if their husbands left them for younger women. They all make/made very good salaries and have good careers. Yes, it would be unfair, unkind, abominable, etc. if their husbands left them for younger women. We can all agree on that. My mother would have called them cads. But the women would survive. My major question is the following: why do women even care about what men think in this regard? Why do women need to see themselves in the eyes of men at all after many years of doing so? Because when you are younger you compete with other women for available men, you are looking for potential partners for marriage and children, you are looking for someone to perhaps take care of you financially, and so on. Competition is part of the picture when you are young. Much of this is built into who we are as human beings; the human race needs to continue and the instinct is to reproduce. That instinct leads to finding a partner with which to accomplish that. Men are looking for fertile women, and those women are usually young, under the age of fifty, because the childbearing years usually end around that time. Most young couples end up being together with partners their own age; some marry younger partners, some marry older. But the majority of young people marry within their own age group. So should older women be mad at evolution and the biology that renders women infertile after a certain point? Of course not. They shouldn't even be preoccupied with these thoughts after a certain point. Why should they? Why should they be at all preoccupied with what men or society at large think about them as older women? Trying to compete with younger women (or younger men in the case of older men) is just plain foolish. And if the older women I know, who are accomplished career women with no financial problems are concerned about this, then what about women who are less fortunate, financially or otherwise? 

My point is that older women should be less concerned about what men and society think of them and more concerned about enjoying their lives and their good fortune whether or not a man is in the picture. Nice if you have a good man with whom you can share your life, but what if there is no good man in the picture? Should you lay down and die? No. You should take your rightful place at the table of life; you've earned it. You should 'take up space', make your presence known, bring up your interests and hobbies, be yourself and live in harmony with yourself. Pursue your interests as far as they take you. If you have good health, be happy. Be happy in your own company. Take the trips you want to take by yourself. Do what you want to do. If you don't 'live' and merely wait around for a man to do these things with you, how long are you willing to wait? When will you do the things you want to do, when you are eighty years old? Forget about whether men will like you. Stop trying to mold yourself to please them. Don't define your worth in terms of whether you are together with a man or not. Why spend the last chapter of your life worrying about whether your husband would prefer being with a younger woman? If he leaves you for one, let him go, he wasn't worth hanging onto anyway. Look at your life as the adventure it really is, with its ups and downs and detours. It's your life, no one else's. I cannot imagine a worse fate than spending my entire life trying to mold myself to fit any man's preferences, rather than having lived my life being true to myself. 

 

Warning signs

I just finished reading The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, a taut thriller about a young woman--Vanessa, her ex-husband Richard, and his new love--Emma. The story that unfolds is not at all what you might think it to be—the jealous ex-wife who makes life difficult for her ex and his new love. Rather, Vanessa tries to save Emma from making the same mistake she did. There are lots of reasons for that. The major reason is that Richard is a control freak (as is revealed gradually during the course of the story) with very disturbing character traits. I’d recommend reading the book, not only because it is a decent thriller and a page-turner filled with ‘palpable tension’, but because it brings up uncomfortable issues to which women should pay attention. Those issues should serve as major warning signs when deciding about the future of any romantic relationship.

Whenever I watch rom-com films, I am always surprised by the ‘couple stupidity’ that gets presented as part and parcel of modern relationships. For example, a man and a woman meet, he has his cushy job on Wall Street and is the wealthy bachelor, she is also a professional woman (journalist, artist, or photographer) with less money than he has. One assumes that the women being portrayed have a modicum of intelligence, such that things like the size of engagement rings and having a big house in the suburbs wouldn’t really matter all that much to them, especially in the 2010s. But in Hollywood films, they still do. And the women’s friends ooh and ah over the large diamond ring, or think it’s totally ok that the man purchases a house for him and his fiancé without consulting her. The fiancé has had no say in the matter, but her reaction (and her friends’ reactions) are always the same—oh how wonderful, generous, and thoughtful her soon-to-be husband is. And so on. I don’t know any couples like this in real life. None.

