Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage Page 5

  So of course the Hmong fall in love. Of course they feel preference for one person over another person, or miss a beloved one who has died, or find that they inexplicably adore somebody's particular smell, or laugh. But perhaps they don't believe that any of that romantic love business has very much to do with the actual reasons for marriage. Perhaps they do not assume that those two distinct entities (love and marriage) must necessarily intersect--either at the beginning of the relationship or maybe ever at all. Perhaps they believe that marriage is about something else altogether.

  If this sounds like a foreign or crazy notion, remember that it wasn't so long ago that people in Western culture held these same sorts of unromantic views about matrimony. Arranged marriage has never been a prominent feature of American life, of course--much less bridal kidnapping--but certainly pragmatic marriages were routine at certain levels of our society until fairly recently. By "pragmatic marriage," I mean any union where the interests of the larger community are considered above the interests of the two individuals involved; such marriages were a feature of American agricultural society, for instance, for many, many generations.

  I personally know of one such pragmatic marriage, as it turns out. When I was growing up in my small town in Connecticut, my favorite neighbors were a white-haired husband and wife named Arthur and Lillian Webster. The Websters were local dairy farmers who lived by an inviolable set of classic Yankee values. They were modest, frugal, generous, hardworking, unobtrusively religious, and socially discreet members of the community who raised their three children to be good citizens. They were also enormously kind. Mr. Webster called me "Curly" and let me ride my bike for hours on their nicely paved parking lot. Mrs. Webster--if I was very good--would sometimes let me play with her collection of antique medicine bottles.

  Just a few years ago, Mrs. Webster passed away. A few months after her death, I went out to dinner with Mr. Webster, and we got to talking about his wife. I wanted to know how they had met, how they had fallen in love--all the romantic beginnings of their life together. I asked him all the same questions, in other words, that I would eventually ask the Hmong ladies in Vietnam, and I got the same sorts of replies--or lack of replies. I couldn't dredge up a single romantic memory from Mr. Webster about the origins of his marriage. He couldn't even remember the precise moment when he had first met Lillian, he confessed. She had always been around town, as he recalled. It was certainly not love at first sight. There was no moment of electricity, no spark of instant attraction. He had never become infatuated with her in any way.

  "So why did you marry her?" I asked.

  As Mr. Webster explained in his typically open and matter-of-fact Yankee manner, he had gotten married because his brother had instructed him to get married. Arthur was soon going to be taking over the family farm and therefore he needed a wife. You cannot run a proper farm without a wife, any more than you can run a proper farm without a tractor. It was an unsentimental message, but dairy farming in New England was an unsentimental business, and Arthur knew his brother's edict was on target. So, the diligent and obedient young Mr. Webster went out there into the world and dutifully secured himself a wife. You got the feeling, listening to his narrative, that any number of young ladies might have gotten the job of being "Mrs. Webster," instead of Lillian herself, and it wouldn't have made a huge difference to anyone at the time. Arthur just happened to settle on the blonde one, the one who worked over at the Extension Service in town. She was the right age for it. She was nice. She was healthy. She was good. She would do.

  The Websters' marriage, therefore, clearly did not launch from a place of passionate, personal, and fevered love--no more than the Hmong grandmother's marriage had. We might therefore assume, then, that such a union is "a loveless marriage." But we have to be careful about drawing such assumptions. I know better, at least when it comes to the case of the Websters.

  In her waning years, Mrs. Webster was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. For almost a decade, this once-powerful woman wasted away in a manner that was agonizing to watch for everyone in the community. Her husband--that pragmatic old Yankee farmer--took care of his wife at home the entire time she was dying. He bathed her, fed her, gave up freedoms in order to keep watch over her, and learned to endure the dreadful consequences of her decay. He tended to this woman long after she knew who he was anymore--even long after she knew who she herself was anymore. Every Sunday, Mr. Webster dressed his wife in nice clothing, put her in a wheelchair, and brought her to services at the same church where they had been married almost sixty years earlier. He did this because Lillian had always loved that church, and he knew she would've appreciated the gesture if only she had been conscious of it. Arthur would sit there in the pew beside his wife, Sunday after Sunday, holding her hand while she slowly ebbed away from him into oblivion.

  And if that isn't love, then somebody is going to have to sit me down and explain to me very carefully what love actually is.

