The Yin and Yang of Love

I have been busy writing my book, so much so that I haven’t had a chance to post a blog. Until today. My book is not a sequel to my memoir, Becoming Alice. Rather it is what now is called creative nonfiction. I won’t belabor the point by going into a lengthy definition of that category, but instead I’ll tell you it is about a young woman who basically wants to get married. What woman doesn’t?

In the process of dating and the man and woman in my story have a lot of yin and yang between them. I thought you might like to know what that means. I went to my dictionary and here it is: “Yin and Yang (Chinese philosophy) are two principles, one negative, dark, and feminine (Yin) and one positive, bright, and masculine (Yang), whose interaction influences the destinies of creatures and things.”

I object! I have never heard yin-yang used in such a way. I have always thought of it as two forces that pull in different directions, perhaps like the positive and negative in electicity or the currect Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I just had to get that one in there. I personally used it in the back and forth dance couples often do when they first get to know one another. Or, what married couples often do for the rest of their lives.

Being a woman I STRONGLY OBJECT to the negative force being identified as feminine. And who says the positive force is always masculine.

I’ve got to do something to protest. I can throw my dictionaly away. Obviously it is way out of date. Or, I could give up on Chinese philosophy on which I have often relied. My favorite sayings are “He who hesitates is lost.” and “Patience is a virtue.” Perhaps it was Confucious who said that.

In any case I am right about people not always seeing things the same way. That is just part of the human condition, call it yin and yang or whatever you like.

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Being Bossed

In my last blog I wrote that it is common for one person to be the decision maker, leader, boss, or, whatever you want to call it, in a relationship. Sometimes that person is aware of it and takes advantage of his dominance; sometimes it comes about in a very subtle way, as I described in many European marriages I witnessed as a child.

The whole subject got me thinking about the person or persons who are being dominated, be they wives, children, office workers, farm hands, secretaries, etc. I think sometimes people are content to be bossed around because it takes the responsibility of making decisions away from them. It is my feeling about people who follow certain religious leaders who dictate to others how they are to live their lives.

Most usual, in my opinion, people are not happy to be controlled in any way. How do they then deal with their discontent? They may seek to dethrone the dominant person by fighting for his/her position as in a family, business, law office, etc. Perhaps they will do as I did when I felt I could not live being dominated by my father. I left the household and moved to another city. I have known others who have left their religion, their job, and even their family.

For me it is clear that being bossed/dominated does not work in the long run. What I didn’t know was that my family members would eventaully follow me to me new home city, forcing me then to take over the leadership position. I hope I didn’t abuse that power.

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Who’s the Boss?

I was having lunch the other day with one of my cousins and as is usual in our meetings, the conversation turned to a rundown of what is new with each member of our extended family. We don’t have a very large family but still, it seems that certain members see each other more regularly than others. I’m not sure if that is “normal” or not. I think it is.

So, I asked my cousin about some members with whom she is closer and the conversation went to a married couple in which the husband has been very successful financially. As I remember him, he was always the one to remind the rest of us about how he rose from being a shipping clerk to being the head of his lucrative company. Meanwhile, his well-dressed, bejeweled wife would sit in the background silently, smiling.

“Don’t kid yourself,” my cousin said to me at lunch. “She’s the whole show.” Of course, what she meant was that the quiet, subservient wife was, in fact, “the boss!”

It made me think about so many European families that I knew growing up as an immigrant in Portland, Oregon in which I saw that same equation at work. It seems to me, looking back at it all, that the Viennese culture I knew then required the husband/father to be the head of the family and thereby the one to lay down all the laws by which everyone under his roof was to live.

However, their wives somehow knew how to finagle their husbands into giving in to their wishes. My mother did it by crying. I’m sure others had other means for manipulating their husbands … without their even knowing it.

What was and still is clear though, is that everyone else among their acquaintances who knew the couple, knew exactly who was “the boss.”

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The Fight

I grew up watching fights. They are spelled out pretty closely in Becoming Alice. There was Dad fighting with Mom; there was Mom fighting Dad the only way she knew how, by crying. There was Dad fighting with my brother about everything he thought poor old Fredi did wrong; but there was Fredi who didn’t know how to fight. There was Onkel Max and Tante Dora fighting each other about everything and anything in the most mean and hurtful way possible. Perhaps they enjoyed it. I’ll never know. It was my first lesson in fighting.

Fast forward a decade or two and then I myself was doing a marriage. I grew up determined not to have a marriage like either Mom and Dad or my aunt and uncle. I had learned a little something in the process and was learning a whole lot more as I was doing marriage myself.

I learned that the early years of marriage are one way and the middle years of marriage often are quite different. It is when the fight comes out in the marriage equation. One partner wants things to go one way and the other partner pulls in the exact opposite direction. The fightensues. Over what? Over many things. How to raise children. How to make your money. Where to spend your money. How to behave socially. Who to be friends with. What to do about problem adolescents … especially those out of control ones. What to do about grandparents who interfere. What to do about those that need help, financially and/or physically. The list goes on and on.

