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 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)

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

  This is a serious long- term consequence of divorce for those who become caught up in the caregiver role. The Diminished Parent BY THE TIME Karen was fifteen, her home situation had changed very little. She made no waves in high school and got just passing grades. Her teachers described her as being quiet, reserved, and ladylike. They made no inquiries about her frequent absences, perhaps assuming too easily that someone at home was ill and she was needed. Clearly she was not working to her potential. How could she? Again I asked Karen about her plans for the future and she replied in what had become her customary grave, thoughtful manner. “I’d like to get married and maybe have kids. But you never know, you might get a divorce. I don’t ever want that.” To understand how divorce affects children over the long haul, we need to explore the fact that the divorced family is not just a cut-off version of the two-parent family. The postdivorce family is a new family form that makes very different demands on each parent, each child, and each of the many new adults who enter the family orbit. For millions of American children the experience of growing up—of simply being a child—has changed. For millions of adults, the experience of being a parent has been radically transformed. The first thing we need to acknowledge is the close link between the marital bond and the parent-child relationship. Every parent and child knows this is true. When the marriage is working and the couple is content, the parent-child relationship is nourished and rewarded by the parents’ love and appreciation for each other and supported by their cooperation. But when the tie is severed, the break sends messages throughout the system that quickly reach the children. The first message is that parenting is diminished. The adults are now each on their own and occupied with building separate lives. How will I manage and where am I going and how can I put my life together? How does this diminished parenting show up? Ask any child of divorce. In every domain of the child’s life, parents are less available and less organized, provide fewer dinners together or even clean clothing, and do not always carry out regular household routines or help with homework or offer soothing bedtime rituals. But the big picture is more troublesome than the details. When the marriage breaks, children take on a new meaning for their parents. They may become a much heavier burden. Or they are an unfortunate residue from a dream that failed. Or they may give hope and meaning to a parent’s life. After divorce a surprising number of otherwise well-functioning adults reach out to children for help with their grown-up problems. In Karen’s case, this kind of behavior became the norm, leading her into the role of caretaker child. But in many families, the reversal of parent and child roles is more or less temporary, albeit shocking.

• 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. “The first showdown in our marriage came because Sara was so close to her family. Early in our marriage she had a bad fall on a ski run and got a compound fracture in her right leg. That’s extremely painful and she had to be on drugs, in a cast, and on crutches. Anyway, during the first week of her injury her mom came and took her home to take care of her. I got home and Sara wasn’t there. Instead I found a note from her mom saying that Sara would stay with her folks until she got better and that they hoped to see me often. I was so mad I could have torn the place apart. I called Sara and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ She said her mom had insisted and she had agreed. I said to hell with that, I was her husband and she was married to me and this was her home.

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

  The bad part is that as far as men are concerned, I always seem to be settling. Like even now I ask myself what am I doing living with a man who is twelve years older than me who has had two divorces? He’s nice but I’ll never fall in love with him. And he doesn’t love me. I worry about that.” Lisa shook her head slowly. “Look at it this way. I grew up unprepared for adult relationships, especially for being a woman with a man. No one taught me what I could expect or ask for. My mother never taught me about men. She didn’t know much herself. She never even taught me not to nag. And my father failed to keep his marriage vows. So it was hard for me to learn much from his marriage, although he’s been a great father and second husband. I have no idea how to be with a man. I have no idea what to expect. When my boyfriends have not been loving or kind or caring and I felt disappointed, I blamed me for being greedy and selfish. I told myself I was wrong for wanting more than I was getting, like I was supposed to be content. Kent told me I was trying to control him when I asked him to call if he was coming home late. I was dumb enough to believe him. I was incredibly naïve. “But look at the good news. I’ve had to become independent and strong. I can work well with change. When things get chaotic, I don’t lose my cool. I’m a good diplomat. I really had to be with my parents. I’m a good mediator in business and I can work with difficult people. I’m a great negotiator. Look at the lifetime of experience I have had keeping peace in my family. Also I learned at an early age to think for myself and to rely on myself. This may surprise you because I know that compared to a lot of others I’ve led a protected life. But I consider myself a survivor.” All that Lisa said was true of her own life and her generation. Others spoke proudly and triumphantly about their achievements and the strength they acquired in having to do things on their own. “Because my parents were so different I learned to navigate my own way in the world,” said Jerry, a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker. “I’ve learned to use my head and my heart. I’m not afraid of what comes along.” Because they learn at an early age that their parents’ values could differ sharply, children of divorce learn to think for themselves. Their independent thinking extends into learning not to take sides in any continued warfare between their parents.

