http://www.philosophersmail.com/relationships/why-when-it-comes-to-children-love-may-not-be-enough/

Why – when it comes to children – love may not be enough

Anyone of childbearing age will be surrounded by examples of catastrophic parenting in their own and previous generations. We hear no end of gruesome stories about breakdowns and resentments, shame and addiction, chronic failures of self-confidence and inabilities to form satisfying relationships. And at the root of all these varieties of suffering, one central cause sticks out: a lack of love. It was because the parents were remote and domineering, unreliable and frightening that life has never been quite complete.

From such failures, a major assumption has come to dominate modern ideals of parenting: that one must, above all else, love one’s child thoroughly, with immense sympathy, gentleness and kindness and that if one does so, the child will develop into a happy, loving and fulfilled human being.

This is the Romantic view of parenting and it is at its most vivid and self-assured in the early years, especially at moments when the child (finally) lies asleep in its cot, defenceless before the world.

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Yet, despite immense investments and profound devotion, one is – gradually – liable to be inducted into a far more complex and challenging set of truths: that love is not a universal panacea and that giving unconditional affection is no guarantee of all the results one had hoped for.

The terrifying 3am truths about parenting run a little like this:

You are a punchbag

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The blades of your child’s remote-controlled helicopter snapped after five minutes, just as you were starting to get the hang of flying it. The fault lies squarely with the manufacturers. But, sadly, they were not present in the kitchen – so, at once and not for the first time, you became the target for the raging disappointment of your child.

The repeated bad behaviour is surprising of course (it wasn’t meant to be that way), but it is a perverse sort of tribute to you nevertheless. One has to feel rather safe around someone in order to be this difficult. You certainly weren’t so tricky with your parents when you were young, but then again, you never felt so loved. All those assurances – ‘I will always be on your side’ – have paid off perfectly: they have encouraged your child to direct their every frustration and disappointment onto the loving adult who has signalled that they can, and will, take it.

You have to be the spoil sport

Human nature has a strong – and exceedingly inconvenient – bias towards indulging in whatever is most immediately pleasant and fun. And yet the central, unavoidable task of being a loving parent is to encourage the child to delay gratification in the interests of longer-term fulfilment. That’s why there will be fights. Constantly.

After all, it is so much nicer to play Minecraft than to learn how to spell ‘scythe’ or ‘embarrassment’; so much more amusing to see what happens if you put a hosepipe in the car’s exhaust than to do maths homework; so much better to read a magazine than brush one’s teeth, so much more gratifying to stay in bed than have a shower.

Out of love, a parent must – all the time, in small ways and large – say no. And for this, they will be severely punished. They will be treated as if they had arbitrarily made up the mechanics of tooth decay or had designed an economic system where the playing of computer games was disconnected from a capacity to pay bills. They will be punished for always bringing up unwelcome facts. And they will be very unfavourably compared with people who give the child whatever they want – because they just don’t care about them. It’s the thoughtless hedonistic characters, the ones who suggest all-night cartoon sessions and come around with iPads, who will be viewed as the heroes while the caring, denying parent has to contend with being called a ‘meanie’ and, later perhaps, a fascist.

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You have to exert authority rather than teach

The dream is to coax the child into doing certain difficult things without ever having to demand they do so by force. The dream is not to have to ‘exert authority’, by which one means, bypass reason in order to impose a conclusion. The dream is to teach, and never to rely on the more basic weapons, like the assertion that one is the older, richer, bigger party.

One thinks with distaste of the Victorian parent demanding obedience simply by saying ‘I am your mother, I am your father’. To the child, the meaning of these words, mother and father, have changed entirely; they now mean merely ‘someone who will make it nice for me’ and ‘someone I will agree with if I see the point of what they’re saying.’

But attempts to teach and appeal to a child’s reason can only go so far. Whatever one says in a gentle voice, the children won’t eat vegetables; they won’t want to get out of bed in the morning; they will want to mock their younger brother or sister; they won’t stop playing the computer game.

When the child is very small, it is easy enough to deal with these protests: one can just lift them up or distract them in some kindly way for a moment. But later, by six, one has to use authority: one must simply assert that one knows best without explaining one’s reasons.

The child wouldn’t have the relevant bits of experience that would render one’s lessons comprehensible. A nine-year-old girl cannot understand how humiliating her six-year-old brother physically is a bad idea because this might make it hard for him to relate easily to women when he is older. It isn’t her fault she can’t understand. It would indeed be wholly unreasonable to expect a nine-year-old to be reasonable – and correctly comprehend the force and direction of adult concern.

