by Tim Kreider
Earlier that same day I’d seen a guy have a heart attack in my doctor’s waiting room. He hadn’t even come in about his heart: he thought he just had the same lingering winter virus as the rest of us. He looked pretty bad—gray-faced and drenched in sweat—but I just figured, as he had, that he had the flu. But then he stood up unsteadily and told the receptionist: “Listen, I think I’m having a heart attack. Something’s really wrong.” She did not argue. They called 911 at once. I had to gather up the man’s coat and bag for the EMTs to send along to the hospital. As I stood holding them, it was impressed upon me that this guy had not expected to go to the hospital today; this was just another errand on his to-do list before he went to work, as it was for me. As he was wheeled out of the office he was heard to moan: “Oh my God . . . This sucks . . . What the fuck?” Later that night, still a little in shock, I repeated these words to Jenny over Belgian ales. After a moment of solemn reflection, we both broke into shamefaced laughter. I swear we weren’t laughing at him; we weren’t gloating that it was him and not us.I It was that that guy had spoken for all us suffering mortals, cursing feebly against the dying of the light. And we both knew, hearing this litany—Oh my God, this sucks, what the fuck—that when our own turns came to be wheeled away, neither of us was going to have anything more illuminating or dignified to say.
A friend of mine who, as a pastor, has access to a much more privileged vista of human suffering than I do recently told me she was tired of the phrase first-world problems—not just because it delegitimizes the perfectly real problems of those of us lucky enough to have adequate diets and Internet access, but because it denies the same ordinary human worries to people who don’t. Are you not entitled to any existential angst or taedium vitae if you live in Chad? Must you always nobly suffer traditional third-world problems like warlords and malaria? It’s true that when you’re starving or scared for your children’s lives, What It All Means is irrelevant; only once the basics are assured do you get to despair that there’s just no point to anything because you will never ever get to go out with that girl on the subway or you put way too much parsley in the chicken soup and now it just tastes like parsley. These are the horrors you’re spared if you’re abducted into a child army.
But, if you’re lucky, you graduate up the Maslovian pyramid to increasingly better problems, until eventually you get to confront the insoluble problem of being a person in the world. Even if we were someday to solve all our problems of economics and governance, people would still be unlucky in love, lonesome and bored, and lie awake worrying about the future and regretting stupid things they said in middle school. Utopia will still have forms to fill out, passive-aggressive bureaucrats, broken pipes and cavities, taxes, ads, assholes and bad weather. Time will pass without mercy. We will die. It will suck.
A couple of days ago I got dumped—first-world problem, I know. It’s not as if it’s a heart attack; it’s just a rejection of your whole self by the person who knew you best. Our brief fake-out spring has been temporarily revoked, and it’s raw and wet and cold out again, the wind maliciously splintering umbrellas, mocking our pitiful, spindly defenses. A friend of mine reports she saw people literally screaming today as the wind hit them in the streets, not in pain so much as an extremity of there-is-no-God rage and despair. The problem with breakup talks is that only one of you has rehearsed, or even has a script: the other one just sits there with his mouth open, trying not to cry, saying things like “So, wait—is this a breakup talk?” I’m still trying to reconstruct the conversation, stupidly trying to understand what was said to me, coming up with belated rebuttals. It’s one of those days where you just have to force yourself through the motions, when the accumulated number of times you’ve had to make coffee and brush your teeth in your life seems too much to be borne, and doing the laundry is like cleaning out the Augean stables. You’re like: Someone should just kill me. You sit on the edge of the bed for just one more minute, psyching yourself up to put on the other sock and commence yet another goddamned Tuesday, wondering: Why can’t I cry? Where is my refund? Do they still make ’ludes?
* * *
I. When I called to get my own test results, I asked after the heart attack guy and was told he was fine—resting comfortably and expected to be out of the hospital in a couple of days. Although it occurs to me now that maybe that’s just the official story they decided to give everyone, the way Dad used to tell us the dog had gone to live on a farm in Cecil County.
