men are not from Mars

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Today I came across a book called Are All Guys Assholes?, a title designed to sell books if ever there was one. The copy on Amazon wonders “what if everything you’ve been told about guys your entire life has been a lie?” and promises to tackle questions like “Why do guys stop calling after a few dates? How can you tell if a guy actually likes you? How soon is too soon to have sex?” with answers “based on actual research.” Apparently, customers who bought this book also purchased the thoughtfully-titled Why Men Love Bitches and Have Him at Hello: Confessions from 1,000 Guys About What Makes Them Fall in Love . . . Or Never Call Back. 

There is a lot to say about the ridiculous (and problematic) implications these titles make about both men and women. But I’m most interested in the story they tell: that there is an uncrossable chasm between genders, that men and women speak different languages and follow distinct but secret rules of conduct. From my experience, being in a relationship is difficult. It’s work. And the moment I start looking at my partner as a member of a code-talking race of assholes, the more difficult the whole thing becomes.

From what I can surmise, the book arrives at the shocking conclusion that no, all men are not assholes. Jezebel describes it this way:

In general, Madison found that men are people, think of women as people, and appreciate being treated like people — with consideration, honesty, and a little confidence. None of this will be shocking to most men, who have long known that they are actually human beings. But when a big chunk of the dating-advice industry is devoted to convincing women that men are in fact giant penises, any evidence that they might have thoughts and feelings is pretty groundbreaking.

I wonder how many women really believe the rhetoric that all men want is sex. It’s easy to conclude that this dating-advice industry is a self-perpetuating phenomenon wherein books or magazines depict men as strangers, give women advice on how to approach those strangers, and, when treating men as strangers rather than other humans perpetuates difficulty communicating, send women running back for suggestions on what to do next. But I don’t quite buy that either. Nuns and boarding school students aside, aren’t most women in daily contact with real live men? And aren’t most women–and most men for that matter–smart enough to see that if this  were the case, gays and lesbians would be out forming problem-free relationships all the time? (You guys can let me know how that one is going in the comments.)

I think we want love to be easy but it’s not. Calling the opposite gender assholes or aliens enables us to imagine that something complex can be coded and simplified. But gender aside, we humans are terrible at actually saying what we mean. Sometimes we don’t even know what we mean, which is probably the painful by-product of possessing the capacity for both emotion and reason. So how can two creatures so notoriously bad at direct communication, with separate but sometimes overlapping agendas and a whole host of unspoken or unacknowledged expectations, ever successfully make a life together? It seems to me that the problem is not that most of us want relationships with a person of another gender, but that we want relationships with people. It’d be much easier making a lifetime commitment to my dog.

the problem of voice

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My friend Duffy said to me, “I was reading your blog on the bus and a funny thing happend. I knew it was you. But I realized it didn’t sound like you.”

What did it sound like? According to Duffy, like my thoughts were hijacked by Marcia Brady. ugh.

After asking if I hated him (no), and then buying me a beer, he agreed that voice, when it comes to blogging, is kind of a hard thing to get right. The thing is, you want to seem approachable–likeable–not literary. (At this point, if I were grading this blog entry, I would say to my student “by ‘you,’ don’t you mean ‘I’?”)

But I should know–because I tell my students this–that voice evolves over time. That the attempt to sound like something–like, say, a blogger–wears itself out, and then you just sound like yourself. I spent a year of grad school trying to sound like Joan Didion, but instead of sharp and insightful, my voice sounded affectedly jaded, which might be the opposite of my natural voice.

So now I’m aiming for Jan. She was my favorite Brady anyway.

(the fourth Brady sister)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canadianisms

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I love thanksgivings and one of the very best things about being an American in Canada is celebrating two thanksgivings. This is good practice, folks, and I cannot recommend it heartily enough. Sure, Americans already have Columbus Day, but you might ought to* consider how the addition of turkey gravy would liven-up an otherwise dull weekend. The main distinction between Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving, as far as I can tell, is that the Canadian version seems to be missing the whole Pilgrims-and-Indians backstory.