In real life, every woman I know who is married (and still married) went to look at the house/co-op/townhouse she and her husband eventually purchased--together with their husbands. The husbands did not purchase their homes without the wives present. Had any potential husband done this, I would have thought he was disrespectful of my wishes and feelings. I would have been angry about it and he would have heard about it in no uncertain terms. There is nothing about that type of ‘surprise’ that appeals to me in the least. I want to see for myself the house I might want to live in; I don’t want anyone making that decision for me. I want the decision to be a mutual one that is discussed mutually and respectfully.

So this type of behavior in a potential husband should ring many warning bells. If he doesn’t respect and value your opinion enough to go house-hunting together with you, he’s not worth marrying. Any man that insists that you wear your hair a certain way because he wants it that way, is also a man to avoid. Any man that solely uses his nickname for you that you do not like (e.g. in the book, Richard called Vanessa Nellie because she was nervous—think, nervous Nellie), is a man to avoid. Any situation where you have no say in what transpires, no control over your present and future life, is a situation to avoid like the plague. Any man who assumes that you will give up your career once you’re married is a man to avoid, no matter how rich or powerful he is or how well he can take care of you. Much better to be able to take care of yourself, and any chance I get, I tell young women that. Be independent and don’t base your financial security on your husband’s wealth or earning ability. Because somewhere down the road, you never know if he will decide that he wants a new life partner, and then you’re out, hoping for a decent divorce settlement from him. Any man who is unfriendly to your friends, or does not want you to see your closest friends once you’re married, is not worth marrying. Any man who buys you a dog or cat to keep you company, only to take it away from you at a later point (and lie about it—saying it ran away) because he didn’t like that you got too attached to it, is a man to run from. I mean, run, and never look back. None of these behaviors is love; none of these behaviors is indicative that you are loved and respected. These types of men are psychopaths—charming and abusive liars without an ounce of empathy for those whose lives they destroy. Why women would ever have children with these kinds of men is a wonder in itself.

But young women continue to marry the Richards of this world. I have empathy for these women, because it’s not always easy to navigate the murky world of love and romance, and we all make mistakes. I have made them too, because I believed that some men were worth trusting and believing in. How wrong I was. Many women believe men who are overly-romantic and attentive, who call at all hours under the pretense that they are worried about them, truly love them. Many women believe men who tell them that they hope that these women can save them from themselves. But there are two old sayings that are applicable here: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is”, and “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. I would much rather have my independence and freedom to control my own life and my decisions; I do not want to give the reigns to a man so that he can control me and what I do. I would much rather have one phone call a day from a caring husband rather than ten calls that to outsiders might signal caring, but that are really disguised attempts at stalking, control and lack of trust on the husband’s part.

There might be some women who are content with such constricted lives, but by and large, if one person has nearly complete control over how another person lives her or his life, it’s a situation waiting to explode at a later point. It takes a long time to understand how one might want to live one’s life, and how to deal with the opposite sex, and how to tackle all of the situations that arise during the romantic phase of one’s relationship. Navigating those choppy waters requires common sense, intelligence, and the support of good friends and family. Luckily, most of us have that support, and do not wish to discard it for the Richards of this world.

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Two short stories so far, and more to come........