The Dilemma
I’m starting this essay in medias res, hunkered down in a basement apartment—not exactly in hiding, more like lying low. Right across the plaza from me lives the woman I’m dating; one neighborhood away lives the other woman I’m dating. I’m currently on hiatus with both of them while they wait, with quickly diminishing patience, for me to choose between them.
As the cad in every bedroom farce says: I can explain. I’d been casually dating these two women for a few weeks—not an unheard-of or unethical practice, at least not in New York City, where people try on and discard partners like sunglasses in a drugstore. Inconveniently, they both seemed seriously interested in me, and, worse, I could find no good reason to break things off with either of them, which is not usually a problem for me. They were both smart, lovely, funny alpha girls who’d made interesting, unconventional lives for themselves in New York City. One was an author of YA fiction; she liked to tell anecdotes whose denouement was “. . . and then I won.” When she’d told her friends that I was seeing someone else, they’d said, “He sounds like you.” The other woman was intriguingly unlike me: a progressive pastor who’d started her own church in Brooklyn. She woke up in the morning and said things like “Today’s going to be great.” Meeting these women had been the first thing in a long time that had given me a glimmer of interest in the future.
After half a dozen dates with each of them, I began to get the uneasy feeling that it might soon be time to have a tentative little talk about exclusivity. It always seems like too soon to have this talk until suddenly it’s too late. One day I saw both of them in the same afternoon, which was just a little too nerve-racking and sitcomish, and I realized this was no longer a tenable situation. So I decided to let each of them know, just as a courtesy, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was seeing someone else.
In retrospect, some critics have identified this as my mistake. One of the women involved has since explained that I should’ve said I was “seeing other people”; telling her I was seeing one other person made it too personal, inciting a spirit of competition. Each of them said that she appreciated my honesty but told me she couldn’t continue seeing me as long as I was seeing someone else. They both insisted this was not an ultimatum and got very touchy if I called it one.
This ultimatum precipitated an unprecedentedly stressful month of my life known as the Dilemma. Having to choose one of these women to be, effectively, my girlfriend based on just a few dates reminded me of having to choose a college—the place where you’re going to spend the next four years and figure out what you want to do with your life and make the kind of friends you’ll later drive cross-country with—based on some glossy brochures and one visit. In fact I had to ask for an emergency twenty-four-hour extension to decide on a college, which is pretty much what I did in this case: asked each woman for a little time to clear my mind and think things over.
This has never once worked. Time to think things over has always resulted in exactly what’s happening now: frenzied indecision, a manic paralysis, my brain revved up high in the red end of the tachometer, stuck in neutral. I lie awake thrashing wretchedly over the Dilemma every night; I groan aloud when I remember it on waking. Well-meaning friends try to help clarify my choice: Who’s better in bed? Which of them has the better apartment? But it was no use: I wasn’t seizing up because I wasn’t sure which of them was the right choice, but because they were both right, and by choosing one I would forfeit the other.
One thing that makes decisions lik
e this so paralyzing for me is that the immediate, concrete problem gets tangled up with the big abstract ones, which is a handy aptitude for an essayist but can make it hard to order in restaurants. Somehow the question of which woman to choose turned into the question of why we need to choose in the first place: who wrote up the boilerplate relationship contract, anyway, and why does it always include an ironclad monogamy clause? This world operates according to rules I was not around to vote on; marriage seems like one of those institutions that everybody agrees on but almost no one actually wants, like jobs, wars, or Christmas. In fact I’d always resented monogamy for the same reason I hate Christmas shopping: if something’s obligatory, it isn’t a gift.
“Maybe it’s time for you to think about polyamory,” suggested my ex-girlfriend T.J. I’d been shocked in ways that were hard to articulate when T.J., with whom I’d had a conventional, exclusive, boyfriend-girlfriend relationship years ago, had told me that she was now in an open relationship, with a primary partner and two regular long-term lovers, each of whom had their own girlfriends. For one thing, it profoundly fucked with my understanding of T.J., a fiercely cheerful, gamine girl you’d more likely imagine playing in a roller derby league. A large part of my reaction was sheer suppurating jealousy; I had to command her never again to speak to me of her boyfriend’s burlesque-dancer girlfriend. Also I couldn’t help but wonder how come this possibility had never come up back when she and I were dating.