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

  Mostly they wanted their children to have protected years, which as loving parents they could relive with them and through them and enjoy vicariously. Children were also welcome because, despite their own experiences, the women and men felt that children would strengthen the marital bond. Women who missed their fathers while growing up treasured watching their husbands care for and interact with their children. Their yearning for the “dad I never had” was vanquished in part by seeing the smiles on their children’s faces as Daddy walked through the door and by the squeals of laughter that accompanied games of horsy or piggyback. For women, the decision to have a child was also mixed because it brought up again the issue of whether or not they could trust their husbands to be there. In fact, a fifth of the children were born out of wedlock, and none of the women in this group was in a stable or even a good relationship during the pregnancy. Most of these single mothers are having a very difficult time. Only a few have found stable partners and they are not working in jobs that pay well. After one or more abortions, they had decided to bring the child to term. Most had wanted a baby since early adolescence to offset their loneliness. These women spoke about their children with great love, and the ones I saw were well cared for at great sacrifice by mothers who had only a little help from their families. For the women who had children within a marriage, several obsessed about whether they should take their husband’s name because in the case of divorce, they reasoned, he might be more likely to provide support for a child that bore his name. The decision of some women to quit work full-time was also colored by their fear of relying on the continued presence of their husband to provide for the family. They also struggled with how many children to have. Most opted for one or two. A few had three. Every part of their lives—in love, marriage, and parenthood—evoked new promises and old disappointments. The men spoke of their growing wish to become fathers in the context of their relationships. One young man told me, “I think I’m finally ready to be a doting father.” Unlike men from intact families, they did not take fatherhood for granted.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3P5.jpg] CHAPTER 11The Queering of Homo sapiensFor decades, those iconic New Yorker couple-in-bed cartoons portrayed exclusively heterosexual couples. Like many American cultural institutions, however, The New Yorker has slowly begun to acknowledge the existence of gay and lesbian couples and to include them in occasional couple-in-bed cartoons. The first ones have been quite prim in comparison to the frequent depictions of postcoital heterosexual couples under rumpled sheets, and, indeed, one of the earliest gay-couple-in-bed cartoons insightfully explored the anxiety surrounding the awkward intercultural negotiation required to bring the simple fact of gay couples sharing a bed into the public conversation. In a brilliant 1999 cartoon by William Haefeli, two men, fully clothed in winter overcoats, are lying next to each other on a smallish, bare mattress among many in a big department store showroom. One man comments to his partner, “I still think we should get a queen-sized mattress—despite the obvious jokes it will invite among the sales staff.” Like traditional New Yorker cartoons, the previous chapters on the evolution of human sexuality in this book could be viewed as reinforcing a heteronormative concept of “human nature”—the idea that heterosexuality is the only “natural” human sexual behavior, the only one that is somehow sanctioned by evolutionary science. However, diversity of sexual preference is a profoundly human characteristic that must be accounted for in any natural history of human desire. Sexual diversity poses distinct challenges to evolutionary explanation. How can evolution account for sexual behavior that is not directly related to reproduction—sperm meets egg? One of the most exciting aspects of this emerging theory of aesthetic evolution is the possibility that it sheds light on this enduring mystery of variation in human sexual desire. Understanding the origin of variations in sexual desire requires that we focus specifically on the evolution of the subjective desires of individuals—that is, the individual aesthetic experiences of sexual attraction. I will not be talking here about the evolution of sexual identity—that is, the conceptual categories of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and so on. The idea that sexual behavior is a marker or definition of a person’s identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention—perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behavior in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation. The problem is that scientific research on the origin of “homosexuality” seeks to explain the evolution of a social construct. As David Halperin, professor of English at the University of Michigan, explained to me, “Proposing a theory about the evolution of homosexuality is like proposing a theory of the evolution of hipsters or yuppies!” Sure enough, an ample scientific literature on the “evolution of homosexuality” gets this issue mostly wrong and has undermined itself as a result.

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

  This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.) The fact that Karen and others were able to turn their lives around is very good news for all of us who have been worried about the long-term effects of divorce on children. It sometimes took many years and several failed relationships, but close to half of the women and over a third of the men in our study were finally able to create a new template with themselves in starring roles. They did it the hard way— by learning from their own experience. They got hurt, kept going, and tried again.