Leaving unkindness and tyranny

I was up late last night, so I sat and watched two old films on TCM—BUtterfield 8 from 1960 with Elizabeth Taylor as a part-time model/part-time call girl (I’ve seen it several times before but never tire of it), and The Barretts of Wimpole Street from 1957 with Jennifer Jones as the poetess Elizabeth Barrett who married Robert Browning. Whenever I watch the old films, I’m always struck by the depth of the character portrayals, by the richness of the stories they tell, and by the feelings I’m left with after they’re over. The old films make you think: about your life, others’ lives, different situations, different times, how you might have handled those situations, and so on. In Butterfield 8, Elizabeth Taylor’s character Gloria is looking to change her life and to find real love, and thinks she has found the way to do so in her relationship with Weston Liggett, played by Laurence Harvey, who is married, albeit unhappily. This being the film world of the late 1950s/early 1960s, we know that their story cannot end like that of Pretty Girl. Weston is a borderline alcoholic with an explosive temper also looking to change his life. While they enjoy some happy moments together, Gloria makes a mistake early on in their relationship that ultimately dooms it, and Weston’s behavior toward her in a restaurant in reaction to this ‘mistake’ is appalling—he is verbally and physically abusive to her in a harrowing scene. He treats her like dirt in a public setting, calls her a whore to her face in a loud voice, and provokes the wrath of other men around them, who step in to their argument to try to protect Gloria. Weston ends up getting punched in the face for his abusive behavior and quickly leaves the restaurant. His subsequent attempts to reconcile with Gloria, to apologize for his crude and caveman behavior, fail; she flees from him in her car, and he follows her. Their story ends tragically, with her dying in a car crash. It struck me that her attempts to change her life, to leave her past behind, to become a new woman, to find self-respect, were punished in this film. She was not allowed to find happiness, with or without a man. But what struck me most of all was the lack of kindness and understanding toward those attempts. With the exception of one person, her childhood friend Steve, played by Eddie Fisher, there were few others who understood her need to change her life; everyone else seemed bound by the conventions of society at that time—marriage, duty, respectability. Why she had chosen the life she chose comes to light when she reveals her secret (early sexual abuse by a father figure) to Steve. But by then we know it is too late. It seems rather horrible to me that she should pay for others’ sins as dearly as she paid in this film, but that says more about the time when the film was made. But it is the lack of kindness toward her that sticks with you after the film is over.

In The Barretts of Wimpole Street, we meet Elizabeth Barrett, her sisters and brothers, and their tyrant of a father, a widower (played by John Gielgud) who refuses to let any of them marry and who vows to disinherit them if they do. Suffice it to say that the household atmosphere is stifling and life-killing, with the father determining how they live, what they eat, who they see, and so forth. It is implied that the father treated his wife in much the same way as he treats his children; she may have loved him early on but came to fear him as his children do. He has absolute control over them, is unkind in word and action, and prefers having his children fear rather than love him. Elizabeth is an invalid with what seems to be some sort of heart problem; in truth, her illness is probably a reaction to her father’s psychological abuse. She is bedridden and her brothers and sisters try to keep her in good spirits; it is her dog Flush who seems to do the best job at giving her some sort of happiness, and he plays a major role in the film. The film is really the story of how Elizabeth comes to life and gets well after meeting the poet Robert Browning, who has fallen in love with her through her poetry and who wants to marry her. It doesn’t take Robert long to figure out that her father is a major cause of her illness and unhappiness. They carry on their romance in secret, as does Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta with her Captain. But we know that Elizabeth’s father will eventually find out, and he does. So the question then becomes, how will they escape their tyrant of a father? He is truly a scary man; he dominates any room he walks into with his dourness and life-killing behavior. You could say about him that a flower would wither in his presence. In a rather sickening scene toward the end of the film, he tells Elizabeth that he is moving the family out of London to the country to get away from the bad influences (visits from friends and suitors), and that he hopes that she will come to love him and not fear him. He then makes the mistake of professing his feelings for her, which border on incestuous. Elizabeth understands that he will ultimately destroy her, and that she needs to get away from him immediately, which she manages with the help of their housemaid Wilson. The scene where she, with her dog Flush in her arms (she could not leave him behind) and Wilson are sneaking out of the house while the rest of the family is sitting down to dinner, is actually terrifying. I kept waiting for her father to appear, to crush whatever little courage and spirit was left in her. Had he appeared while she was escaping, he would have won. And had she left Flush behind, it would have been awful; her father, when he discovers that Elizabeth and Wilson have gone, orders the dog destroyed. But of course Elizabeth knew that this would be his fate, and since she loves her dog, he goes with her. I have never rooted for a character to escape her tyrant the way I did with Elizabeth; when they paused on the staircase, just a few feet from the front door, I found myself saying ‘go, leave, get out now’. It would have been awful had she been stopped. But she does escape, does marry Robert, and Flush stays with them. It's a true story with a happy ending, in other words, and thank God for that.

Both films deal with women who want to change their lives and leave unhappiness and abuse behind. Both women decide to leave their abusers—men who mete out nothing but unkindness, misery and unhappiness, men who confuse love and control, men who dominate and bark out orders, men who can say and do things that they would never tolerate from the women in their lives. It made me appreciate the courage and the energy these women showed in the face of abuse; they knew they had to leave their situations and they did. In one case it ended tragically, in the other, it ended happily. So it goes in life; it’s not always easy to leave an unhappy situation. But the courage involved in trying to leave is what stays with you long after the films are over. 

