Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ciency of the old absolutisms. Discussion of free will changed key, the older cosmological mode giving way to debates over the nature of volition and the absence of material capacities to choose. Augustine came to expound a view of divine grace and original sin that cut against centuries of Christian voluntarism. Moreover, rather suddenly some Christian bishops came to realize that their pure notions of free will were simply incompatible with the realities of life, above all with the centrality of sexual coercion in the Roman sexual economy. Th e sudden recognition that Christian sexual morality would have to account for those without volition over their sexual fate is a sign of the church’s broader social power from the later fourth century. Most remarkably, this new anxiety led directly to a program of legal reform in which Roman emperors, from Th eodosius II to Justinian, at- tacked coerced prostitution. Th e campaign against violent sexual procure- C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  ment is deeply symbolic of the triumph of a Christian logic of sexual morality, rooted in sin, in the order of imperial law and public culture. A D I S E A S E N OT J U S T O F D E S I R E : S A M E - S E X E RO S I N L ATE A NTI Q U IT Y In the waning years of the fourth century, an anonymous Christian lawyer assembled a small handbook juxtaposing Mosaic and Roman law, with the evident purpose of emphasizing the commonalities between them. Although the governance of sex presented inauspicious prospects for such a comparison, the author was not deterred. He presented the Levitical prohibition on same- sex coupling (in an Old Latin translation), which dictated the death penalty for both partners when “a man lies with a man as with a woman.” On the Roman side of the ledger, matters were far less clear. Th e author of the compilation could cite two rules preserved in the late legal collection known as the Sentences of Paul. “Anyone who will have corrupted a free male against his will is to suff er capital punishment. Anyone who will have submitted, of his own volition, to shameful and impure violation, will be deprived of half his property.” Th e Sentences of Paul, composed around AD 300, accurately refl ected the foundations of classical law, which still prevailed when the author wrote his comparison of Mosaic and Roman law in the 390s. Th e violation of free boys was fearsomely punished, and sexual passivity incurred severe public penalties. Roman law was inspired by norms of masculinity; it guarded the impenetrability of the Roman youth and debilitated the pathicus. Th e Mosaic law sits across a conceptual divide

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Of course, in the flesh-and-blood world of a child living in a postdivorce family, economic issues are not separate from psychological is- sues—a fact that is rarely talked about. After divorce, the drop in income carries other losses that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, like being forced to move away from friends in a familiar neighborhood to less expensive housing, like being exposed to the violence and chaos of a bad neighborhood, like being sent to a more crowded school with overwhelmed teachers. The extras that make life comfortable for a child are lost. Special weekend activities, movies, summer camps, swimming lessons, piano and ballet lessons, uniforms for athletic teams, and other after-school activities, not to mention private schools, are the first to go. Later on, there is the real possibility that children from a father’s second marriage will receive more resources and be given greater opportunities than the child of divorce whose mother does not remarry. The narrowing of educational opportunities and usurping of their place within the family have a chilling effect on children of divorce. Why aim high when you’ve been pushed to the bottom of the ladder with others blocking your way? Loss of Structure I VIVIDLY REMEMBER the first time I saw Paula six months after her parents had separated. A small, wiry child with unkempt, dark curly hair and vivid green eyes, she roamed my playroom restlessly, too anxious to settle down and play. As she picked up and threw down toy after toy, I tried to ask her about her life, her house, her parents, her school, and her sister. Instead, she talked endlessly about her pet dog, Daisy, and ignored all my questions. Then she startled me—for the first of many times—when she suddenly stopped her anxious wandering and said clearly, “I’m going to find a new mommy.” Here was a child overwhelmed with anxiety. The world had changed overnight into an incomprehensible, unpredictable place in which her central, all-important, caregiving mother had disappeared and was replaced by a series of hastily chosen, low-paid babysitters and a person who resembled her mother but who had little energy or time left over for Paula. Paula’s father, while largely absent from the everyday routines during her early childhood, had brought presents and had played with Paula and her sister when he lived at home. After the separation, his absences grew longer, and after the first year, he disappeared for several years. Paula had lost her place in the world from being a cherished, well-cared-for, protected child who was the centerpiece of the family life to being a child who felt she was a leftover from a failed marriage and a burden around her mother’s neck. At age four these losses cannot be put into words. They are felt and expressed in overwhelming internal panic. Trust and spontaneity, which are the outward manifestations of feeling loved and nurtured, disappear as panic and anxiety give way to disappointment and anger.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect. The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’—making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring. There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra , an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble. Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  How Can I Be a Parent?TWO OUT OF three adults in our long-term study of children of divorce have decided not to have children.4 National surveys are turning up similar results. Childbirth is down everywhere, but children of divorce who choose not to have children specifically cite divorce as the main reason. Of course, these people are still relatively young and may change their minds if the right person comes along. But our data are unique in that these men and women are telling us very clearly why they don’t want children. “Kids?” they say. “No way. Out of the question.” Married, divorced, or single, they say things like, “I never want to hold a baby or to raise one.” Others insist they’d be poor mothers or fathers so why undertake a role for which they have neither interest nor talent nor good experience in their own childhood to draw from. They said, “How can I be a parent? Look at the upbringing I had.” Or, “My life is too insecure to think about having a kid.” They had little confidence in their ability to bring up a happy child. Others were afraid that a child might destabilize their marriage. No one cited a demanding career as a reason not to have children. I found it fascinating that children of divorce who want children and those who don’t want children draw on the same experiences to arrive at different conclusions. People who want kids seek to rewrite their history by providing the children with what they missed. Those who don’t want kids have no interest in looking back at their history and find little to inspire them about becoming parents. They seem to doubt they could do any better than their parents and have no interest in trying. But in looking closely at their upbringing—amount of contact with fathers, levels of child support, anger between parents—I could find little that distinguished the two groups. They are similar except for the fact that those who don’t want children were more distant from their parents, either angrier or less involved. One important, though usually unconscious, motive for having a child is a sort of payback, to express appreciation for having been brought into the world and to provide your own parents with a child who is a symbolic lien on immortality. It’s natural for new mothers to present their newborns to their moms and dads with a great sense of pride and interconnectedness. I was interested that so few children of divorce seemed interested in their own parents’ desire to become grandparents. It was a theme that came up frequently among those raised in intact families. It may be natural for children who are still angry about divorce to refuse this gift as a way of keeping their distance from their parents. If this is true, it is an exceptionally sad legacy of our divorce culture.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  When it comes time to choose a life mate and build a new family, the effects of divorce crescendo. A central finding to my research is that children identify not only with their mother and father as separate individuals but with the relationship between them. They carry the template of this relationship into adulthood and use it to seek the image of their new family. The absence of a good image negatively influences their search for love, intimacy, and commitment. Anxiety leads many into making bad choices in relationships, giving up hastily when problems arise, or avoiding relationships altogether. As we will see, the divorced family is not a truncated version of the two-parent family. It is a different kind of family in which children feel less protected and less certain about their future than children in reasonably good intact families. Mothers and fathers who share their beds with different people are not the same as mothers and fathers living under the same roof. The divorced family has an entirely new cast of characters and relationships featuring stepparents and stepsiblings, second marriages and second divorces, and often a series of live-in lovers. The child who grows up in a postdivorce family often experiences not one loss—that of the intact family—but a series of losses as people come and go. This new kind of family puts very different demands on each parent, each child, and each of the many new adults who enter the family orbit. Moreover, divorce brings radical changes to parent—child relationships that run counter to our current understanding. Parenting cut loose from its moorings in the marital contract is often less stable, more volatile, and less protective of children. When that contract dissolves, the perceptions, feelings, and needs of parents and children for one another are transformed. It’s not that parents love their children less or worry less about them. It’s that they are fully engaged in rebuilding their own lives—economically, socially, and sexually. Parents and children’s needs are often out of sync for many years after the breakup. Worried children watch their parents like little hawks, looking for signs of stress that will affect their availability as parents. As the stories you are about to hear reveal, children are not passive vessels but rather active participants who help shape their own destiny and that of their family. They make gallant efforts to fit into the new requirements of the postdivorce family although they hope for many years that their parents will reconcile. Because they are in their formative years, the new roles that they assume in the family are built into their character. Some move into the postdivorce vacuum and become principal caregivers of their families. Others learn to hide their true feelings. Some get into trouble hoping that they can bring their parents back together to rescue them.