Disappointment

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 Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Additional y, Matthew demonstrates a danger of insisting upon difference in the absolute terms of rigid stereotypes. There are historical as well as social psychological reasons why he cast things in this way. These explanations may or may not be helpful for modern readers when it comes to rendering a moral verdict against this ancient writer and his community. How might one determine “guilt” or “innocence” in a case like this? Perhaps we might do this by using a pragmatic measurement of success? How successful was Matthew in the use of the Pharisees in his gospel? If success is measured by the number of people who profoundly identified with a group so that that group’s identity and their own self-concept became fused, at least in part, then Matthew’s construction of collective identity was successful. On the other hand, if success is measured by the ethical treatment of the other that this collective identity justified, then Matthew’s construction of identity was unsuccessful. Perhaps Matthew’s own standard can be used to evaluate success in this latter sense: did Matthew’s constructed collective identity develop a habit of characteristical y loving the group’s enemies (Matthew 5:38–42)? Matthew’s animosity toward the Pharisees suggests that he did not do so personal y, and subsequent Christian history suggests that, by and large, the Christian church did not do so either. 130 130 131 8 From Tamar and Mary to Perpetua: Women and the Word in Matthew Catherine Sider Hamilton And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” Luke 1:46–47 In Luke’s gospel, famously, Mary speaks—and speaks stil , in my own Anglican tradition, every time the Magnificat is sung at Evensong. In Matthew, by contrast, she is silent. “In Matthew,” Andries van Aarde and Yolanda Dreyer say, “Mary quickly recedes into the background.” 1 As commentators universal y note, in Matthew’s birth narrative it is Joseph and not Mary who is the main actor. 2 In Dreyer and van Aarde’s judgment, the Gospel of Matthew as a whole “relegates women to being supporting characters. ”3 Indeed, P. J. J. Botha concludes, in Matthew’s gospel “women characters are demeaned … The gender inflection of the Matthean text is implicitly and explicitly male and it reflects a symbolic universe characterised by this androcentric bias.” 4 And yet from the outset Matthew’s text places a question-mark against this reading.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  One example is the woman who wants to lose weight for health reasons (a mental idea—unable to sustain the goal) and adapts the (emotional) strategy of imaging herself, in a sexy dress, walking into a party and turning heads. Leaving aside the possibility that one of the reasons for the woman’s excessive weight might have been a desire to not have just such attention called to her body, the imaging strategy is a reasonable one. The point here is that conscious deliberation is easily forgotten and buried among the flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives. However, this frailty is sidestepped when sensations and feelings are evoked. Perhaps the reason that “the elephant never forgets” is because her memories are emotional ones. In contrast to volitional memory, emotional memory often operates outside the range of conscious awareness. Rather than holding a verbal idea in our conscious minds (“I have to wait until the meeting on Friday” or “Remember to eat salads for lunch to lose weight”), experiential memory makes use of what have been called somatic markers. 138 These are emotions or physical sensations that inform us about a situation based on past experiences or feelings. Somatic markers might be the fluttering butterflies in our stomachs when we are anxious, the flushing of our cheeks when we are embarrassed, wide-open eyes when we hear an idea that excites us, the relaxation of our body muscles signaling the relief we feel when we complete a crucial task or the lightness and easy breathing we notice when we get something important off our chest. The reason the bodily felt sense has the power to creatively influence our behaviors is precisely because it is involuntary; feelings are not evoked through acts of will. They give us information that does not come from the conscious mind. “Emotional intelligence” and “emotional literacy” communicate through the felt-sense/somatic markers and are vitally important to the conduct of our lives. Indeed, the writer Daniel Goleman 139 claims that it accounts for eighty% of our success in life. However, emotions can also lead us astray. The Merry-Go-Round of Therapy When psychologists talk about change, they often equate it with insight. This assumption, though often subliminal, has had a profound influence on theories and therapies purported to help people deal with “mental” and “emotional” disorders. However, when we investigate this further, we see that understanding, talk and change frequently have little relationship to one other. Woody Allen, asked if he still had his same symptoms, quipped that he was only on his “fifteenth year” of psychoanalysis. If only he had known that the process of change has to do primarily with being able to alter one’s internal feeling states, and that “psychological” problems arise when these states have become habitual or “stuck.” These chronic emotional states in turn dominate our ways of thinking, imagining and behaving. An understanding of how deeply rooted feelings can change is at the core of any effective therapy.