  That said, we have to be careful, too, not to assume that all arranged marriages across history, or all pragmatic marriages, or all marriages that begin with an act of kidnapping, necessarily resulted in years of contentment. The Websters were lucky, to an extent. (Though they also put a good deal of work into their marriage, one suspects.) But what Mr. Webster and the Hmong people perhaps have in common is a notion that the emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership. Moreover, they would likely agree that there is not one special person waiting for you somewhere in this world who will make your life magically complete, but that there are any number of people (right in your own community, probably) with whom you could seal a respectful bond. Then you could live and work alongside that person for years, with the hope that tenderness and affection would be the gradual outcome of your union.

  At the end of my afternoon's visit at Mai's family's house, I was granted the clearest possible insight into this notion when I asked the tiny old Hmong grandmother one final question, which again, she thought bizarre and foreign.

  "Is your man a good husband?" I asked.

  The old woman had to ask her granddaughter to repeat the question several times, just to make sure she'd heard it correctly: Is he a good husband? Then she gave me a bemused look, as though I'd asked, "These stones which compose the mountains in which you live--are they good stones?"

  The best answer she could come up with was this: Her husband was neither a good husband nor a bad husband. He was just a husband. He was the way that husbands are. As she spoke about him, it was as though the word "husband" connoted a job description, or even a species, far more than it represented any particularly cherished or frustrating individual. The role of "husband" was simple enough, involving as it did a set of tasks that her man had obviously fulfilled to a satisfactory degree throughout their life together--as did most other women's husbands, she suggested, unless you were unlucky and got yourself a real dud. The grandmother even went so far as to say that it is not so important, in the end, which man a woman marries. With rare exceptions, one man is pretty much the same as another.

  "What do you mean by that?" I asked.

  "All men and all women are mostly the same, most of the time," she clarified. "Everybody knows that this is true."

  The other Hmong ladies all nodded in agreement.

  May I pause here for a moment to make a blunt and perhaps perfectly obvious point?

  It is too late for me to be Hmong.

  For heaven's sake, it's probably even too late for me to be a Webster.

  I was born into a late-twentieth-century American middle-class family. Like untold millions of other people in the contemporary world born into similar circumstances, I was raised to believe that I was special. My parents (who were neither hippies nor radicals; who in fact voted for Ronald Reagan twice) simply believed that their children had particular gifts and dreams that set them apart from other people's chil
dren. My "me-ness" was always prized, and was moreover recognized as being different from my sister's "her-ness," my friends' "them-ness," and everyone else's "everyone-else-ness." Though I was certainly not spoiled, my parents believed that my personal happiness was of some importance, and that I should learn to shape my life's journey in such a way that would support and reflect my individual search for contentment.

  I must add here that all my friends and relatives were raised with varying degrees of this same belief. With the possible exception of the very most conservative families among us, or the very most recently immigrated families among us, everyone I knew--at some basic level-- shared this assumed cultural respect for the individual. Whatever our religion, whatever our economic class, we all at least somewhat embraced the same dogma, which I would describe as being very historically recent and very definitely Western and which can effectively be summed up as: "You matter."

  I don't mean to imply that the Hmong don't believe their children matter; on the contrary, they are famous in anthropological circles for building some of the world's most exceptionally loving families. But this was clearly not a society that worshiped at the Altar of Individual Choice. As in most traditional societies, Hmong family dogma might effectively be summed up not as "You matter" but as "Your role matters." For, as everyone in this village seemed to know, there are tasks at hand in life--some tasks that men must do and some tasks that women must do--and everyone must contribute to the best of his or her abilities. If you perform your tasks reasonably well, you can go to sleep at night knowing that you are a good man or a good woman, and you need not expect much more out of life or out of relationships than that.

  Meeting the Hmong women that day in Vietnam reminded me of an old adage: "Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment." My friend the Hmong grandmother had never been taught to expect that her husband's job was to make her abundantly happy. She had never been taught to expect that her task on earth was to become abundantly happy in the first place. Never having tasted such expectations to begin with, she had reaped no particular disenchantment from her marriage. Her marriage fulfilled its role, performed its necessary social task, became merely what it was, and that was fine.