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

  For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as a far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm. More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood. Karen confirmed this change in several of our follow-up interviews. Ten years after her parents’ divorce, I learned that she was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz so that she could run home on weekends and be available for crises. And there were plenty of those, mostly involving both her younger brother and sister. When she was twenty, she told me angrily, “Since their divorce I’ve been responsible for both my parents. My dad became a pathetically needy man who always wants a woman to take care of him. I’m the backup when his girlfriends leave him. My mom is still a mess, always involved with the wrong kind of men. I’ve had to take care of them as well as my brother and sister.”

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

  Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.” Her last words were unforgettable. She seemed to be talking more to herself and only partly to me. “My co-workers say that I have an old soul. I’ve always felt that I would die young, that so much unhappiness was compressed into the early part of my life that it made sense. But maybe the second half of my life is the part that I will enjoy more. I never had a childhood. I always took care of everything.” A smile broke across her face. “You know, I like the kind of woman I’m becoming. I love the man I’m marrying. I like my kindness and my sensitivity. I love my work. I’m on a good path.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Vibrant flowers bursting in pink, orange, and yellow surround her—a contrast to the brown lawn and bushes that are dry and barren from the winter. I take in the breadth of the house; how ordinary it is: yellow shingles and weathered wooden shutters with nailed-in plastic cutout images of horses and buggies. I notice the cracked cement of the driveway; the neglected trees and bushes that are years overdue for trimming. I exit the car and cross the street slowly, ignoring my nervousness in order to open the chain-linked gate and walk the broken path to the front door. This close to the flower beds, I see that the clusters of silky color are artificial bouquets stuck upright in the frosted soil. I step toward the front door—protected by an exterior storm door framed with Police Youth League and Jesus and Mary decals. Jesus’ face is plastered on stickers representing every phase of his life, and as I move to open the storm door, the inner door suddenly opens. A woman shrunken by age appears. She’s wearing a flowered knee-length day dress, slippers, and a tightly sprayed white bouffant. “Regina?” she asks. “Yes. Hello, Julia.” She opens the door and moves to me on the porch. I stay still while, with wide eyes, she examines me—first my hair, then my face and my clothes . . . then finally my hand as she takes it in hers. Suddenly, her small frame opens, her arms stretching in an invitation for me to walk into them for a hug. I freeze: it’s almost too much to take in. By the look on her face, it’ll be devastating for her if I refuse, so I fix my arms around her in a political hug—a guarded non-embrace. For a moment we remain this way—Julia, breathing me in; and me, telling myself it’s safe to soften to her affection. Finally, she moves away but keeps a gentle hold on the sleeve of my coat. “Go on, dear,” she says. “Please, make yourself at home.” Passing through the front door to the living room, I look in at the worn carpeted steps leading to the second floor. It’s as if I’m outside of myself, watching a movie of this moment: I recognize all of this place. I know what lies up those stairs—three bedrooms and a yellow bathroom. My eyes move toward the dining area with its oval table and the plastic-covered chair they used to sit me in, propped up on phone books and pillows so I could reach the table. If I walk through the dining room, I’ll find the kitchen, with a yellow and brown linoleum floor, a small stove tucked in the corner, and the large window above the sink where I used to bathe.

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

  As rescuers, most young women like Karen are used to giving priority to the needs of others. Indeed, they are usually not aware of their own needs or desires. Karen confessed that she had never in her life thought about what would make her happy. “That would be like asking for the moon,” she said. “I was always too worried about my family to ask for me.” As a result, these young women are often trapped into rescuing a troubled man. How can they reject a pitiful man who clings to them? The guilt would be unbearable. Others find troubled men more exciting. One young woman who had frequent contact with both parents during her growing up years explained: “I think I subconsciously pick men who are not going to work out. Men who are nice and considerate bore me. My latest is irresponsible. I don’t trust him. I’m sure he cheats. But he’s the one I want.” WHAT PROMPTS SO many children of divorce to rush into a cohabitation or early marriage with as much forethought as buying a new pair of shoes? 3 Answers lie in the ghosts that rise to haunt them as they enter adulthood. Men and women from divorced families live in fear that they will repeat their parents’ history, hardly daring to hope that they can do better. These fears, which were present but less commanding during adolescence, become overpowering in young adulthood, more so if one or both of their parents failed to achieve a lasting relationship after a first or second divorce. Dating and courtship raise their hopes of being loved sky-high—but also their fears of being hurt and rejected. Being alone raises memories of lonely years in the postdivorce family and feels like the abandonment they dread. They’re trapped between the wish for love and the fear of loss. This amalgam of fear and loneliness can lead to multiple affairs, hasty marriages, early divorce, and—if no take-home lessons are gleaned from it all—a second and third round of the same. Or they can stay trapped in bad relationships for many years. Here’s how it works: at the threshold of young adulthood, relationships move center stage. But for many that stage is barren of good memories for how an adult man and woman can live together in a loving relationship. This is the central impediment blocking the developmental journey for children of divorce. The psychological scaffolding that they need to construct a happy marriage has been badly damaged by the two people they depended on while growing up. Let’s look closely at the process of growing up. Children learn all kinds of lessons at their parents’ knees, from the time they are born to the time they leave home.