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  In his 2020 book, Perfectly Confident , Moore makes the point that even if optimism helps you in that situation, there must be limits to how much it helps. Let’s say that sufficiently energetic optimism could help you leap a six-foot crevasse. If it’s a twenty-foot leap, there’s no way you’re better off with optimism than with a realistic calibration of your confidence. And Moore literally has the scars to prove it. He humbly admits, “Believing in myself did not prevent my feet from getting burned on [a] fire walk.” Moore, along with colleagues Elizabeth Tenney of the University of Utah and Jennifer Logg of Georgetown University, has explored whether people actually believe that more optimism will lead to better performance. Their 2015 paper examines performance on a variety of tasks, ranging from math problems to Where’s Waldo? puzzles. The researchers led some participants to be optimistic about their likely performance. When others were asked to guess at how well those participants would do as compared with ones who were not so optimistic, Moore and his colleagues found that people do, indeed, believe in The Little Engine That Could . The people who think they can get up the hill or finish more math problems or find Waldo were rated as more likely to actually do it. This unfettered belief in the power of optimism is, of course, widespread in Silicon Valley, which makes Ron Conway a contrarian in a world where being overly optimistic is not only considered a job requirement for founders but is also actively encouraged. And that ethos is reflected in founders’ actual beliefs. A survey of three thousand entrepreneurs found that 81% of founders put their odds of success at 70% or better and a third of founders put their odds of success at 100%! Given that only about one in ten of the ambitious ventures Conway invests in generates a positive return, that optimism borders on the delusional. Of course, if optimism actually improves performance, delusional confidence might be worth it. If you are in a business where you only have a 10% chance of success, maybe being optimistic improves your chances to 40%. Even if that is far short of the 70% shot you think you have, that boost might be worth the cost of being poorly calibrated. Moore and his colleagues tested just this idea, looking to see if the more-optimistic participants had better performance on the math problems or found Waldo more often. While they did find that more-optimistic people stuck to the tasks longer, the optimists failed to perform measurably better on these tasks than the people who were less optimistic. In other words, they quit later, but to no benefit. What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life’s too short to do that.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  THE RICH YOUNG RULER, THE SINNING TAX COLLECTOR, AND THE BEGGING BLIND MAN Luke 18:18–30 tells of a young man, a member of a leading family, who approaches Jesus, asking the question “Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As a former Southern Baptist pastor of a small rural Kentucky church, I used to live for questions like this and had no doubt as to my response. After leading the seeker through “Roman's road to salvation” outlined in Paul's letter to the Romans, I would guide them through a sinner's prayer (similar to the one in Dr. Graham's book); have them walk down the church aisle, make a public profession, and join the church; admonish them to give up drinking and carousing; and get them baptized the following Sunday. Depending on denominational association, this is how many ministers throughout the United States would have answered the question of the young man in Luke. Fortunately, Jesus does not give this response. Jesus does not invite the young aristocrat to repent of his sins and then ask that he allow Jesus to enter into his life in a personal relationship. Instead, Jesus tells him to keep the commandments, which the rich young man confesses he has kept since his earliest days. Then Jesus does the unexpected. Rather than simply accept the young man as a follower, Jesus tells him to sell all that he owns and distribute the money to the poor so as to gain treasures in heaven. Then he can follow Jesus. But when the rich young man heard this, he became full of sadness. As the rich young man walks away, Jesus makes a disturbing pronouncement: “How hard it is for those having riches to enter into the reign of God. For it is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into the reign of God” (18:24–25). It appears that for the rich, Jesus determines salvation by how they interact with the poor. It is important to note that the term “poor” does not just refer to a lack of financial resources; instead, “poor” encompasses the inequality and injustice that accompany the lack of access to opportunities that the dominant culture takes for granted as a privileged right. Yet some readers will turn to Ephesians, which clearly states, “For by grace you are being saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is a gift from God; not works, lest anyone should boast” (2:8–9). After all, Isaiah reminds us that “all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (64:6). How then can Jesus make the salvation of this rich young aristocrat conditional on his treatment of the poor? Often the dominant culture reconciles this apparent contradiction by employing a metaphoric reading. Such an interpretation recognizes the primary message of the story, which is that Jesus must be the center of every aspect of the life of the believer.