The dream is that one will be able to pass on insights to the child that were painfully accumulated through experience, and thereby save them time. But in the absence of experience, insight doesn’t work. One cannot rush children to conclusions; one cannot spare them time. They will need, with difficulty, to make many of the same mistakes (and a few new ones too) and waste a good part of their lives finding out what you already know full well.

You can’t make things too nice for them

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Modern culture is deeply vexed – and appalled – by the thought that development might require suffering. We have been traumatised by the barbaric old-fashioned enthusiasm for punishment, the view – expressed by generations of sadistic Victorian school masters – that success demands pain, that there is a necessary relationship between early discomfort and humiliation and later strength and ‘character’.

But we have not merely rejected the Victorian mechanisms for inflicting suffering (the cold showers, the beatings), we have for the most part sought to abolish suffering altogether. Kindness has been triumphant.

And yet this attempt to abolish suffering involves waging a counter-productive and ultimately cruel war with the facts of human nature. We know from our own experience that we have at key moments grown through things that had a painful side to them: that there were terrors, rejections and disappointments that – in the end – made us more mature and better able to pursue our goals. We know that the drive to accomplish certain things, to master some difficult material, to win out over others, gained some of its power from fear and desperate insecurity. Because someone (perhaps a parent) didn’t believe in us, we redoubled one’s efforts. Because we were afraid of the consequences of failure, because succeeding was the only way to impress someone we loved but who wasn’t easily impressed, we put on an extra spurt.

We desperately want our child to grow mature but without going through awful things. We hate being an agent of fear. We want always to cheer and to hug. We want everything to be nice. Yet we also know, in our hearts, that this can only be a path to ruin.

You can’t guarantee their goodness

The Romantic view of existence sees all humans as fundamentally good from birth: it is only upbringing and a lack of love that corrupts and damages us and in the process, makes us cruel. Romanticism states that if only a child can grow up anxiety free, secure and encased in love, it will never break another child’s toy, rip up their paintings or try to scare them. The child will be reliably kind if she or he has reliably been shown kindness.

But experience suggests the existence of some ineluctably dark sides hard-wired in us and beyond the reach of the gentlest behaviour: certain kinds of aggression, cruelty and violence appear to be a given. A child may just want to hit its sibling out of excess vitality, boredom or native sadism. It might just be fun to smack someone in the face to see what happens.

That’s why there used to be such an emphasis on manners. Those who upheld them didn’t believe that a child ever could be spontaneously good simply because they’d been shown love. Indeed, a firm denial of love was what was necessary to help the child to create a wall between what they might feel inside and what they knew they could express with others. Being strict wasn’t a route to making anyone evil, it was a way to teach a person to keep their evil firmly locked up inside themselves.

You can’t guarantee their success

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The modern parent believes that it might be possible to mould a happy, fulfilled, successful human. From this flows the minute attention to detail, from the purchase of the cot to the time-tabling of after-school activities. It is this that explains the Mandarin lessons, the French horn, the educational trips to the countryside and the ruinous tutor fees – because with all this in place, fate and failure can surely be kept at bay.

Yet the relationship between effort and return is more bizarre and more random. We cannot spare those we love the cup of human sorrow – whatever the intensity of our after-school programmes. We are always statistically most likely to give birth to mediocrities.

You will be forgotten

You take great care not to be frightening. You make silly jokes, put on funny voices, pretend to be a bear or a camel – all so as not to intimidate, so as to be approachable, the way one’s own parents were not. It should be a recipe for reciprocated love.

But weirdly, we rather like difficult people in a way, people we can’t quite read, who aren’t around so often, who are a bit scary. They hook us in – in a way the kind, stable ones never quite do. One loses authority by being natural, approachable, friendly, a bit daft, the clown who doesn’t want to scare.

An even more dispiriting thought comes to mind. Love them reliably and without fear and you will be forgotten. Be distant, intermittent, often absent and deeply volatile, and they will be obsessed with you for life.

And with these thoughts fully aired, it will be time for the kindly parent to attempt to return to sleep. It will be a long day – with the kids – tomorrow.

This is all very excellent and pertinent…

http://www.philosophersmail.com/relationships/when-is-one-ready-to-get-married/

When is one ready to get married?

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It used to be when you’d hit certain financial and social milestones: when you had a home to your name, a set of qualifications on the mantelpiece and a few cows and a parcel of land in your possession.