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “Should I withdraw my question?” I was torn between not wanting to upset him but wanting very much for him to respond. He smiled at me. “Thanks. I appreciate your offer. But I’ll try.” As it turned out he was more than candid. He opened the door wide and let me in. “Mom was always on him about things. She was real critical of what were really his best qualities. He wanted to go out to dinner with friends and have people over to dinner. She worried about money and babysitters. When they did have people over, she’d get so tense that she’d often have a migraine by the time the company arrived. If they had a good sex life, I’d be surprised.” Gary paused and thought it over. “Let me restate that. I’d give odds that they had very little sex, if any. When I was younger I remember Dad coming home from work and trying to kiss her but she’d always be busy getting dinner on and she wouldn’t stop and greet him. After awhile, he didn’t try anymore.” “Did they have arguments or fights?” I was trying to see the interior of this marriage as Gary had experienced it. “No, they didn’t have that many actual fights. Or at least we never saw many. They were pretty restrained in what they did or said in front of us kids.” “How did their being restrained affect you kids?” I asked. “There was this feeling of tension that you could cut with a knife,” Gary replied. “As things got worse between them, there were fewer words and more and more tension. My brother and sister and I spent as much time out of the house as we could.” I was again struck by the similarity between Gary’s household and households like Karen’s where parents decide to divorce. “Things got pretty bad when I was in junior high school,” he said. “This is when I wondered if Dad would leave. Mom had always been possessive of Dad—keeping track of where he was and how he spent his time. But then she started getting real jealous. It seemed like she went out of her way to interpret what he did in the worst possible light. And then she’d blame him.” When I asked for an example, Gary told a detailed story about a birthday party he attended with his family. As they were driving home, Gary’s mother accused his father of flirting with other women. She said he only cared about pleasing himself and about being everybody’s best friend. When they pulled into their driveway, she jumped out of the car and ran into her bedroom. Gary’s father told the children to get to bed and took off in the car. He didn’t come back until late the next morning. The parents didn’t speak to each other for days. “Was that the only time this happened?” I asked.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Adults from intact families have two other advantages over those raised in divorced families. They had a sense of continuity with their families. They felt that they were part of an important tradition with a history and that they had a responsibility to their parents and children to maintain this continuity. This sense of being part of a family tradition gave them a perspective that helped to stabilize their relationship and influenced their desire to have children. They also had a realistic sense that marriages change over time. They did not expect their twenty-five-year-old brides to look and act the same at age thirty-five. They knew that having children would alter their lives. They were aware that the road ahead would be sometimes rocky and sometimes smooth. They didn’t expect or even want serenity or perfection. They did expect that their relationship with each other would influence them as individuals. Finally, they were open to change from the day they embarked on marriage. Gary surprised me when he explained that one of the many things that attracted him to Sara is that she’s from a very close-knit family. I didn’t expect that people would give a hoot about the marital status of the parents of the person they fall in love with. I was wrong. A number of people from intact families said that they took a good look at prospective in-laws before getting too involved. Some claimed that they could always tell on a date if their partner came from a divorced family—the women were edgy and too eager to please, the men confided their history too quickly. I doubt that this perception affects the numbers of people willing to marry children of divorce, and I don’t know of any engagements broken because of it. Nevertheless, many young people admitted that the pedigree of coming from a happy intact family is reassuring. They boasted, “My husband comes from a large family with no divorce. He’s got no demons.” Their attitudes reflect the general anxiety in our society about the fragility of marriage and the fear that children of divorce may have less of a commitment to marriage. I was impressed with the self-confidence of so many of those raised in harmonious intact families. Despite the high incidence of divorce among their friends and schoolmates, they said that they never doubted they’d marry a good person and have a stable life with children. This was not true of the adults like Gary who were raised in troubled marriages that stayed together. They came to marriage with serious concerns that they would repeat their parents’ behavior along with a firm resolve to keep that from happening. Despite their passionate hope for a good marriage, children of divorce came with a much higher expectation of failure and only a sketchy sense of how one goes about protecting the relationship.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In truth, people seek divorce for reasons beyond the wish to escape a wretched or frightening marriage. A driving force in the thousands of divorces that I have seen close-up is the wish to surmount the quiet loneliness and disappointment of a loveless marriage. People understandably reach out for another chance at happiness and companionship. Indeed, these troubled feelings merit our deep respect and understanding. But the parent’s agenda may conflict with the wishes of the children who need a stable home while growing up. Put succinctly, unlike other social ills such as poverty or community violence, where the interests of parents and children converge, divorce can benefit adults while being detrimental to the needs of children. Our moral vision and our family laws have been built on the assumption that members of a family, big and small, have the same interests. But divorce challenges this assumption straight on. We have been reluctant to face this dilemma in its full complexity. I will take up this issue of when and whether to divorce or stay together for the children’s sake in coming pages. I believe guidelines can be drawn from the life stories you are about to read. I also address whether new policies and practices by the courts and parents could better meet both the wishes of parents and the needs of children. Can we do things better is the core question of this work. Who This Book Is For THIS BOOK IS written for those of you who grew up in divorced families and want to know why you feel and act the way you do. Each of you