About the film Shoot the Moon

I sat and watched the 1982 film Shoot the Moon last night on TCM; it has to be at least the tenth time I’ve seen the film. It is hands-down the best movie I’ve ever seen about marital problems, impending divorce, and the effects of a broken relationship on children. I love this film for its raw honesty and the incredible acting of Albert Finney (George), Diane Keaton (Faith), and Dana Hill (who plays their eldest daughter Sherry). These are characters that you can actually like and get to know--better put, these are people that you can relate to. Each time I watch the movie, I realize that the entire story resembles life—messy, chaotic, no pat answers, situations that are not explainable or forgivable or black-and-white. There are no easy answers in this movie, and no contrived happy endings. If you choose to interpret the ending as a new beginning for the estranged couple, you are a romantic. I am not so sure, even after the tenth viewing. And that could say more about me than about the character of Faith, who remains ambiguous about her feelings for George even after he dumps her for a younger woman (Sandy, played by Karen Allen) with a small son, moves out, and goes to live with Sandy. I like Faith’s ambiguity; she isn’t sure what she wants, even when she gets involved with Frank (played by Peter Weller), who is the contractor she hires to build the tennis court she has always wanted. She still loves George, even though she knows that so much of their relationship is irretrievably broken. She is jealous of Sandy and has no desire to hear about her. She has four daughters to take care of and does a good job of taking care of them in a difficult situation. She could have demanded more attention and focus on herself; she could have wallowed in self pity. But she doesn’t. Her father’s illness and her mother’s interference in her life are also issues that she deals with, in addition to the demise of her marriage. This too is the way real life is. You don’t get to choose all the time what you want to deal with—one problem at a time. Sometimes there are multiple problems that get dumped on you all at once, and the only choice you have is to sink or swim. George for his part still loves Faith, but he is in love with Sandy because she pays attention to him, like Faith used to before she got totally involved in raising their children. He is also a jealous person, aggressive, and has an explosive temper; he doesn’t like Frank and doesn’t like the idea of Frank hanging around his old home getting to know Faith or his children.

The most poignant scenes in the film are those between Sherry and George, and Sherry and Faith. Sherry, who is a teenager on the verge of adulthood, is most affected by her parents’ split, and desperately tries to understand what is going on. She doesn’t get many clear answers from either parent. What they do manage to impart to her is how much they love her, despite their own problems. Sherry gets to see her parents as flawed people; again, this is how real life is. The scene when she asks her mother why husbands and wives don’t wait for each other as they pass through doors on their way to new rooms—in essence, why they don’t share their new experiences with each other—is touching. Or when she asks her father if he loves Timmy (Sandy’s son) more than his own daughters and George says no. But Sherry knows (and verbalizes) her doubt about his priorities; she knows that Timmy will ultimately usurp her and her sisters’ places in their father’s heart. Sandy will see to that. This is also a reality many people in such a situation do not want to deal with. It’s easier to lie, to say that nothing will be different, when of course nothing could be further from the truth. Children know the truth; they can intuit it. Children in the same family may deal with their parents’ divorce differently. Sherry is the oldest daughter and the hardest hit. It’s hard not to sympathize with her anger and confusion. Shoot the Moon is timeless despite its being thirty years old; it has as much to say to us today about marriage and divorce as it did when it was made.     

Talking about loss and sorrow

This past summer has been a reminder that life is fragile and that sorrow and loss are ever-present parts of life. I have written several posts about loss during the past several years; it strikes me how we can never really quite come to terms with loss and the grief that accompanies it. It can be the loss of a friend or family member due to illness; I know of several people who have ‘lost’ their spouses to Alzheimer’s disease and to the slow descent into oblivion that accompanies it. The healthy spouses live with a sorrow that they silently carry around with them. Sometimes they are able to talk about their loss; mostly they do not. Others deal with illnesses that may rob them/have robbed them of their mobility and physical freedoms. Others deal with separations and divorce, or the loss of treasured friendships. Most times it is death that takes our loved ones from us. We need only listen to the TV news to know that this happens every day due to crime, war, or tragic accidents (as just happened to my husband’s good friend who drowned last week after falling off his boat); or just the inevitable progression toward old age where again, people we love move into old age, forge the paths they are able to forge through that barren wilderness, before they move on into the world where death takes them physically from us. Learning to let go of those we love is probably the most difficult thing we will ever be asked to do in this life. Wondering if we will ever know happiness again, that question haunts us.