The American-Canadian difference I’m stuck on lately is a question of vocabulary. I have been in love with the same person for a decade. (a decade!) And in that time we’ve lived in the same room and on separate continents. Before I moved to Vancouver, I didn’t know anyone who’d been in a ten-year relationship and not gotten married. For my friends in Virginia, loving the person you loved at twenty and still, after a decade, not being married to him (not to mention not having yourselves a baby or two) is rare. Or unheard of.

But when we moved to Vancouver five years ago, I realized pretty quickly that “boyfriend” is a word used by teenagers, not adults who live together. Boyfriend is low-commitment. And we’d just moved to a new country together—that wasn’t low commitment. But using the word “partner” felt weird. In Virginia, referring to my partner meant I was either a business woman or a lesbian.

I think this semantic gray area–the space between dating and marriage–points out a difference in Canadian and American attitudes toward long-term relationships. Here, you can put your live-in partner on your health insurance. You can file taxes together. (All of which is independent of your gender or sexual orientation, by the way.) You get all the legal rights that come with marriage. Though I have lots of married friends, I also have plenty of friends who are in committed long-term relationships but who aren’t married. They have babies and own homes, but they don’t wear wedding rings.

That moving to another country made my boyfriend into my partner was something I wasn’t prepared for. Partner seemed to imply that I intended to spend my whole life with this person, which I wasn’t quite sure about, though I was happy to offer him the excellent dental care that came with my new job. (I’ve never known a more enthusiastic flosser!) How we talk about love matters, and when I found myself without the right words for my own relationship it stressed me out. Like Thanksgiving, Canadians seem to treat long term relationships a bit more casually than we Americans do. And while I’m perfectly content to embrace a turkey day without parades and football and elementary school pageants where kids in feather headdresses and buckled hats sit down together to an awkward dinner, I’m not so sure about this partnership thing.

After five years here, I’m still committed to the idea of commitment. Formalized commitment, that is: rings and a white dress and a red velvet cake. The modern gal in me sees wedding traditions like being “given away” as antiquated. And I can see that marriage is far from a guarantee of happiness. And I know, I know that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. But I still make a distinction between a boyfriend, a partner, and a husband. And I still want to get married. Maybe it’s that I’ve spent my life imagining my wedding day (as we American girls are taught to do) or maybe it’s that my father wouldn’t let me quit the rec basketball team until the season was over (“when you say you’re going to do something, Mandy, you do it”), but I don’t think I’ll ever feel fully invested in a relationship without it.

So am I old fashioned? anti-feminist? way too into dresses?

*before you grammarians get upset, “might ought to” is a legit Appalachianism that has a distinct meaning which is lost when you use either “might” or “ought to” solo

Something about how this started

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I have this theory that most love stories actually do a terrible job of preparing us for the business of being in a romantic relationship. But despite this, we still love love stories. We tell them all the time. We hold them up to the light next to our own relationships.

I love love stories. Personal experiences, family histories, fairy tales, cheesy romantic comedies–you tell it, I’ll listen. Cue up a Julia Roberts movie and I’m the one sitting beside you on the trans-Atlantic flight, glancing surreptitiously at your iPad and pretending my red, puffy eyes are the result of cabin pressure and a pretzel allergy.

I once worked at a writing center with a Joan Didion quote on the wall that read, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I’d been writing essays about rock climbing, or caffeine, or medieval martyrs, but somehow each piece snuck back around to this one fact: I fell in love.

Every day I looked at that quote and I grew increasingly worried about what it might mean for me. Love scares the crap out of me, but somehow I’d spent my life wanting it. If I didn’t tackle it head-on, I might never stop writing about it. I was used to being good at things, but love? Love was too smart for me. It was the roadrunner and every time I tried to catch it, I threw myself off the cliff with the anvil. I wanted to know why love wasn’t easier. And why something that was a fundamental biological drive could feel so utterly unintuitive.

Well, I for one blame the messenger. Love stories, you’re in my sights.

One day, this will be a book. In the mean time, it’s a hot mess of Word documents, and, now, a blog!