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

  Clement’s sexual ideology is closer to the monastic desert than we might suppose. “Our antagonists are Olympian in stature and sting, as is said, more sharply than a wasp. Above all plea sure, which not only by day but also by night, in our dreams, bites us and aims to deceive us with its sorcery.” But Clement’s asceticism is lodged within marriage, within the city. Th e endless stream of minute directives for Christian living proff ered by Clement amount to a monastic rule for the Christian house hold. Clement clasped enthusiastically to the Paul of the pastoral letters, who had off ered “so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of house craft.” Paul’s commands are exuberantly expanded into a punctilious rubric for the Christian life. Time, place, and manner restrictions are unmercifully imposed on the sexual act. Sex was not for the daytime, but neither was the darkness of night to be a veil for hidden excess. Immemorial patterns of sociability are wrapped in new rules of Christian modesty: Clement could prescribe which sorts of dinners to attend and how to behave. If women had to attend social gatherings, they should be entirely covered; the “gravest calumny” that could be leveled against an unmarried T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  woman was that she was present at a symposium. If young men were present, they were to sit motionless, look down, and keep their legs uncrossed. Men were to eat and drink moderately, but also slowly, with a cultivated air of self- control, pausing frequently, never reaching for food, sharing generously, and departing early. For Clement, the Christian sage could pass through life amid the city, but exposure to so many temptations required unfailing vigilance and supreme control of the will. Clement has what might seem an embarrassing amount of advice on the proper consumption of food and drink. His interest in dietetics and medical lore places him in the mainstream of imperial culture. Clement admired those who abstained from wine completely in the name of chastity and “thought it best if boys and girls are kept apart from this drug completely. It is not advisable to pour liquid heat on smouldering youth. . . . Ramped up by its infl uence, their privates expand and their breasts swell, so that their genitals are an omen, the image of fornication.” Clement would harness conventional medical wisdom in the name of not just healthful balance, but also transformation. “Food is for hunger and drink is for thirst, but it calls for the most acute self- protection against any slip, for one step down the path of wine makes one apt to fall. With care we can keep our souls pure, dry, and luminous.” Th e more extreme regimes of mortifi cation, which will exploit the medical tradition with gusto, lie not far in the future.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  drug search?” I tell one unsuspecting neighbor as she approaches the pay phone, taking a quarter from her pocket. “I heard the R.A.’s going to pull the fire alarm and the police are coming into our rooms to search.” She stares at the phone in confusion, then slinks away. Around midnight, when KiKi brings a group of friends into our room, I slam our door shut behind me and take a spot on the hard couch in the common area near the pay phone. First I lie seething, then tears streak down my temples and into my hair. I think about Mr. Brownstein’s lectures on the role of government in our lives, how it needs to be there as a safety net . . . right now I’m the only one who’s been saved by any net, while my baby sister navigates a high-wire act with no protection whatsoever; no sisters or social workers there to defend her. Exhausted by my tears, I drift to sleep. I’m awakened by the sound of the phone. It’s rung four times when I’m finally within arm’s reach. Then, it stops. I slam my fist against the painted cinder-block wall and press my forehead against the phone. “Dammit!” Then it rings again. “Hello?” “Cherie is flying out to Idaho tomorrow,” Camille says. “And?” “She’s getting Rosie!” “How?” “We’ve got this whole plan. She’s flying into Boise and will rent a car, then she’ll stake out at Rosie’s bus stop. She’ll have to talk fast to convince her to get inside, but when she does, she has a hiding spot where they’ll put on wigs and change clothes.” “Isn’t that a little extreme?” “It’s a small town, Regina. If anybody sees Rosie in a car with Cherie, they’ll call Cookie, then Cookie will call the cops, then Cherie will get arrested. Cherie has to play it safe. Then the two of them will rush to the airport in Boise and fly back to New York.” “You feel like this plan is foolproof?” “As foolproof as it ever will be.” “Okay. I have a test to take tomorrow, then I’ll hop on a bus to Manhattan and catch the train out to you and Frank so we can wait together.” “No, Regina—you have school. You can’t screw it up.” “Camille, I screwed up the thing that’s most important to me in the world the day I signed that affidavit when I was fourteen! Rosie’s life has never been the same, and nothing matters more to me than this.” Two of my neighbors groggily stick their necks out of their rooms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whisper into the receiver. “I’ll call you when the train drops me at the Ronkonkoma station.”