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Hotel Room in Iowa City She emails you to tell you that she is staying in a hotel room in Iowa City, and will you come see her? You say no, no, but then you go anyway. She says she is in town to see you, that she wants to be with you, and you bring a box of her things to leave with her but end up staying instead. You scream at her, and cry. At some point, there is a knock on the door. You open it, and a slow-speaking, square-headed Iowa City bro stands on the other side. He has a strange, eerie smile. He says that the two of you should come party with his friends, do you want to come on over? They have booze, and other things. You don’t learn what the other things are, you just close the door. You stand there for a second, then flip the deadbolt. She comes up behind you, to hug you. You pull away so hard you smash into the door. You turn and slide down to the floor and she says, “Shhhh, shhhh,” and you beg her not to touch you, but she does. She leans in to your head. “Did you change your shampoo?” she asks, and you nod because you have. You have sex with her because you don’t know what else to do; you only speak the language of giving yourself up. “This will work,” she says to you as she touches you. “Amber means nothing to me. When I think about her, I feel sick. This will work, I promise. I love you so much.” The morning after, you go to a restaurant next door. A gorgeous baby coos from the adjacent vinyl booth, and it makes you cry so hard the waitress writes with a blue pen on your Styrofoam box of leftovers: Have a beautiful day! Maria. You are startled because she’s written your middle name, and you think to yourself that she’s sending you a message before you realize it is her first name. You take the box of her things back to your car, drive home. A week later—after you’ve convinced yourself that everything is going to be okay and you’ve gotten a new phone—you run into a woman who asks if your girlfriend has found an apartment yet, since she’s been here in town, looking. You are confused, but then later that night, when a friend tells you about a rumor she’s heard through the grad-school grapevine—your girlfriend is dating Amber, back in Indiana—you realize so many things all at once: She is not planning on moving in with you. You have made some bad choices. You call her, tell her what you know. Even here, on this incontrovertible hook, she equivocates so smoothly you can barely see her squirm. It is, she explains, merely complicated. She simply has too many wonderful things in her life; she is having difficulty making sense of it all. “I cannot be an attentive girlfriend while I love someone else,” she says, finally, and then it is over for good.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Wanting to cultivate a more public presence, Eisner decided to revive the old The Wonderful World of Disney , an hourlong television show from the fifties and sixties hosted by Walt Disney himself. This time Eisner would be the host. He was not a natural in front of the camera, but he felt audiences would grow to like him. He could be comforting to children, like Walt himself. In fact, he began to feel the two of them were somehow magically connected, as if he were more than just the head of the corporation but rather the natural son and successor to Walt Disney himself. Despite all his success, however, the old restlessness returned. He needed a new venture, a bigger challenge, and soon he found it. The Walt Disney Company had plans to create a new theme park in Europe. The last one to open, Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, had been a success. Those in charge of theme parks had settled upon two potential sites for the new Disneyland—one near Barcelona, Spain, the other near Paris. Although the Barcelona site made more economic sense, since the weather there was much better, Eisner chose the French site. This was going to be more than a theme park. This was going to be a cultural statement. He would hire the best architects in the world. Unlike the usual fiberglass castles at the other theme parks, at Euro Disney—as it came to be known—the castles would be built out of pink stone and feature handcrafted stained-glass windows with scenes from various fairy tales. It would be a place even snobby French elites would be excited to visit. Eisner loved architecture, and here he could be a modern-day Medici. As the years went by, the cost of Euro Disney mounted. Letting go of his usual obsession with the bottom line, Eisner felt that if he built it right, the crowds would come and the park would eventually pay for itself. But when it finally opened as planned in 1992, it quickly became clear that Eisner had not understood French tastes and vacation habits. The French were not so willing to wait in line for rides, particularly in bad weather. As in the other theme parks, no beer or wine was served on the premises, and that seemed like sacrilege to the French. The hotel rooms were too expensive for a family to stay there more than a night. And despite all the attention to detail, the pink stone castles still looked like kitschy versions of the originals. Attendance was only half of what Eisner had anticipated. The debts Disney had incurred in the construction had ballooned, and the money coming in from visitors could not even service the interest on them. It was shaping up to be a disaster, the first ever in his glorious career. As he finally came to terms with this reality, he decided that Frank Wells was to blame. It was his job to oversee the financial

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. —Anaïs Nin It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before…to test your limits…to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —Anaïs Nin IT ALWAYS AMAZES ME HOW much people are willing to experiment sexually outside their relationships, yet how tame and puritanical they are at home with their partners. Many of my patients have, by their own account, domestic lives devoid of excitement and eroticism, yet they are consumed and aroused by a richly imaginative sexual life beyond domesticity—affairs, pornography, cybersex, feverish daydreams. For them, sexual love becomes compromised in the making of a family, even a family of two. They numb themselves erotically. Then, having denied themselves freedom, and freedom of imagination, in their relationships, they go outside to reimagine themselves liberated from the constraints of commitment. Security inside, adventure and passion outside. So when the media frantically (yet regularly) announce that couples are not having sex, I can’t help thinking that they may be having plenty of sex, but not with each other. Passion may fuel the initial stages of a relationship, or