Alongside the historic legal upheavals surrounding the expansion of the definition of marriage, a much quieter revolution seems to be taking place, extralegally and mostly under the media radar: a mass defection from traditional monogamy. Just as in Baltimore I’d always been at one remove from people who’d OD’d on heroin, in Brooklyn I was apparently only one degree of separation away from an underculture of people who were all companionably fucking each other. “They’re mostly nerds,” said T.J. “The kind of hipsters who knit.” My friend Lorraine had told me there was a lot of overlap between the fetish community, the local contingent of Burning Man, and regulars at the Jazz Age party on Governors Island: they’re people who like playing dress-up, reinventing themselves. In articles about polyamorists, their smug quotes reminded me of the naïve optimism of utopian communities; they were trying to erase history and rewrite human nature, like French revolutionaries starting the calendar over at the Year One.
The defenders of “traditional marriage,” girding themselves to protect that sacrament against the sodomite horde, arrived about a half century late. The Pill may have been a more transformative invention than fossil fuels or nuclear weapons: as soon as people had access to sex without the threat of pregnancy, marriage became a vestigial custom, like shaking hands as a symbolic weapons check. When I was illegitimately conceived, only fifty years ago, my mother had to leave home under a cover story, and lived in an institution for young unwed mothers where mean ladies shamed them and boys followed them through the streets mocking them. Those mores now seem as archaic and cruel as child brides or foot-binding. Because I’ve never had any intention of having children, there’s been no compelling practical reason for me to marry. And since at this point in the Malthusian curve, having children is about as responsible a decision as chucking your McDonald’s wrappers onto the highway while blasting the AC with all the windows down, the whole get-married-have-kids-repeat pattern, the basic template for human life since day one, is suddenly just one option among many.
Too many, arguably. I’ve often thought that if I’d been impressed into an arranged marriage with one of my old girlfriends I’d’ve been perfectly happy—or at least no unhappier than most married people. I wished some village elder would choose one of the women in the Dilemma for me. Instead it was possible to squander my life in restless dissatisfaction, imagining there might still be some ideal person out there, tantalized by the illusion of bottomless choice, my relationships only ever provisional.
At the same time I was caught in my Dilemma, I got to watch an even more clichéd drama play out: a friend of mine left his wife for a younger woman. The first time Kevin told me, over the phone from a New Year’s Eve party, that he was probably going to leave Renee, he sounded so laid-back and matter-of-fact about it that I wondered whether he might have a brain tumor. He and Renee had been together since we were all in our twenties; they were one of those couples whose names you said as a unit: Kevin and Renee say hi. He’d confessed to me a few months earlier that he had a huge crush on one of his coworkers. Well, that happens, I’d told him. Don’t let it wreck your life or anything. He had immediately set about wrecking his life. He acted like a man with no choice in the matter. “I love the way she smells,” he said.
I knew better than to try to argue with this kind of talk. I referred Kevin to a chapter called “The Pervert’s Lament” from a chapter in Sex at Dawn, a then-popular book of speculative anthropology that purported to explain this very syndrome.I Men experience the ebbing of testosterone in midlife as a creeping anhedonia: they don’t enjoy the things they used to as much anymore; they wonder what the hell ever happened to them. One of the things that reliably boosts testosterone is a novel sexual partner, especially a younger one, which is why so many men feel restored to their true selves by such affairs after years of putting one foot in front of the other, and aren’t content to keep mistresses on the side but instead abandon their families, trash their whole lives, and make themselves into buffoons out of Der blaue Engel. Kevin himself had nearly died of a heart attack a few years ago; he now took fistfuls of pills every day, and his heart was bristling with stents. The signature tag on his emails was: Consider the finite time you will spend on Earth before closing this email.