There are other losses that are not spoken about very openly, despite the means for communication that are continually available to us. We as a society seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to truly describing how we feel about losing our jobs, our identities, our pride or self-esteem, about how it feels to be displaced or frozen out of the ‘good company’ at work or in school, or simply ignored by our workplaces and schools. We talk about bullying in society and that it should stop, but it doesn’t. People who are bullied and harassed experience a loss of self-esteem and happiness that is difficult for them to deal with and that may affect them for the rest of their lives, and they may grieve silently for those losses. We are told to deal with constant change in our workplaces, and while most of us adapt to the new changes and patterns, it is neither as fast as management wishes nor as successful as they might hope. ‘Something’s lost but something’s gained, in living every day’, as Joni Mitchell sings. That’s true, but sometimes the gains don’t outweigh the losses. I would argue that it depends upon what is lost and what is gained. Nonetheless, we cannot stand still and we must live in the now. So we are forced to deal with loss and change.

Our sorrows are often right under our surfaces, but we are silent about bringing them to light. I was at a summer party recently, and I met a young woman who told me about her father’s quiet sorrow; he was born in another country and came here to live many years ago, probably as a political refugee. He married and had a family, but he never stopped missing his birth country. For her young age, she was deeply reflective, and her love and understanding for her father were clear. Her description of his sadness was something I could understand viscerally. For I too miss my birth country; it is a tangible feeling of sorrow that I carry around with me, and that I have done a good job of keeping under my surface until now. But I cannot do that any longer. At the same party, I met a fellow expat, who told me that he hated America and that he would never go back there to live. I could never say the same. I love my country the way I love a person—we are intertwined. I couldn’t tell you why it is this way; it just is after many years of living away from my birth country. So I could not understand my fellow expat, although I registered his words and opinions. It made me think of my grandparents who left Italy for America in the early 1900s and who never once returned there, as they could not afford to do so. What must it have been like to know that you would never see your father, mother, or siblings again, unless they followed you to America? Loss and sorrow on both sides. How their sorrows must have defined their lives, especially when their lives took a downturn during the Great Depression when my grandfather lost his pharmacy. I know that their sorrows colored their later lives because my father told me a lot about his family life and how his father suffered. Not all immigrants miss their birth countries; I know several people who have moved from Europe to the USA, who have become successful and who would never move back to their birth countries. But I also know immigrants to the USA who miss their birth countries regardless of their successes. It is an individual thing—how we deal with loss and the sorrows that accompany it. But it is good to talk about it sometimes, because you find out that you are not as alone in this life as you may think.  

Sexcapades

This past week the news has been dominated by sex scandals—some of them of an (alleged) illegal criminal nature and some of them not. What they have in common is that the men involved in all cases risked their marriages, personal lives and reputations to live out their different sexual fantasies. Again, I have to ask the question, what were these men thinking? But I know I won’t get a satisfactory answer. Or I’ll get the standard wisecrack answer—they weren’t—it was their second brain that was doing the thinking.