it may not. Either way, the volatility of passionate eroticism is expected to evolve into a more staid, stable, and manageable alternative: mature love. Even the biochemistry of passion is known to be short-lived. The evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher says that the hormonal cocktail of romance (dopamine, norepineprine, and PEA) is known to last no more than a few years at best. Oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, outlasts them all. The fruits of this ripening love—companionship, deep respect, mutuality, and care—are considered by many to be a fair trade for erotic heat. If attraction and desire were the central actors in your courtship, now they retreat backstage to make way for the main act: building a life together. Eroticism is conspicuously absent from our idea of marriage. Of course, committed couples are expected to have sex, and even to enjoy it these days. Sex solely for the sake of reproduction is, theoretically, passé. But sex and eroticism are not the same, and the lascivious, intimate, ardent, needful, frivolous, erotic sex of lovers becomes rare after the housewarming party. In spite of the sexually saturated media that promise unfettered excitement provided we follow the ten ideas suggested in this week’s issue, there is still some anti-hedonism surrounding domesticated sex. Could it be that we’re inundated with articles about how to make sex hot with our partners because we don’t actually believe it can be hot with our partners? More to the point, could we believe deep down that it’s not supposed to be? Could we believe that regardless of how sexually free we might have been before tying the knot, marriage is no place for the naughtiness of lust?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Cecil’s great fear was that she would marry the one man whom she had actually fallen in love with, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, a man beneath her in station who would stir up all kinds of dissension and intrigue within the English court. As representatives of different countries pressed their cases, Elizabeth would seem to favor one, then grow cold. If the Spanish were suddenly creating trouble on the Continent, she would begin marriage negotiations with the French to make King Philip II of Spain suddenly fear a French-English alliance and back off, or with Archduke Charles of Austria to strike fear in both the French and Spanish. Year after year she played this game. She confessed to Cecil she had no desire to be a wife, but when Parliament threatened to cut off funds if she did not promise to marry, Elizabeth would soften and negotiate with one of her suitors. Then, once the funds from Parliament had been secured, she would find some other excuse to break off the marriage talk—the prince or king or archduke was too young, too fervently Catholic, not her type, too effeminate, on and on. Not even Dudley could break her resolve and get her to marry him. After a few years of this, his frustration mounting, Cecil finally saw through the game. There was nothing he could do, but at the same time he had come to realize that Queen Elizabeth I was almost certainly a more capable ruler than any of the foreign matches. She was so frugal with expenses that the government was no longer in debt. As Spain and France ruined themselves with endless wars, Elizabeth prudently kept England out of the conflicts, and soon the country was prospering. Although she was Protestant, she treated the English Catholics well, and the bitter feelings from the religious wars a decade before were now mostly gone. “There was never so wise a woman born as Queen Elizabeth,” he would later write, and so he eventually dropped the marriage issue, and the country itself slowly became used to the idea of the Virgin Queen, married to her subjects. Over the years, however, one issue would continue to eat away at the people’s affection for the queen, and even made Cecil begin to doubt her competence: the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, cousin to Elizabeth. Mary was a staunch Catholic, while Scotland had become largely Protestant. Mary was next in line to be Queen of England, and many Catholics asserted that Mary was in fact the rightful queen. The Scots themselves came to despise Mary for her religious sentiments, for her adulterous affairs, and for her apparent implication in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  their expected value over all those days and all those hands. That’s what they mean by one long game. This mantra is meant to help expert players overcome the sunk cost fallacy, expressed in poker as wanting to protect the money you’ve already invested in a single hand by not folding, or not wanting to quit a game when you’re in the losses. Of course, what applies to poker applies to life as well. We all need this kind of reminder because of a quirk in our mental accounting. When we start something, whether it’s putting money into the pot in a hand of poker, or starting a relationship or a job, or buying a stock, we open up a mental account. When we exit that thing, whether it’s folding a hand, or leaving a relationship or job, or selling the stock, we close that mental account. It turns out that we just don’t like to close mental accounts in the losses. If we’re losing in a hand of poker, we don’t want to fold because that means we have to realize the loss of the money we put in the pot. If we’re losing in a poker game, we don’t want to quit because it means that we have to leave with less money than we started with. If we’re in a relationship or a job, we don’t want to walk away because we’ll feel like we will have wasted or lost all the time and effort that we put in. Of course, that’s irrational. What really matters is maximizing your expected value across all the things you start, across all of your mental accounts. If you’re investing in a number of stocks, some are going to win and some are going to lose. What matters is whether you’re winning across