But when, under the influence of Romantic ideology, this grew to seem altogether too mercenary and calculating, the focus shifted to emotions. It came to be thought important to feel the right way. That was the true sign of a good union. And the right feelings included the sense that the other was ‘the one’, that you understood one another perfectly and that you’d both never want to sleep with anyone else again.

These ideas, though touching, have proved to be an almost sure recipe for the eventual dissolution of marriages – and have caused havoc in the emotional lives of millions of otherwise sane and well-meaning couples.

As a corrective to them, what follows is a proposal for a very different set of principles, more Classical in temper, which indicate when two people should properly consider themselves ready for marriage.

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We are ready for marriage…

1. When we give up on perfection 

We should not only admit in a general way that the person we are marrying is very far from perfect. We should also grasp the specifics of their imperfections: how they will be irritating, difficult, sometimes irrational, and often unable to sympathise or understand us. Vows should be rewritten to include the terse line: ‘I agree to marry this person even though they will, on a regular basis, drive me to distraction.’

However, these flaws should never be interpreted as merely capturing a local problem. No one else would be better. We are as bad. We are a flawed species. Whomever one got together with would be radically imperfect in a host of deeply serious ways. One must conclusively kill the idea that things would be ideal with any other creature in this galaxy. There can only ever be a ‘good enough’ marriage.

For this realisation to sink in, it helps to have had a number of relationships before marrying, not in order to have the chance to locate ‘the right person’, but so that one can have ample opportunity to discover at first hand, in many different contexts, the truth that everyone (even the most initially exciting prospect) really is a bit wrong close up.

2. When we despair of being understood

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Love starts with the experience of being understood in a deeply supportive and uncommon way. They understand the lonely parts of you; you don’t have to explain why you find a particular joke so funny; you hate the same people; they too want to try out a particular sexual scenario.

This will not continue. Another vow should read: ‘However much the other seems to understand me, there will always be large tracts of my psyche that will remain incomprehensible to them, anyone else and even me.’

We shouldn’t, therefore, blame our lovers for a dereliction of duty in failing to interpret and grasp our internal workings. They were not tragically inept. They simply couldn’t understand who we were and what we needed – which is wholly normal. No one properly understands, and can therefore fully sympathise with, anyone else.

3. When we realise we are crazy

This is deeply counter-intuitive. We seem so normal and mostly so good. It’s the others…

But maturity is founded on an active sense of one’s folly. One is out of control for long periods, one has failed to master one’s past, one projects unhelpfully, one is permanently anxious. One is, to put it mildly, an idiot.

If we are not regularly and very deeply embarrassed about who we are, it can only be because we have a dangerous capacity for selective memory.

4. When we are ready to love rather than be loved 

Confusingly, we speak of ‘love’ as one thing, rather than discerning the two very different varieties that lie beneath the single word: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and are aware of our unnatural, immature fixation on the former.

We start out knowing only about ‘being loved.’ It comes to seem – very wrongly – like the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent is simply spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, clear up and remain almost always warm and cheerful. Parents don’t reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears and been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The relationship is almost entirely non-reciprocal. The parent loves; but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way. The parent does not get upset when the child has not noticed the new hair cut, asked carefully-calibrated questions about how the meeting at work went or suggested that they go upstairs to take a nap. Parent and child may both ‘love’, but each party is on a very different end of the axis, unbeknownst to the child.

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This is why in adulthood, when we first say we long for love, what we predominantly mean is that we want to be loved as we were once loved by a parent. We want a recreation in adulthood of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret part of our minds, we picture someone who will understand our needs, bring us what we want, be immensely patient and sympathetic to us, act selflessly and make it all better.

This is – naturally – a disaster. For a marriage to work, we need to move firmly out of the child – and into the parental position. We need to become someone who will be willing to subordinate their own demands and concerns to the needs of another.

There’s a further lesson to be learnt. When a child says to its parent ‘I hate you’, the parent does not automatically go numb with shock or threaten to leave the house and never come back, because the parent knows that the child is not giving the executive summary of a deeply thought-out and patient investigation into the state of the relationship. The cause of these words might be hunger, a lost but crucial piece of Lego, the fact that they went to a cocktail party last night, that they won’t let them play a computer game, or that they have an earache…

Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn’t yet know how to say: ‘I’m lonely, in pain, or frightened’ – distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child’s world: the parent.

We find it exceptionally hard to make this move with our partners: to hear what they truly mean, rather than responding (furiously) to what they are saying.