believes that your suffering was unique. You’ve struggled with inner conflicts and fears whose source you don’t comprehend. You’ve lived for years with fear of loss and the worry that if you’re happy, it’s only a prelude to disaster. You fear change because deep down you believe it can only be for the worse. You’ve been worried about one or both of your parents all your life, and leaving them has been a nightmare. Like most adult children of divorce, you’ve never confessed to anyone how terrified you are of conflict because the only way you know to handle it is to explode or run away. You’ve lain awake night after night struggling with anxiety about love and commitment. You know far too much about loneliness and too little about lasting friendship. But you were too uncomfortable to mention these feelings because you had no idea that you were part of a large and growing army of millions of young adults who were raised in divorced homes and who share your bewilderment and concerns. The feelings that confuse and trouble you have deep roots in your history.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Will one of the adults ruin the occasion by acting out? The children would hold their breath until the event was safely over. The glow of a family get-together, where the older generations can relax and enjoy the food and laugh at the children’s antics and the children can bask in the family’s admiration, was not part of their storehouse of childhood memories in the same way that it was for those in most intact families. Invisible Structure of Parenting AS GARY DESCRIBED how he spent his time as a child, it gradually dawned on me that in a well-functioning intact family mothers and fathers are in the background as their children grow up. Their role is to create a safe and supportive place for the children, whose job during elementary and junior high school is to go to school, play, make friends, and simply grow up. From the child’s perspective, children occupy center stage. The parents’ job as producers is to stay in the wings and make sure that the show goes on. They should of course encourage, applaud, feed, and clothe the players. If the children stumble, parents should come out of the wings, help them up, dust them off, and immediately get offstage again. In families like Gary’s, parents keep a close eye on what their children are doing “onstage” at every moment. If the play gets too rough or there is trouble in the classroom, they are front and center, ready to act. At home, they keep up the buzz of a “parenting dialogue,” a conversation that begins with the child’s birth and never ends: How is Gary doing? Does his teacher understand his aptitude for math? Should I talk with her? What should we do about his fighting in the schoolyard? What’s the best way to handle the teacher’s complaints? and so on. The litany is endless. Out of these ongoing dialogues, held after the children are asleep, or when they are thought to be out of earshot, parents evolve a domestic policy for the home and a foreign policy for outside the home. Later, at the dinner table, both adults present a united front to the children. This invisible structure of parenting that supports the growing child and runs interference for her is weakened or lost in the breakup. Karen and her siblings felt that they had been suddenly abandoned, almost orphaned. Their mother was present but so distracted that they could hardly get her attention. And their father was morose and cranky. In divorce, even parents who get along well after the breakup rarely share a strategy for raising their children, although they may come together around an emergency or scheduling.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  About half of them walked down the aisle when they were in their early twenties; a few were in their late teens. 1 As we’ll see in Chapter 14, many of these marriages were doomed from the start. A large number ended in divorce whereas some are continuing amid great unhappiness, with no expectations for change. More on this later. For now I want to discuss adults like Karen who have entered into what appear to be good marriages later in their lives. Many of these thirty-somethings have been through the hard knock school of relationships. Some have had brief first marriages that ended in failure or they lived with another person or a series of other persons through their twenties. Others had a long run of one-night stands. A few were heartbroken by a lover’s rejection and for years felt too discouraged to try again. But then, in tentative but courageous steps, each of these children of divorce found someone whom they could love, trust, and cherish. It’s too soon, of course, to say how many of these good, later marriages will last. Most have only been in place for a few years and, like all marriages, they are not immune from strife. A few were shaky, and some had already come apart. But in the twenty-five-year interviews, I saw many happy, loving couples who were devoted to each other and who had clearly vanquished the fears that beset them in the early days of their relationships. One of the reasons I selected Karen as a main character for this book is that her story illustrates the troubled path that many follow before achieving a splendid marriage. Her mixed feelings of triumph and disbelief are emblematic of many in her generation. What distinguished these happily married people? After years of trial-and-error, they finally acquired the judgment to choose a mate carefully and wisely. And then they mustered the courage to pursue that person for a long-term commitment. This was a major achievement that reflected their greater maturity and increased self-esteem. As these same men and women entered their twenties, most were terrified of being alone—a feeling directly related to their fear of being abandoned or lost during the turmoil of their parents’ breakup and divorce. But as every young adult needs to learn, the only way to reject an unsuitable lover is to be able to face being alone. This is a hard lesson for everyone, but it’s especially difficult for children of divorce. Several of the women in the study told me candidly about their first breakthrough in therapy: they were finally able to go to a party and return home alone, without panicking.