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

  For women, pudici- tia 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 in- separable 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 inter- twined 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 there- fore 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 in- ternal 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  FROM SHAME TO SIN veiled from the time they reached sexual maturity. Coins of the high em- pire advertise pudicitia as a chief imperial virtue, and its image is a Roman matron, hair veiled, hand drawn partly across her face to shield it from full view. Conventional limits on visibility and movement were truly constrict- ing. Even the gentle Plutarch counsels a woman to be most visible in her husband’s presence and to hide when he is away. A woman without a man was “like a city without a wall”; fathers and husbands off ered protection, and protection brings its own types of dependence. But it would be a mis- take to underestimate the room for maneuver left to women.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “I remember the feeling”—here she made a frightened face and gave a little gasp—“of the phone ringing and knowing it was a guy I was sleeping with, and I’d have to pretend it was someone else because Dan was standing right there. It’s exhausting, and the number of heart attacks and stress—it’s complicated to keep all the lies straight. There’s a whole part of it that’s really difficult and tiring! Sometimes I would think, Okay, I’ve got to stop. This is just too hard and dangerous.” Such moments, the frissons of near discovery, are touchstones of narratives with infidelity plots—from Eyes Wide Shut to a YouTube genre called “cheaters getting caught” to Carmen Rita Wong’s novel Never Too Late, with its storyline about high-powered, very married Latina lesbian Magda, whose happy life might be turned upside down by a one-night stand with a woman who has a taste for revenge. Like many women in fiction and life, Annika got too much out of her affairs to stop—including the variety and novelty of sexual experience she craved. “I think no matter how hard you try and how exciting it is, even when your marriage is good—and mine wasn’t, at least in the sex department—you still miss that thing where you’re so excited, and it’s so new, and you can’t eat or sleep, you’re having such an intense time emotionally and sexually with this entirely new person. That’s what I kept going after, what I couldn’t say no to.” Like Sarah and Druckerman’s ladies in Florida, Annika was living what Marta Meana calls “erotic self-focus.” When others saw her as sexy and hot, she did too. Wanting to be wanted, and withering when she was unwanted (or, in the case of Meana’s study participants, wanted) by one man in perpetuity drove Annika and may drive us in ways we might not want to admit but cannot deny.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Perhaps because he had heard such complaints before, he seemed to take this as a genuine sarcasm. ‘No, it’s not that,’ he insisted—which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘No, it’s because they let so many new members in.’ Still I carried on grinning at him. ‘You must be on the weights a lot, though,’ I said. ‘The way you’re filling out, my dear …’ I thought it was important to drop in a casual endearment, but he showed no response to it. We had about a ten-minute walk to Phil’s hotel, and an uncomfortable amount of it was spent in silence, with both of us looking about with affected interest at the buildings, the shops, the parked cars. Normally, if I was leaving a pub or nightclub with a pickup, and taking a cab or a tube to his place or mine, we had both of us been drinking, time sped by, and we were openly set upon sex. I had rarely felt as sober as I did on this summer evening walk; each speechless step seemed more fateful than the last; and deeply embarrassing doubts began to occupy me. I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance. Misunderstandings were almost unknown. Any uncertainty in a boy I wanted was usually overcome by the simple insistence of my look. But with Phil I had let something dangerous happen, a roundabout, slow insinuation into my feelings. Though I very much wanted to fuck his big, muscly bum—and several times dropped behind a step or two to see it working as he walked—my stronger feeling was more protective and caressing. It was growing so strong that it allowed doubts not entertained in the brief certainties of casual sex. If I had got it all wrong, if going back to his place meant a drink in the bar, a game of chess, a handshake—‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow’—the evening would be agony.