painstaking appraisal of Slate article
The article. BF read it yesterday and recommended that I read it. When he first explained it to me, I said “Um…isn’t that how we spend all of our weekends together?” Honestly, we are rarely very far apart for very long at all on weekends that we actually get to be together for the whole weekend, when work and school don’t keep us apart.
Anyway, I read the article, and it bothered me so much that I wrote him an email which quoted about half of the text of the article and remarked upon the quotes. I have reworked that email into what follows, because I know you’re all interested. All none of you.
“Hanna, who’s putting laundry away, decides she needs to walk down the hall to deposit some clothes in our daughter’s room, which means I have to get out of bed and follow her. Two minutes later, she does this again, and again I must get up. I utter some very un-Buddhalike curses. I can see why Roach and McNally moved into a one-room yurt – no hallways to negotiate, no kid bedrooms, no kids.”
This is the opening of the article, and already I feel that they’ve missed the point. Help her to put the laundry away, you dolt. Do the laundry together. And this is also the first of about 130 times I thought “oh, poor fucking you” while reading the article. I met David Plotz when I went to a Slate bookstore event last year, and it pains me to like him so little now when I liked him so much then.
“I never thought of myself as a ‘private’ person or someone who keeps secrets from her husband. I do, however, want to put on makeup and fix my hair without David standing outside the bathroom tapping his foot and glaring.”
Couldn’t they, I don’t know, have a conversation? Use that time pleasantly instead of being impatient? I don’t know what bad quality to ascribe to her, because wanting privacy is not negative, but why do you need privacy to put on makeup?
“Because I can’t leave, I have no choice but to listen to the conversation: I force myself to pay attention. I force myself to suppress my interior monologue about work I have to do and e-mails I must answer. Instead, I will myself to tune into her world. This discipline brings a reward, albeit a tiny one: a sense for those few moments that we’re deeply together.”
Whenever I watch BF tell a story I’ve already heard, I think about how much I love his rhythm of speech, how much I enjoy watching him gesture, and I watch the other party to see how they’re reacting to the things I laughed at. Maybe I just love BF more than Plotz loves his wife, but I like watching him say stuff I’ve already heard almost as much as I liked watching him the first time. I don’t understand why David found togetherness in that moment, though, because she’s not paying attention to him.
“It’s a joy to watch her at work. I see her best professional self, proposing, scheduling, clarifying, explaining – building a picture of the thrilling article to come. And my presence there contributes just what I’d hoped. I propose ideas. I bounce thoughts off her. Her editor and I agree about a major element of the story, and we change Hanna’s mind. She and I are engaged, alive to the same subject.”
This is the only time they engage with each other – when they work together? I’m not sure what it was that bothered me so much about this moment, but something about it just got to me. Maybe it’s because he’s largely annoyed by his wife, except when she’s acting like him, or except when she’s doing stuff that he already enjoys.
“Back at my office, David gets to be the appendage.”
This was one of a number of times that Hanna talked about her day in terms of up and down, winner and loser. I have a hard time believing that anyone can live in a relationship for eleven years without giving up the win/lose dynamic of a relationship and realizing that cooperation and compromise are the name of the game. But…I guess not.
“I stop just inside the door to check my e-mail. Hanna keeps walking through to the kitchen – 25 feet away – to get food for the kids. I look up and yell at her for breaking the barrier. She barks back: ‘You’re spaced out on your BlackBerry!’ The point being, I guess, that it was my unmindfulness that caused the split. If I had been paying attention to her and to my family’s needs, I would have been heading to the kitchen, too. Instead, I isolated myself in the electronic world, fleeing to my BlackBerry island. My mental separation was the real crime, not her physical one.”
Whoa mama. First issue is that I think he’s trying to be sarcastic here, but I agree with what he said in all seriousness, because BLACKBERRYING IN THE COMPANY OF OTHERS IS A CRIME. If he doesn’t use this moment to realize that maybe some or most or all of life can be lived without a BlackBerry, shame on him. Setting aside that issue, I consider this a serious miscommunication between them. Have they been living the whole day like this – just sitting together, and not really being together? Talking to their kids and their bosses but not to each other? Does he BlackBerry while she’s watching a soccer game, and vice versa? I’m sort of stunned by the implication of this. They didn’t really do the experiment at all if that’s the case, and if they can’t cooperatively live one day together, what is their marriage like?
“It is draining to be watched all the time, even by your wife. Weirdly, we have nothing to say to each other. We don’t have any stories to tell each other about our day because we lived the same day. We don’t have questions for each other because we know the answers. We can’t lie and exaggerate and twist the day’s happenings to gain sympathy – the usual evening activity for most married couples, I suspect – because the other will call foul. This is where the Buddhism may come in. We lived in the moment: Being together all the time eliminated the need for the usual daily reflection because we already spent every minute of the day reflecting.”
I’m surprised that he uses the word “watched”. Since when is watching part of the equation? It’s just spending time together, right? And, crikey, you have nothing to say to each other? No deeper analysis of the day’s events? No discussion of your thoughts on what you encountered separately on your computers? No talk about what’s coming tomorrow, next week, next year? No conversations about global warming? And, um, 1) I don’t think I ever exaggerate the day’s events unless I exaggerate everything I say all the time, and 2) you didn’t live in the moment, you fool, you just spent the day near each other.
“I hope that’s partly a tribute to the strength of our marriage – we find it easy to keep company with each other, thank God.”
YOU DO? You can’t stop complaining about how long it takes her to get dressed and how many times she has to pee, but you find it easy to keep company with her?
–
I guess what I got out of that article is that BF and I really, really, really get along well. Really. Actually this article has made me rethink why most people get married, and what those marriages are actually like; it has added more brightness to the brightest star in the constellation of reasons why I don’t want children (isolation from your partner, and a loss of understanding of who that person is sleeping next to you); it has vastly reassured me about my relationship with BF, not that I needed reassuring; and it has made me facepalm about the utter lack of understanding of Buddhist principles that clearly propagates among journalists.