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In contrast, like the other adults who did not want to emulate their parents’ marriage, Gary had a clear agenda. One of the lessons he drew from watching his parents was that he wanted to have better communication in his own marriage. “That wasn’t hard,” he quipped, “because my parents hardly talked except about us kids. Communication isn’t talking baseball or even children. It’s solving problems. I had this notion that admitting to problems meant that you’d end up in a big, screaming fight feeling misunderstood and angry for days. But I’ve really learned from Sara that it doesn’t have to be that way, that you can discuss your differences and actually have the tension get less, not bigger. That’s been a huge relief to me.” In his anxieties over dealing with conflicts, Gary sounded a lot like Karen. The difference is that Gary eventually learned how to argue without feeling the world would crash down on his head. Karen never could. Gary had the enormous advantage of having seen his parents cooperate consistently over many years in situations involving the children. Their cooperation made it easier for him to learn from Sara how to deal with differences directly, without fear that they will rock the marriage. He was also greatly reassured by Sara’s firm belief that problems in a marriage are meant to be resolved. The multiple parts of Gary’s legacy from his parents were evident in two marital crises that Gary described. The first reflects Gary’s legacy from his father of a steely resolve to fight for the marriage and the belief that one has to give it priority over other relationships.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Most of the young men in our study did reasonably well or very well with the second task. They understood about supporting themselves and took it seriously. Some had excellent careers and made plenty of money. Others worked steadily at moderately or poorly paid jobs But the first task was a giant hurdle that caused a tide of heartache. As we’ve seen, young men and women from divorced families enter young adulthood anxious about love, commitment, and marriage because they are so afraid of failing and being hurt. One way this anxiety plays out is to avoid commitment altogether. 1 We’ve already seen how the fear of commitment played out in Karen’s story and her delay in saying yes to marrying the man she loved. But as the findings of this study shows, these young men have an even harder time than the women. Many can’t even begin to play the courtship game. Their fear of rejection runs so high that they spend years running away from women or standing still, waiting to see who wants them. Many lead solitary lives and suffer in isolation. Casual dating is not an option. Most lack the dash and self-confidence to enjoy it or do it well. Why is courtship so important and why is it going out of style? Courtship, be it short or extended, is a necessary overture to a loving relationship. It’s the process of selecting who is right and deciding who is wrong. As we saw in Gary’s story, during courtship each of us asks, Do we fit? Are we good together? Is what we have in common good enough to stay together for one night, one year, a lifetime? For building a family? Courtship is that critical time early in a relationship when each person learns about himself and about the other and decides whether they match each other’s needs, wishes, and fantasies well enough to pursue the relationship further. The goal of courtship is to find someone who comes closer than others in meeting one’s realistic expectations for love, intimacy, and friendship. Unfortunately, our divorce culture has fundamentally changed the nature of courtship. Its goals are no longer clear because commitment is feared instead of expected. Young and not so young people want lasting love and companionship as much as ever. Given the loneliness of modern life, the bleakness of offices, and the stress of commuting and traffic, they need it more than ever. They want to come home to someone who loves and appreciates them. A pet won’t do it. Sometimes people try to avoid facing the fears of commitment by moving in together right away and then pretending it’s not for keeps. Cohabitations like this can last for years or a lifetime (more on this later). As Larry’s story shows, the young men’s fears are not simply part of a general discouragement in our culture about marriage. Rather, their fears are deeply rooted in their own memories.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Despite the extraordinary weight Paul places on sexual purity, his missive to Corinth was a delicate act of triangulation. Word had reached Paul of a faction within the Christian community who declared that strict continence was the mea sure of holiness. Paul could not register unqualifi ed disagreement. “I wish that all were as I myself am,” he writes, foreground-ing his own celibacy. For centuries Christians will elaborate on this most gentle of moral suggestions, usually with a stridency that contrasts with Paul’s cautious sensibility. Paul was not willing to disenfranchise the reliable married house holders who held together the fl edgling church. Marriage was to be accommodated, “by way of concession, not of command.” In fact, although marriage might tie down a man or woman to the dull distractions of everyday life, it was the surest bulwark against sexual sin. “Because of fornications, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.” Paul imagines a sexual version of Pascal’s wager: “It is better to marry than to be afl ame with passion.” Surrounded by the temptations of the Greek city, the Christians for whom continence was not a practicable goal were to fi nd safe exercise in the licit amours of the marriage bed. Eros was an ominous threat hanging over the purity of the body, T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  not a constitutive feature of human identity. Th e most that could be said for marriage was that it was not, at least, an act of desecration. Amid the ubiquitous lures of Aphrodite’s city, that was not necessarily a trivial blessing. Paul’s compromise between libertinism and continence was to reverberate throughout the rest of Christian history. It was a settlement forged in