  By contrast, I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love? I, for one, had always been taught by my culture that marriage ought to be a fertile greenhouse in which romantic love can abundantly flourish. Inside the somewhat rickety greenhouse of my first marriage, then, I had planted row after row of grand expectations. I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

  One gets the feeling that if I'd tried to explain all that to the Hmong grandmother, she would have had no idea what the hell I was talking about. She probably would have responded exactly the way an old woman I once met in southern Italy responded, when I confessed to her that I'd left my husband because the marriage made me unhappy.

  "Who's happy?" the Italian widow asked casually, and shrugged away the conversation forever.

  Look, I don't want to risk romanticizing the oh-so-simple life of the picturesque rural peasant here. Let me make it clear that I had no desire to trade lives with any of the women that I met in that Hmong village in Vietnam. For the dental implications alone, I do not want their lives. It would be farcical and insulting, besides, for me to try adopting their worldview. In fact, the inexorable march of industrial progress suggests that the Hmong will be more likely to start adopting my worldview in the years to come.

  As a matter of fact, it's already happening. Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment"--that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose. Mai--trilingual, bright, and observant--had already glimpsed another set of options for life. It wouldn't be long before she was making demands of her own. In other words: It might be too late for even the Hmong to be Hmong anymore.

  So, no, I'm not willing--or probably even able--to relinquish my life of individualistic yearnings, all of which are the birthright of my modernity. Like most human beings, once I've been shown the options, I will always opt for more choices for my life: expressive choices, individualistic choices, inscrutable and indefensible and sometimes risky choices, perhaps . . . but they will all be mine. In fact, the sheer number of choices that I'd already been offered in my life--an almost embarrassing cavalcade of options--would have made the eyes pop out of the head of my friend the Hmong grandmother. As a result of such personal freedoms, my life belongs to me and resembles me to an extent that would be unthinkable in the hills of northern Vietnam, even today. It's almost as if I'm from an entirely new strain of woman (Homo limitlessness, you might call us). And while we of this brave new species do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore.

  The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice. (I have a friend who second-guesses herself so compulsively that her husband jokes her autobiography will someday be titled I Should've Had the Scampi.) Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different--but equally critical-- piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two.

  The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means "two," and the word zweifel, which means "doubt"--suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers--always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.

  Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating cases of what Nietzsche called Lebensneid, or "life envy": the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. (A therapist friend of mine defines this problem simply as "the condition by which all of my single patients secretly long to be married, and all of my married patients secretly long to be single.") With certainty so difficult to achieve, everyone's decisions become an indictment of everyone else's decisions, and because there is no universal model anymore for what makes "a good man" or "a good woman," one must almost earn a personal merit badge in emotional orientation and navigation in order to find one's way through life anymore.
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  All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives--as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, "Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

  Believe me, modern Western marriage has much to recommend it over traditional Hmong marriage (starting with its kidnapping-free spirit), and I will say it again: I would not trade lives with those women. They will never know my range of freedom; they will never have my education; they will never have my health and prosperity; they will never be allowed to explore so many aspects of their own natures. But there is one critical gift that a traditional Hmong bride almost always receives on her wedding day which all too often eludes the modern Western bride, and that is the gift of certainty. When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path to have taken. And a bride whose expectations for happiness are kept necessarily low to begin with is more protected, perhaps, from the risk of devastating disappointments down the road.

  To this day, I admit, I'm not entirely sure how to use this information. I cannot quite bring myself to make an official motto out of "Ask for less!" Nor can I imagine advising a young woman on the eve of her marriage to lower her expectations in life in order to be happy. Such thinking runs contrary to every modern teaching I've ever absorbed. Also, I've seen this tactic backfire. I had a friend from college who deliberately narrowed down her life's options, as though to vaccinate herself against overly ambitious expectations. She skipped a career and ignored the lure of travel to instead move back home and marry her high school sweetheart. With unwavering confidence, she announced that she would become "only" a wife and mother. The simplicity of this arrangement felt utterly safe to her--certainly compared to the convulsions of indecision that so many of her more ambitious peers (myself included) were suffering. But when her husband left her twelve years later for a younger woman, my friend's rage and sense of betrayal were as ferocious as anything I've ever seen. She virtually imploded with resentment--not so much against her husband, but against the universe, which she perceived to have broken a sacred contract with her. "I asked for so little!" she kept saying, as though her diminished demands alone should have protected her against any disappointments. But I think she was mistaken; she had actually asked for a lot. She had dared to ask for happiness, and she had dared to expect that happiness out of her marriage. You can't possibly ask for more than that.