Do any of these marriages survive? A lot of them do and they have a couple of things going for them. I find that those fights that stay on the issues have a much better chance of surviving than those that move on to attacks between fighting partners themselves, attacks on their shortcoming and on them personally. They usually are not about the issues that prompted the fight in the first place.

The marriages that seem to survive over the years are the ones where the partners have deeper reserves of positive feeling, lets call it love, for one another left over from the early years. I’ve known many couples who have gone through major problems and ended up with the most solid and satisfying marriages in the next stage of their lives.

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Marriage-the Early Years

Some things seem to never change. The sun rises and sets. Dogs chase cats; cats chase birds; birds eats insects and worms. Termites find wood in my house. Ants sneak in here and there, despite my exterminator. And I believe cockroaches will be on earth long after we humans have vacated the planet.

But changes do happen and one of the big areas where that seems to be true is in the relationships between man and woman inside marriage. In the early years, when one feels intense love, changes happen that can even be identified in the human brain. Studies have been done through brain scans that show marked differences in the brain configuration in persons that are in love.

It seems to me that the state of love also causes people to behave in ways that change in time. In the beginning,these couples not only think their partners are the most wonderful human beings on earth, but they admire and accept all their thoughts, their ways, and their behaviors totally.

The brain scan study took their experiment further and studied married couples later on in their relationships, say two or three years down the line. The changes in the brain had diminished if not disappeared altogether; the couples didn’t always think alike on all issues. One of them would like a neighbor; the other couldn’t tolerate that person. One of them would leave their socks on the floor; the other never turned a light off upon leaving a room. The list is long.

But we’re still in the early years, so no one says anything to the other. They just swallow the irritation and bring themselves back to the warm feeling that is still working in the early years.

Let’s look at what happens in the middle years in my next blog. My husband and I are going to have lunch now.

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Marriage Today

I was at a cocktail party recently where there were many people who I did not know. We grabbed our glasses of wine off a tray being passed by a uniformed server and looked around at whoever was standing next to us. The usual questions about where one is from and how we might know the hosts came first. They were followed by questions about perhaps having a mutual acquaintance from your home town.

In my case, I did know some people who my companion also knew. I’d even gone to a 50th anniversary party for that couple. By coincidence my companion was invited to that affair but was unable to attend. We remarked how youthful and athletic this couple was. And then I was asked … out of the blue …, “How long have you been married?”

I thought the question was a bit out of order, much like being asked. “How old are you?” Regaining my composure, I answered my companion’s question. After digesting the rather large number of years that my marriage has survived, she said, “To the same person?”

I laughed. My marriage’s survival did not seem so unusual or strange to me, but to my companion, a woman at least a couple of decades younger than I, marriages don’t have much of a chance to surviving many years. This change in our culture is quite remarkable.

For my generation, divorce was unusual. Not that all those long-standing marriages were happy. Not by a long shot. But couples stayed together for economic reasons, for religious reasons, or for fear of being ostracized by their friends.

Today, men and women are equally able to take care of themselves. Our society has become much more secular, and many different aberrations of behavior have become, if not accepted, at least tolerated. It is easy to explain that today one’s chance of being divoced is at fifty-five per cent.

I must remember to tell the next person who asks, in the same breath, that I have been married many years and … would you believe? … to the same man.

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How’d They Meet?

I’m in Ojai this weekend. What a great place! Of course, having perfect wheather and all the plants in my garden bursting with spring bloom helps to make my mood soar. I don’t know know if all this effects everyone in the same way, but I think it does.

We (my husband and I) went to a neighborhood cocktail party last night and the conversation got around to talking about our kids. In my case, kids means adult midlife-aged “kids.” So naturally, since 50% of our population now can count on having at least one divorce under their belts, my kids are testimony to the fact that the statistic is correct. But, I do have good news. My daughter who has been divorced for about six years has finally met someone special and is planning to get married. Almost in unison, our little social group asked, “How’d they meet?”

“On Match .com,” I replied.

And then I started thinking about how much our culture has changed since I was hoping to meet M. Right. For me and my generation, we had to rely meeting someone at school or at work, or at church. And if all that didn’t work out, we hoped that some relative or friend would act as matchmaker and introduce us to someone they knew. One had to rely on having a whole bunch of good luck.

Fast forward in time to today’s people who are interested in meeting someone. Of course, all the old ways can still be productive but today you can add a really polular health club/gum with lots of single members, or an upscale New York or L.A. bar that the singles have chosen as their hangout, and then there is Match.com. How great is that? You can list yourself on their website and specify exactly what you are looking for. Isn’t that what the scientists are working on right now in terms of finding a way for parents to engineer exactly the color eyes and hair and even sex of the babies they plan to have. Brave New World, I say! And good luck to all of you out there looking.

And then I think back on how frustrated my poor brother was as a young man looking for a girl friend and then bride. Perhaps you read about it in Becoming Alice, A Memoir. No wonder he had four marriages. So, good luck to all of you who are out there looking. Any which way that works is good, I say.

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