the compressed atmosphere of apocalyptic time. Paul off ered a wisdom “not of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.” Like any treaty, it would eventually show the marks of age, strained by the passage of time and subtle realignments in the balance of power. But it laid down the key terms that acted as the starting point for all future negotiations. At the same time, the urgency of the moment left much unsaid. Th ere was much that simply did not need saying. Th e protocols of feminine respectability— virginity followed by fi delity— were so universal and obvious that their express declaration would have been otiose. Paul’s focus was squarely on the quarrels that had arisen in the church. His letter was an intervention. But it was an intervention that would progressively attain canonical status within the diff use network of tiny communities who viewed Paul as an authoritative messenger. Almost immediately Christians were scrambling to interpret what Paul meant, both in what he said and what he left unsaid. Th

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Karen explained it this way: “I haven’t the faintest idea how to settle an argument without panicking. First, I’ve never seen how it’s done. My parents were always fighting. Mom was a shrieker and Dad would just walk out. That’s how they solved things or I guess you could say didn’t solve them. And now, whenever Gavin and I disagree, whether it’s about Maya or whether I think he’s working too hard or if it’s about a big decision like what I should do about my work, the one and only solution that occurs to me is that he’s going to leave or that I’ll have to walk out of here. And I panic. And then I pull myself together and act like an adult.” I asked Karen for an example. “Sure. It happened just last week. Gavin was very tense because the economics department was having a meeting and he really cared about the decision they were going to make. I should have known better but just as he was leaving, I started to chide him about not spending enough time with Maya. Judy, he just blew up. As he was walking out the door, he turned on his heel and said, ‘Damn it, Karen, are you never satisfied?’ and he slammed the door.” Karen bit her lower lip as the stress of the situation came back. “And I sat there, Judy, in a state of absolute terror. I tell you, I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is where it ends. This is what happened to my parents.’ And I even went further, I’m ashamed to say. I thought, should I call a lawyer? What should I do about our joint bank account? I even spun out in my head that Gavin would support Maya but probably wouldn’t give me a dime if we got a divorce. I worked myself into an absolute panic and sat there frozen, for hours. And then Gavin sailed through the door and kissed me! He had completely forgotten our quarrel. It never registered on his radar screen. He must have realized that I was upset because he took me in his arms, hugged me and kissed me, and told me that he loves me more than he thought he would love anybody. And then it was over.” “How often do you have these panics?” “You mean how often do we quarrel? We fight very little. It’s just that when we do, it takes me back to a place in my life where I don’t want to go and I freak out. And I hate that in myself because it’s when I become like my mom or my dad. And that terrifies me.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Everyone shrugs and says, ‘Well, guess they never should have gotten married in the first place.’” Karen’s voice took on a tinge of anger. “But that’s a cop-out. Fact is, they did get married and they probably were in love at the time and then things just changed.” She shrugged. Karen’s reaction to her parents’ failure to explain the divorce is understandable. If her parents were in love, well suited to each other, and their marriage failed, what’s to keep Karen from following in their footsteps? She can’t help but feel anxious. The problem is that children of divorce grow up not having learned anything from their parents’ experience that might be useful to them in their own marriages —except that marriage is a slippery slope and people fall off it. Without any guidance and family history, their own marriages begin without an internal compass for telling them which way to turn when difficulties arise. They lack the template I described earlier of how a man and woman live together and solve their differences. Karen explained it this way: “I haven’t the faintest idea how to settle an argument without panicking. First, I’ve never seen how it’s done. My parents were always fighting. Mom was a shrieker and Dad would just walk out. That’s how they solved things or I guess you could say didn’t solve them. And now, whenever Gavin and I disagree, whether it’s about Maya or whether I think he’s working too hard or if it’s about a big decision like what I should do about my work, the one and only solution that occurs to me is that he’s going to leave or that I’ll have to walk out of here. And I panic. And then I pull myself together and act like an adult.” I asked Karen for an example. “Sure. It happened just last week. Gavin was very tense because the economics department was having a meeting and he really cared about the decision they were going to make. I should have known better but just as he was leaving, I started to chide him about not spending enough time with Maya. Judy, he just blew up. As he was walking out the door, he turned on his heel and said, ‘Damn it, Karen, are you never satisfied?’ and he slammed the door.” Karen bit her lower lip as the stress of the situation came back. “And I sat there, Judy, in a state of absolute terror. I tell you, I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is where it ends. This is what happened to my parents.’ And I even went further, I’m ashamed to say. I thought, should I call a lawyer? What should I do about our joint bank account? I even spun out in my head that Gavin would support Maya but probably wouldn’t give me a dime if we got a divorce. I worked myself into an absolute panic and sat there frozen, for hours.