A third vow should state: ‘Whenever I have the strength in me to do so, I will imitate those who once loved me and take care of my partner as these figures cared for me. The task isn’t an unfair chore or a departure from the true nature of love. It is the only kind of love really worthy of that exalted word.’

5. When we are ready for administration

The Romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions. But what a couple actually get up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile and budget.

None of these activities have any glamour whatsoever within the current arrangement of society. Those obliged to do them are therefore highly likely to resent them and feel that something has gone wrong with their lives for having to involve themselves so closely with them. And yet these tasks are what is truly ‘romantic’ in the sense of ‘conducive and sustaining of love’ and should be interpreted as the bedrock of a successful marriage, and accorded all the honour currently given to other activities in society, like mountain climbing or motor sport.

A central vow should read: ‘I accept the dignity of the ironing board.’

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6. When we understand that sex and love do and don’t belong together

The Romantic view expects that love and sex will be aligned. But in truth, they won’t stay so beyond a few months or, at best, one or two years. This is not anyone’s fault. Because marriage has other key concerns (companionship, administration, another generation), sex will suffer. We are ready to get married when we accept a large degree of sexual resignation and the task of sublimation.

Both parties must therefore scrupulously avoid making the marriage ‘about sex’. They must also, from the outset, plan for the most challenging issue that will, statistically-speaking, arise for them: that one or the other will have affairs. Someone is properly ready for marriage when they are ready to behave maturely around betraying and being betrayed.

The inexperienced, immature view of betrayal goes like this: sex doesn’t have to be part of love. It can be quick and meaningless, just like playing tennis. Two people shouldn’t try to own each other’s bodies. It’s just a bit of fun. So one’s partner shouldn’t mind so much.

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But this is wilfully to ignore impregnable basics of human nature. No one can be the victim of adultery and not feel that they have been found fundamentally wanting and cut to the core of their being. They will never get over it. It makes no sense, of course, but that isn’t the point. Many things about us make little sense – and yet have to be respected. The adulterer has to be ready to honour and forgive the partner’s extreme capacity for jealousy, and so must as far as is possible resist the urge to have sex with other people, must take every possible measure to prevent it being known if they do and must respond with extraordinary kindness and patience if the truth does ever emerge. They should above all never try to persuade their partner that it isn’t right to be jealous or that jealousy is unnatural, ‘bad’ or a bourgeois construct.

On the other side of the equation, one should ready oneself for betrayal. That is, one should make strenuous efforts to try to understand what might go through the partner’s mind when they have sex with someone else. One is likely to think that there is no other option but that they are deliberately trying to humiliate one and that all their love has evaporated. The more likely truth – that one’s partner just wants to have more, or different, sex – is as hard to master as Mandarin or the oboe and requires as much practice.

One is ready to get married when two very difficult things are in place: one is ready to believe in one’s partner’s genuine capacity to separate love and sex. And at the same time, one is ready to believe in one’s partner’s stubborn inability to keep love and sex apart.

Two people have to be able to master both feats, because they may – over a lifetime – be called upon to demonstrate both capacities. This – rather than a vow never to have sex with another human again – should be the relevant test for getting married.

7. When we are happy to be taught and calm about teaching

We are ready for marriage when we accept that in certain very significant areas, our partners will be wiser, more reasonable and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. We should, at key points, see them as the teacher and ourselves as pupils. At the same time, we should be ready to take on the task of teaching them certain things and like good teachers, not shout, lose our tempers or expect them simply to know. Marriage should be recognised as a process of mutual education.

8. When we realise we’re not that compatible

The Romantic view of marriage stresses that the ‘right’ person means someone who shares our tastes, interests and general attitudes to life. This might be true in the short term. But, over an extended period of time, the relevance of this fades dramatically; because differences inevitably emerge. The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently and wisely.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate difference that is the true marker of the ‘right’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

Conclusion 

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We have accepted that it is a truly good idea to attend some classes before having children. This is now the norm for all educated people in all developed nations.

Yet there is as yet no widespread acceptability for the idea of having classes before getting married. The results are around for all to see.

The time has come to bury the Romantic intuition-based view of marriage and learn to practice and rehearse marriage as one would ice-skating or violin playing, activities no more complex and no more deserving of systematic periods of instruction.

For now, while the infrastructure of new vows and classes is put in place, we all deserve untold sympathy for our struggles. We are trying to do something enormously difficult without the bare minimum of support necessary. It is not surprising if – very often – we have troubles.