your whole portfolio not whether any one investment is up or down. But that’s not how we naturally think. We don’t think about the whole portfolio of stocks we own. Each is associated with its own mental account that we don’t want to close out unless we are in the gains. What’s true for one stock or one hand of poker is just as true for an individual decision or a project, or climbing a mountain, or opening a discount store in a converted chicken coop. When we start any of these things, we open a mental account. When things start going poorly, we don’t want to quit because we don’t like to close accounts in the losses. This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When Carla and Leo came to see me, she was at her wit’s end. They’d been together seventeen years: the first six a frenzy of the flesh, the next four the chaos of babyhood, the last seven a sexual desert. She went from talking to pleading to screaming to compensating. She had a number of flings and then a serious affair. He found out, she threatened divorce, he suggested therapy, and here they are. She says, “I am so sick of the excuses. It’s his work, it’s the stress, it’s his dying father, he has to get up early, he hasn’t been to the gym and so he doesn’t have the energy, his back hurts, it’s my breath, it’s my weight, it’s his weight. I took it personally for so long, but now I’m done. I love this man, I’m prepared to stay, but I can’t live like this.” He says, “I always considered myself to be very competent sexually. We kid around that we broke furniture when we first started dating; there was a lot of passion. I never looked at the kids as a defining moment in my life sexually, but obviously something switched somewhere deep inside.” I learn that Leo had begun to withdraw physically when Carla became pregnant with their first son, and they had no sexual contact at all during the last trimester. Leo just came home later and later from work. Carla knew something was up, though they never discussed it openly. “What changed for you when she became a mother?” I ask. “Her significance,” he answers. “Her whole being turned from being my lover, my partner, and my wife to being the mother of my son. And then the mother of my other son. For a while they needed her completely, and that was really OK with me. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world to have our babies sleeping next to us, for her to nurse them through the night. I wasn’t jealous at all. I’m a very loving, nurturing father myself.” “What’s it like to suck the breast of a woman who’s been nursing a baby?” I ask him. “It was weird,” he answered. “The whole physical thing was a little weird. I watched her give birth, twice, and I’ve got to say it was not so great for our sex life.” “I know it’s supposed to be this magical moment, the miracle of life and all that, but no one seems to want to acknowledge the yuck factor,” I reassure him. “It’s not politically correct for a man to admit that watching his wife give birth can be gross. There’s a character in one of Alice Walker’s books, I think it’s Mr. Hal, who watches his partner give birth and is never able to touch her—or any other woman—for the rest of his life. He says he never wants to put someone through that again.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Lesson 6: Never Send to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls One day, in the fourth year of therapy, Irene arrived carrying a large portfolio. She put it on the floor, slowly unbuckled it, and pulled out a big canvas, keeping its back toward me so I couldn’t see it. “Did I tell you I was taking art lessons?” she asked in an uncharacteristically playful manner. “No. First I’ve heard of it. But I think that’s great.” And I did. I took no umbrage that she mentioned it en passant; every therapist is used to patients’ forgetting to mention the good things in their lives. Perhaps it’s simply a misunderstanding, a mistaken assumption by patients that since therapy is pathology-oriented, therapists want to hear only about problems. Other patients, however, who are dependent upon therapy choose to conceal positive developments lest their therapists conclude that they no longer need help. Now, taking a breath, Irene flipped the canvas. Before me gleamed a still life, a simple wooden bowl containing a lemon, an orange, and an avocado. While impressed with her graphic skills, I felt disappointed in her subject matter, so flat and pointless. I would have hoped for something more relevant to our work. But I feigned interest and was convincingly enthusiastic in my praise. Not as convincing as I had thought, I soon learned. In the next session she announced, “I’m signing up for another six months of art lessons.” “That’s wonderful. Same teacher?” “Yes, same teacher, same class.” “You mean a still-life class?” “You’re hoping not, I think. Obviously there’s something you’re not sharing.” “Like what?” I began to feel uncomfortable. “What’s your hunch?” “I see I’ve hit on something.” Irene grinned. “Almost never do you fall back on the traditional shrink practice of answering a question with a question.” “Never miss a trick, Irene. Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.” Here I invoked a practice I always teach my students: when two opposing feelings put you in a dilemma, your best recourse is to express both feelings and the dilemma. “First, as I said, I admired it greatly. I have absolutely no artistic talent and am filled with respect for work of such quality.” I hesitated, and Irene nudged me: “But—” “But—well—uh—I’m so pleased with your finding pleasure in painting that I dread sounding even slightly critical, but I guess I was hoping that you might do something with your art that might be more—uh—how to put it?—resonant with our therapy.” “Resonant?