This time it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who ‘took full responsibility’ and stepped up to the proverbial plate to inform us about his extramarital affair with one of his household staff members and the resulting love child. The news was apparently kept secret even from his wife Maria Schriver, who when she heard it from him apparently a few months ago, promptly moved out of the house. They are currently separated and will likely divorce. When I first heard the news I thought, yet another male politician who couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Really, what is the world coming to, I ask you? One politician after another caught up in the arms of sleaze—affairs with household staff/servants (Schwarzenegger and a few of our country’s founding fathers), dabblings with prostitutes (Eliot Spitzer), oral sex with congressional pages and sex with nightclub singers (Bill Clinton), adultery with women sneaked into the White House (John F. Kennedy), adultery with an Argentinian girlfriend (Mark Sanford) and adultery with other (healthy younger) women while their wives struggled with cancer (Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, and a few other men I know of who are not politicians). The latter especially is distressing to read about if you own an iota of empathy, because you know that the news that your husband is fooling around or having children with another woman while you battle cancer cannot be anything other than immensely stressful precisely at the time when you need little to no added extra stress. And how sad to leave this life knowing that your husband was a ‘rotter’ as my mother would have called these types of men. What a thing to forgive, and can you really? What a betrayal—the ultimate betrayal. Even if you did live, could you trust a man again? Again I find it hard to believe that men can behave this way. Of course I know that there are two sides to every story. If I didn’t write that here I’d be reminded of it by some well-meaning person. And I agree, there are two sides to every story. But it’s hard to find equivalently awful stories about female politicians who behave in this way toward their husbands. I’d like to know about them, I really would.

I have been witness to some strange male (and female) relationship behavior during the past thirty years, so I know that bad behavior does happen. I know of married men who traveled under assumed names to meet their lovers so that their wives wouldn’t find out, I know of men who were on message boards and internet dating sites passing themselves off as single when in fact they were married, I know of men who were fooling around with their current wives while their soon-to-be ex-wives were succumbing to cancer, I know of men who strung women along for years telling them that they would marry them and then dropping them the minute they found the woman they ‘wanted to marry’. I know of swinging couples and wife-swappers; of men who lied to women about being ‘separated’ in order to get a woman to sleep with them. I know of men who travel on business who pick up prostitutes and call girls when they are in another city. I know of married men who offered to be sperm donors for single women and whose wives would probably not have appreciated the offers had they known about them.  I also know of women (married and single) who have contacted the wives of the men they have decided to seduce, to tell the wives that they and the husbands are very attracted to each other and that if the husband hadn’t been married they would be together. I know of women who pursue married men on social network sites, by email, and via text messages. I know of women who worked for men who told them at the outset that they’d like to be their mistresses, who ended up being so, and who ended up marrying them after causing hell for the wives involved. In Norway alone, infidelity in marriage occurs in one of two marriages according to what I hear from other people and from news reports; I have no way of knowing whether this is true, since most people would never talk about this honestly. In turn, I know of wives who fought back and told some of these women off and told their husbands off at the same time. I know of some women who divorced the louts they were living with. I know of some wives who really fought back—when their husbands went to live with the other women and the scorned wives made their lives a living hell. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. You bet. And maybe it’s good that it is that way at least in some cases. But sometimes I believe in divorce as the solution to painful hellish lives. I’ve seen a number of abusive and depressing marriages during my growing up—drunken men who hit women, eternal flirters and skirt-chasers who were never happy with the women they had at home, or men who always had to have the last word—who controlled their wives and families with an iron fist. And this took place/takes place in Westernized society. So every time people say to me that women have it so much better in our neck of the world, I remind them of this, and then we come down a few notches on the ‘everything is great for women in our society’ scale.

Which brings me to the men and women I know who are unsung heroes in my book. The men and women who have stayed married through thick and thin without cheating, without abuse, without carping. Who start each day with a smile and who never cease to amaze me with their cheerfulness and helpful spirits. Who are loyal and kind to their spouses and children. Who have probably been tempted to leave a few times in their lives, but didn’t, because they put the happiness and needs of their spouses and families ahead of their own. Who stuck by spouses in times of sickness—the true test of love. I’ve seen what sickness in one or the other partner can do to relationships, so I know it’s not easy. Loyalty is underrated in our society these days. But it is what makes marriages and friendships last. Without it, there can’t really be much trust. You have to be able to see into the future and ‘know’ with your gut that the person you share your life with will be there for you when you are sick, when you need help, and vice versa. No one said it would be easy. Maybe you’d like to run at the first sign of trouble. But maybe you didn’t; maybe you wrestled with your doubt and anxiety and temptation and stayed put. These are the people who impress me. You don’t need to climb Mt. Everest or practice extreme sports or any of those things to impress me. ‘That don’t impress me much’, as Shania Twain sang a few years ago. What does impress me is longevity and the ability to be positive and cheerful in a marriage. I’m not saying that all people should stay together for an entire lifetime; I’ve already argued for divorce as a solution to hellish relationships. But if after some years of being together, an otherwise decent marriage loses a bit of its luster and temptation comes one’s way, maybe one should take a closer look at what one has before tossing it away for a sexcapade. It is possible to stay faithful, and I know couples married for forty or more years who have been faithful to one another. They say so, they are still in love with their spouses, and they are my heroes. 