* * *
The two women in the Dilemma had put a moratorium on any actual dates but they were both still subtly conducting psyops campaigns. One of them sent me a Valentine’s Day note. I covertly met the other for pie. The YA writer told me that she was sick of the clichéd device of romantic triangles in YA fiction; she just didn’t buy it anymore. “If you really can’t decide between two people,” she said, in a way that seemed to contain some pointed subtextual message, “probably neither of those people is the right one for you.” I thought this might just be something we all needed to tell ourselves to reassure ourselves that our choices are inevitable, preordained—hence people’s blather about finding their one true unique soul mate in all the world, by astronomical coincidence, in their same homeroom/college class/tax bracket. I suspect the more unsettling truth is that there are quite a lot of people out there you could fall in love and spend your life with, if you let yourself.
The romantic ideal whereby the person you love, the person you have sex with, and the person you own property and have children with should all be the same person is a more recent invention than the telescope. In my own experience, love and lust have coincided about as often as looks and smarts, by happy coincidence. Lauren, one of my long-married friends, once advised me: “You don’t need to get everything from your spouse” (though my friend Lucy added the sobering caveat: “You can’t get breasts from your friends”). More than once I’d found my own romantic life split between someone with whom I felt genuinely intimate and someone to whom I was sexually addicted, like a typical Victorian hypocrite with his respectable Victorian wife and a bawdy Victorian whore. (And this distinction had less to do with any qualities intrinsic to those women than with the roles I projected onto them.)
It turns out this may not just be me. Sigmund Freud initially diagnosed the divorce between love and desire as a neurosis common among his male patients. He attributed it to unresolved incestuous wishes: we’re attracted to people who unconsciously remind us of the first people we ever loved, for whom, unfortunately, sexual desire is taboo. So, although we feel most comfortable with people who feel like family and home, we’re excited by people who are different, illicit, transgressive.II Domesticity dampens desire; it’s just awkward to pack school lunches with someone the morning after th
ey’ve seen you in the Nixon mask. Freud eventually came to regard it not as a neurosis to be cured but a more universal, irreconcilable tension, one of the hidden costs of civilization, the way that chronic back pain is a symptom of walking upright.
Freud’s glum conclusion is to some extent corroborated by evidence that what he would’ve called “the affectionate and sensual”—what modern psychologists call attachment and sexuality—are separate biochemical systems, with elevated levels of different chemicals associated with each. If you inject oxytocin into the brain of a ewe, she’ll instantly bond with any lamb you put in front of her;III if you give testosterone to normally monogamous birds, they start sneaking around behind their bird wives’ backs (and also Napoleonically expanding their territories).IV In one of life’s many humorous little double binds, these different chemicals tend to have an antagonistic effect on each other, meaning that love and lust can actively inhibit each other. Hence people feeling conflicted and guilty because they truly love their spouses but have no wish ever to sleep with them while secretly writhing with lust for some idiot.
Then again, this might not be the human condition, just the male one. Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner disputes the consensus among her male colleagues that intimacy and desire are tragically incompatible, contesting that some people feel freer to express themselves sexually within the safety of a monogamous relationship. This echoes what some of my female friends have told me: that being in a relationship is liberating, allowing them to be more uninhibited with their partners and indulge in crushes and flirtations without any of the sticky complications of affairs.V Plus, Goldner points out, makeup sex.
The way this evolutionarily jerry-rigged system is supposed to work is that sex lures you into a relationship long enough for an attachment bond to form (which, in adults, typically takes about two years), so that by the time the hormonal buzz wears off (which, conveniently, takes about three), you’re bonded in a deeper, more enduring way and will then be willing spend the next twenty years together in indentured drudgery: managing tantrums, wiping up mucus and sputum, and paying for Pokémon, karate, and college. As many have noted, this system is imperfect in practice. But nature did not invent this system to make us happy; it invented it to make more people.