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  must consciously develop, because we humans are generally inept when it comes to such assessments. The general source of our ineptness is that we tend to base our judgments of people on what is most apparent. But as stated earlier, people often try to cover up their weaknesses by presenting them as something positive. We see them brimming with self-confidence, only to later discover that they are actually arrogant and incapable of listening. They seem frank and sincere, but over time we realize that they are actually boorish and unable to consider the feelings of others. Or they seem prudent and thoughtful, but eventually we see that they are in fact timid at their core and afraid of the slightest criticism. People can be quite adept at creating these optical illusions, and we fall for them. Similarly, people will charm and flatter us and, blinded by our desire to like them, we fail to look deeper and see the character flaws. Related to this, when we look at people we often are really seeing only their reputation, the myth that surrounds them, the position they occupy, and not the individual. We come to believe that a person who has success must by nature be generous, intelligent, and good, and that they deserve everything they have gotten. But successful people come in all shapes. Some are good at using others to get where they have gotten, masking their own incompetence. Some are completely manipulative. Successful people have just as many character flaws as anyone else. Also, we tend to believe that someone who adheres to a particular religion or political belief system or moral code must have the character to go with this. But people bring the character they have to the position they occupy or to the religion they practice. A person can be a progressive liberal or a loving Christian and still be an intolerant tyrant at heart. The first step, then, in studying character is to be aware of these illusions and façades and to train ourselves to look through them. We must scrutinize everybody for signs of their character, no matter the appearance they present or the position they occupy. With this firmly in mind, we can then work on several key components to the skill: recognizing certain signs that people emit in certain situations and that clearly reveal their character; understanding some general categories that people fit into (strong versus weak character, for instance), and finally being aware of certain types of characters that often are the most toxic and should be avoided if possible. Character Signs The most significant indicator of people’s character comes through their actions over time. Despite what people say about the lessons they have learned (see Howard Hughes), and how they have changed over the years, you will inevitably notice the same actions and decisions repeating in the course of their life. In these decisions they reveal their character. You must take notice of any salient forms

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I don’t know where a dump is, and I don’t know how long it takes to get back from one. A car pulls up to the curb, stops, and one of my girl cousins gets out holding a sack. Aunt Bernie and my other cousin stay in the car. My mother hangs up the phone and goes to the door while Bernice and I watch each other through the glass. “We went to the store and this is for Jo-Jo,” my cousin says when she hands the sack over. She’s been crying. “We didn’t get anything!” she bursts out. My mother sends her into the kitchen for cookies. “One for you, one for your sister, and none for your mom,” she tells her. She holds up the sack and calls, “You didn’t have to do this!” to Bernie, who rolls down her window. “You’re raising a brat!” she hollers. My mother laughs and shakes her fist in the air. The girl cousin goes back down the sidewalk and triumphantly shows her mother the cookies before getting in. They pull away from the curb and my mother waves as they head down the street, then says, “I’d like to slap that mouth right off her face.” Linda and Pattyann come into view on the other side of the street. They look both ways and then hop across the street on one foot. “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” my mother says brightly, setting the sack on the coffee table. She checks all her pockets, looking for her lighter, then puts a cigarette in her mouth and heads to the kitchen to light it on the stove. They got that sack at the store. Outside, a lady is walking by with a dog, and Linda and Pattyann pet the dog so fervently the lady has to pull him away and keep going. The sack is folded over at the top and it’s pretty big but not that big. Linda and Pattyann start playing hopscotch on the front sidewalk, using soda crackers for markers. My mother is all excited about the sack. She sits down with her ashtray and pats the couch next to her. I climb up and then lie down with my eyes closed. She can’t figure out why we aren’t more curious about our new present. It must be something very special or they wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here. You know, there just might be something inside that will make Jo-Jo forget her troubles. So. Is somebody ready to go down for her nap, or is she ready to sit up here right now and see what’s in the sack? It’s a box with a picture of girl on it. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and a pearl necklace. Her hair is curled and she has lipstick on. Inside the box are a broom, a dustpan, and a vacuum cleaner. “Christ,” my mother snorts.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Hypochondria You tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees. She does go, for a while. The first morning, you make her coffee and breakfast, so that she’s ready to head out into the world. You feel like a mother on her child’s first day of school. You sit there in your underwear and robe, contemplating the winter morning from the plate-glass window in her kitchen. She returns in a cheery mood, holding a second coffee; her nose and the tops of her ears blushing with winter. “What did the therapist say?” you ask. “I know I shouldn’t be asking, I just think—” “We’re still getting to know each other,” she says. “It’s too early to say.” Things get better for a little bit. They really do. She is attentive, kind, patient. She brings you treats—little foods, dips and things, your favorite—and leaves them for you to find when you wake up. A few weeks later, she tells you over the phone that she’s not going to continue therapy. “It’s too much time,” she says. “I’m really fucking busy.” “It’s one hour a week,” you say, gutted. “Besides, he says I’m totally fine,” she says. “He says I don’t need therapy.” 