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Their equally patient response has been, “If they divorced once they could again.” Parents would be surprised to learn that many children cling to their reconciliation hopes well into their teens. The wide gulf between the adult mind and the child’s mind is the same in high-and low-conflict divorces. Children in the most abusive families are often very worried about their parents. But unlike adults, they do not conclude that they or their parents would be better off if the parents separated. To the utter despair of mothers who, like Larry’s mother, have to mobilize all their courage to leave the marriage, children in violent marriages want their parents to stay together. They want the fighting to stop but they want the marriage to continue. In his campaign to bring his father back and reunite the family, Larry engaged in behavior absolutely typical of children his age and even much older. Being children they fully believe that they can rescue the family. Often they think that it is their moral duty to do so. Because children in most divorcing families are not given explanations of the breakup that make sense to them, their anxiety and confusion increase. Many children like Larry and his sister are told that one parent was drinking, and they have no idea what this means. Or the explanation is provided when the child is engaged in some other activity, like having friends over to play. Or they are told so hurriedly that they have no chance to absorb the message. (Half of the young children in this study first heard about divorce on the day their parents separated.) Some are not told at all. I remember one terrified third grader who learned about his parents’ divorce in the carpool on the way to school. When he entered the classroom, his face was ashen. Although the child was in agony, the teacher waited until school was out to call the father so he could pick up his son and avoid the carpool to his home. Typically children hear a real estate explanation of divorce: “Your mother is going to live here and I am going to live there.” Violence as the cause of the breakup is hardly ever mentioned, even though it is a central issue in many divorces. Mostly mothers assume that the children know and understand the connection because the child saw or overheard the fighting, or the mother feels too ashamed to discuss it with them. Mothers fail to realize that young children do not make the connection. No End to the Anger LARRY’S ANGER AT his mother for the divorce continued throughout elementary school. Every weekend his father visited for three hours, during which time he played chess with Larry, taught Larry the Cyrillic alphabet along with how to insult his mother in Russian, and brushed off his daughter, calling her vulgar names that she fortunately did not understand.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Because children of divorce don’t know how to negotiate conflict well, many reach for the worst solutions when trouble strikes. For example, some will sit on their feelings, not mentioning complaints or differences until their suppressed anger blows sky-high. Others burst into tears and are immobilized or retreat into themselves or into the next room and close the door. But the most common tendency is to run away at the first serious disagreement and wrestle with unconscious demons. This is because from the perspective of the child of divorce any argument can be the first step in an inevitable chain of conflict that will destroy the marriage. It’s easier to run away. One thirty-two-year-old woman left her marriage when she concluded that her husband gave priority to the wishes of his daughter from a previous marriage. She didn’t try to discuss the situation before bolting. Although she was otherwise content with the marriage and fond of the man, she never stopped to consider that the stepchild was an adolescent and would soon be out of the home. When I asked about it, she shrugged. “I’m used to being pushed around. It’s not worth fighting about. I’ll manage.” Then she confessed to me, “I realized when I packed that I had no place to go.” This kind of behavior totally baffles spouses like Gavin who were raised in intact families. The major and minor battles of their parents’ marriages were unpleasant but not terrifying. Fights do not, in their minds, threaten the marriage. They are storms but not hurricanes. The Gavins of this world do not enjoy conflict, but their anxiety is muted by an understanding that marriages just don’t spring into being. Resolving differences and recovering from anger and hurt simply goes with the territory. They’ve been present at family crises and seen their parents struggle with serious issues and survive. They understand that marriage requires dedication and hard work. They expect high points and lows. And they expect that two people who love each other will deal rationally with conflict and resolve it. When their partner who is a child of divorce panics after a minor quarrel like the one Karen described or threatens to leave, their reaction is utter bewilderment.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Roman Empire had its own complexion. Erotic life was caught up in the great sciences of the day— medicine, astrology, physiognomics— to a new extent; the body’s sexual capacity became part of broader conversations about fate, free will, and the physical constitution of the self. But eros thrived. If there was a new anxiety, it was the anxiety of affl uence, and the anxiety of an existentially serious culture, not a morbid or world- weary anxiety. Th e visual record alone is a stark correction to the odd stern moralist who groused about the power of the aphrodisia. Consider just the culture of erotic lamps. Th e use of erotic art on this humble domestic instrument reaches its pitch of expressiveness, variety, and popularity in second and third centuries, and only withers in the late fourth or very early fi fth century. Pace Veyne, the Romans not only had sex with the lamps on— they had sex by the fl ickering light of lamps that had images of them having sex by lamplight on them! Th e development of a Christian packet of sexual norms and a distinctive sexual program is the focus of Chapter 2. Th e goal is to understand the shape of Christian sexual morality as it was presented to the cast of literate, second- century phi los o phers and artists featured in the fi rst chapter. In par tic