Dissing others

I was recently out to dinner with a group of people (men and women) and was keenly aware of the different dynamics present at the table. In several instances it was almost as though one person knew that she could rile up another person simply by talking in a particular tone—call it condescending. Of course this got the other person riled up, and this other person is the type of person who responds angrily to perceived slights or insults. But from my perspective, they weren’t just perceived slights or insults—they were real. The woman was hacking away at this other person, under the guise of being an all-knowing and caring woman. She knew best, and she was being condescending. That doesn’t do much for me and it simply shows me that she doesn’t care about this other person at all. You don’t publicly humiliate another person as a pattern of behavior; yet I have seen a lot of this type of behavior at social gatherings. “You did what? Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you? God you must be crazy! I would never have done that. I never do such things.” Those sorts of comments, the type that are guaranteed to make the recipient feel small. You also have the other types of people, the ones who constantly criticize you or tell you that your way of thinking is wrong without making any attempt at all to understand where you are coming from. “No, you’re wrong. No, that’s not true. No, that’s not right.” I call it dissing. These people have their own agenda and their agenda is the correct agenda. In both cases, there is no acknowledgment of or respect for the other person’s situation or life, no acknowledgment that perhaps the other person has suffered or is struggling. These patterns of behavior are self-promoting and they come from a deep-seated lack of self confidence. If you have to make other people feel small in social situations in order to get attention and make yourself appear as though you’re the best thing ever, then it’s you and not the other person who has the real problem, in my humble opinion. And after this particular gathering, I thought of how much I would have rather spent the evening alone reading a good book instead of wasting time watching other people compete to be the center of attention over a dinner table.

I used to think that the best response to an insult or personal injury was to ’fight back’ in the best way one knew how—a snappy retort, an aggressive verbal response, or a real argument. It was important to defend yourself so that you didn’t appear ‘weak’. To be sure, these are fitting responses in some situations, especially when you feel threatened and the threat is real, e.g. someone really does want to hurt you or take his or her anger or rage out on you. But as I get older, I see that to respond with anger to a situation that makes you feel hurt and angry only adds fuel to the fire. Anger begets anger. The smarter approach is to smile and do nothing at all. If this response does nothing else, it will confuse those who are trying to hurt you. It may even make them angrier because they know that their behavior hasn’t gotten to you.  So this response is not a guaranteed method for defusing the situation. You may end up triggering the other party to harass you even more to try to drag you into a real argument. I have tried this a few times recently and I have to say that it’s much better than wearing your heart on your sleeve so that the world around you sees when you’ve been wounded. I am discovering that I want to move away from angry responses toward something different—wisdom, harmony, balance, peace. I don’t want to let anyone push me off my center; that’s happened often enough earlier in my life. There are some people who find your weak points, and when they do they exploit them if they want you to behave in a certain way. This has happened to me and others I know in work-related situations, but also in personal relationships. It’s easy to hone in on another’s weakness and exploit it if you decide to. But why would you want to if you really care about another person? If you have to go for the jugular each time there is the potential for an argument with another person, then you don’t really care about that person. Or if you always have to be right, or promote yourself at the expense of another, then you don’t really care about the other person at all. I am learning to identify liars, and there are quite a few of them in this life.

So perhaps the best thing when faced with such people is to smile, let go of the insult, and wish them well. After all, they have real problems of their own. But letting go of the insult and the hurt is the tricky part. How fast can a person learn to do that? That is the question and also the key to a more balanced harmonious life. If you give other people the power to control you by holding onto your hurt, you lose, because you use up an incredible amount of energy trying to deal with and retaliate against these people. And they are simply not worth the time or the energy involved.

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.