u lar, the focus is on Clement of Alexandria, a profoundly important Christian voice of the later second and early third centuries. To understand Clement, it is necessary to understand the Christian apostle Paul (and it must be confessed that this book is more interested in Clement’s Paul than in the actual mission of the fi rst century). At the level of specifi c prohibitions, two strands of Paul’s thought would come to occupy the foreground: the injunction against porneia and a radical opposition to all same- sex intercourse. Th e central Christian prohibition on porneia collided with deeply entrenched patterns of sexual permissiveness. With the lighthearted tolerance  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N of male wandering to be found in imperial sources like Leucippe and Clitophon we can contrast the adamantine prohibitions of early Christian sexual morality. Among the earliest Christians, fornication quickly became the bright axis around which sexual morality turned. “Fornication,” of course, is an unsatisfactory word, because it is churchy and has no clear referent in En glish beyond “sex forbidden by the New Testament.” At some level, the word means “extramarital sex,” but much is lost in translation when the word is removed from an ancient context where the legitimacy of sexual contact was determined primarily by the status of the woman. Th e signifi -

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e code of female sexual morality was summarized by one word, modesty— pudicitia in Latin, sōphrosynē in Greek. For a woman, the “single ornament, the noblest beauty, unravaged by age, the highest honor,” was pudicitia. A man perfectly blessed by the gods was given a wife with fertility and pudicitia. If sexual modesty was a monopolistic virtue, it was nevertheless one that allowed surprising nuance and refi nement. For women, pudicitia or sōphrosynē implied both an objective fact and a subjective mode of being; it was a state of body and a state of mind. Fundamentally, pudicitia was the corporal integrity of the free woman, untouched until marriage, vouchsafed for one man within marriage. Sexual modesty was inextricably fused with status, and pudicitia often appears alongside libertas as its inseparable adjunct. Nevertheless, pudicitia was a social rather than a strictly legal concept, and it could, exceptionally, even be predicated of slaves. In a vast and highly stratifi ed slave system, where slaves were delicately intertwined with the life of the free family, pudicitia was a powerful and impre-cise enough concept that some of its mystique might devolve even on the lowest members of the house hold; but the deeper truth was that, for slaves, access to honor depended on the discretion of the master. An ancient woman lived every moment engaged in a high- stakes game of suspicious observation. “Th e one glory of woman is pudicitia, and therefore it is incumbent upon her to be, and to seem, chaste.” In the words of a Christian author, “A woman’s reputation for sexual modesty is a fragile thing, like a precious fl ower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.” Th ere were “so many” potential signs of immodesty; her dress, her gait, her voice, her face all acted as external projections of her internal state. Th e woman’s “only protection” was never to become the cause of any gossip. To guard against the attentions of other men, the Roman matron should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rude-ness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed. Th e sharpest of these patriarchal prescriptions come from rhetorical school exercises, sources that no doubt caricature contemporary male bom-bast and must be taken with healthful caution. Undoubtedly the scripts of female modesty could be stifl ing. In most quarters women wore their hair  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Karen is one of the many children who, after divorce, moved into the vacuum created by parents who are overwhelmed by the changes in their lives and unable to carry on as they had before. Divorce often leads to a partial or complete collapse in an adult’s ability to parent for months and sometimes years after the breakup. Caught up in rebuilding their own lives, mothers and fathers are preoccupied with a thousand and one concerns, which can blind them to the needs of their children. In many such familes, one child—often the oldest girl—takes on responsibilities far beyond anything she has done before. These young caregivers quietly assume the nurturing and moral guidance of their younger siblings and also serve as confidant, adviser, caregiver, and even parent for their own parents during the years that follow. Karen followed this script to the letter. From a merry, outgoing ten-year-old, she soon became a somber young woman. I remember her telling me when she was only eleven, “I’m really worried about my brother and sister. I have to set them a good example so they’ll be good. That means I have to be good. They fight all the time since my parents broke up. I try to stop that and teach them to talk instead of hitting. I’m also worried about my mom. Since Dad left she cries every day when she comes home from work. I try to comfort her and also to warn her about her new boyfriend. I think that he’ll hurt her feelings even more.” Karen shook her head sadly. She was overburdened by her new responsibilities but felt that she had no choice but to forfeit her needs to the needs of her family. High school, she explained at our meeting several years later, was a blur because her home situation had hardly changed. At out last meeting, when she was twenty-five, I was very concerned about Karen’s inability to break free from a young man she was living with but did not love. She tried to explain: “You remember that when I was dating guys in college, I became very frightened that anyone I really liked would abandon me or be unfaithful, and that I would end up suffering like my mom or my dad? Well, choosing Nick was safe because he has no education and no plans, which means that he’ll always have fewer choices than me. I knew that if we lived together and maybe got married someday I wouldn’t ever have to worry about him walking out.” With tears in her eyes, she added, “Nick is very kind and caring.