37 “You threw things at me,” you say. “You chased me. You destroyed everything around me. You have no memory of any of it. Doesn’t that alarm you?” 38 She is silent. Then she says, “I’ve got lots of things to do. You don’t understand how hard I work.” You remember your promise, to leave her if she doesn’t get help. But you don’t push the issue. You will never talk about it ever again. 37 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type X905.4, The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless. 38 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C411.1, Taboo: Asking for reason of an unusual action. Dream House as Dirty Laundry One day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer? But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance: Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas? She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm. Every answer enrages her. When you tell her, “No one,” she calls you a liar. When you say, “Just my roommates,” her eyes go flat and hard as flint.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Planning has proved to be most useful for Stephanie. She elaborates, “Warren’s idea of a date is this: he approaches me for sex at eleven on Tuesday, and when I turn him down he says, ‘Can we have a date tomorrow night?’ I’ve had to explain to him that, for me, scheduled intercourse is not a date. I need to go out. I want food that someone else has cooked, on dishes that someone else is going to wash. When we go out, we talk, we kiss, we joke. We can finish a sentence without being interrupted. He pays attention to me, and it makes me feel sexy.” Not only do their rendezvous help maintain the emotional connection so critical for Stephanie; they also help her to make the transition from full-time mom to lover. “For so long, my thinking about sex was about how to avoid it. Knowing that Warren and I have a date has helped me to anticipate it instead. I pamper myself. I take a shower, shave my legs, put on makeup. I make a special effort to block the negativity and to give myself permission just to be sexual.” The story of Stephanie and Warren is typical of the effect of parenthood on eroticism, but it is only one among many. It is the story of a straight, white, legally married, middle-class couple whose egalitarian ideals and romantic aspirations were mercilessly undone in the transition from two to three. My work with them isn’t finished. Things have definitely improved, but for this couple, and for this woman, caring for small kids doesn’t agree with eroticism. I suspect that when they reach the next life stage—when the kids are both in school full time and Stephanie is back at work, as she plans—new energy will be released. In the meantime, thinking of this as but one phase in a lifelong relationship helps them remain patient and hopeful. Sexy Mamas Do Exist Today we arrive at parenthood with a sexual identity that’s often fully sprung. All of us benefited when sexuality was cut loose from reproduction. As regular users of birth control, we have been granted the privilege of a risk-free romp that can go on for years. We enjoy desire with impunity, at least for a time, and we expect sexual fulfillment in our committed relationships. For our parents and grandparents, sex after kids probably wasn’t all that different from sex before kids—pregnancy, and the heavy responsibility that went with it, was always a looming possibility. But for baby boomers and all who have followed, parenthood throws a wrench into our liberated, self-gratifying lifestyle. The “baby clash” is all the more galling because we have something to compare it with. “You used to love sex,” “We used to make love for hours,” and “I used to know how to turn you on,” are laments I frequently hear. We’re as flabbergasted as we are resentful when parenthood brings our fun to a screeching halt.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I tell them I want to know how, or if, we can hold on to a sense of aliveness and excitement in our relationships. Is there something inherent in commitment that deadens desire? Can we ever maintain security without succumbing to monotony? I wonder if we can preserve a sense of the poetic, of what Octavio Paz calls the double flame of love and eroticism. I’ve had this conversation many times, and the comments I heard at this party were hardly novel. “Can’t be done.” “Well, that’s the whole problem of monogamy, isn’t it?” “That’s why I don’t commit. It has nothing to do with fear. I just hate boring sex.” “Desire over time? What about desire for one night?” “Relationships evolve. Passion turns into something else.” “I gave up on passion when I had kids.” “Look, there are men you sleep with and men you marry.” As often happens in a public discussion, the most complex issues tend to polarize in a flash, and nuance is replaced with caricature. Hence the division between the romantics and the realists. The romantics refuse a life without passion; they swear that they’ll never give up on true love. They are the perennial seekers, looking for the person with whom desire will never fizzle. Every time desire does wane, they conclude that love is gone. If eros is in decline, love must be on its deathbed. They mourn the loss of excitement and fear settling down. At the opposite extreme are the realists. They say that enduring love is more important than hot sex, and that passion makes people do stupid things. It’s dangerous, it creates havoc, and it’s a weak foundation for marriage. In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, “Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.” For the realists, maturity prevails. The initial excitement grows into something else—deep love, mutual respect, shared history, and companionship. Diminishing desire is inescapable. You are expected to tough it out and grow up. As the conversation unfolds, the two camps eye each other with a complex alloy of pity, tenderness, envy, exasperation, and outright scorn. But while they position themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, both agree with the fundamental premise that passion cools over time. “Some of you resist the loss of intensity, some of you accept it, but all of you seem to believe that desire fades. What you disagree on is just how important the loss really is,” I comment. Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  348The History of Christianity II õSome Koreans have celebrated the role of Christianity in nurturing democracy in South Korea. For example, South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, was an elder in the Methodist Church. But the truth is more complicated. For most of the past 60 years, the South Korean government, with plenty of Christians in its ranks, has been authoritarian. Syngman Rhee himself was not shy about using strong-arm tactics to silence political dissent. õAnother example was President Park Chung Hee, a general who seized power in a military coup in 1961 and ruled until he was assassinated in 1979. He dissolved the National Assembly—South Korea’s legislature—and enacted martial law. He drew up a new constitution that gave him more or less complete control, and allowed him to steamroll over working people in order to “modernize” South Korea and raise economic output. õMost Christian clergy just tried to keep their heads down and survive. Some openly endorsed Park’s policies. But eventually, some Protestant ministers became vocal defenders of democracy and civil rights. They organized and educated workers, ministered to political prisoners, brought relief to poor city neighborhoods, and monitored voting during Park’s very fraudulent elections. õAfter several years of doing this work, in the late 1970s, Protestant activists developed a uniquely Korean version of the social gospel called minjung theology: a people’s theology focused on giving voice to the frustrations of common people and assuring them that Jesus is on their side. õMinjung theology has been a powerful stream in Korean Christian culture. But the most famous Korean church is on the other end of the theological spectrum. That’s David Yonggi Cho’s Yoido Full Gospel 349Lecture 35—Revival and Repression in Korea Church. Cho picked up on the powerful stream of the prosperity gospel: the promise that God rewards the faithful in this life with worldly blessings. õCho may be the most famous prosperity preacher in the world, but America is full of pastors who preach a very similar message. And 92% of Korean Protestants say they believe in another Western idea: biblical inerrancy, or the belief that the Bible it totally without error. Korean Christians have, in some ways, held on more tightly to the ways Western missionaries presented things than Christians in other parts of the non-Western world. õYet Korean evangelicals have also accommodated Korean culture. They tend to place a special emphasis on the Fifth Commandment to honor one’s parents. And very early in the 19 th century, they started adopting Christianized versions of Confucian ancestor rites called services of recollection—technically a prayer addressed to God, not ancestor worship. However, the marriage of Christianity and Korean nationalism has both strengthened churches and them into dangerous alliances with authoritarian regimes. SUGGESTED READING Buswell and Lee, Christianity in Korea. Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy. Lee, Born Again. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHas nationalism been a positive or negative inf luence on Korean Christianity? äHow has the repressive regime of North Korea shaped the Christian experience in South Korea?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Most of the Framingham Eight had their sentences commuted or were otherwise released, but not Debra. (The board said that she and her girlfriend had “participated in a mutual battering relationship”—a common misconception about queer domestic violence—even though it had never come up during the hearing.) She was paroled in 1994, the second-to-last member of the group to achieve some measure of freedom. An ABC Primetime report about them barely talked to or about Debra compared to the other women. The Academy Award–winning short documentary about the Framingham Eight— Defending Our Lives —didn’t include Debra at all. The sort of violence that Annette and Debra experienced—brutally physical—or that Freda experienced—murder—is, obviously, far beyond what happened to me. It may seem odd, even disingenuous, to write about them in the context of my experience. It might also seem strange that so many of the domestic abuse victims that appear here are women who killed their abusers. Where , you may be asking yourself, are the abused queer women who didn’t stab or shoot their lovers? (I assure you, there are a lot of us.) But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention. There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse—verbal, emotional, psychological—and even worse, it does not provide context . It does not allow certain kinds of victims in. “By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.” After all, in Gaslight , Gregory’s only actual crimes are murdering Paula’s aunt and the attempted theft of her property. The core of the film’s horror is its relentless domestic abuse, but that abuse is emotional and psychological and thus completely outside of the law. Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. Trying to find accounts, especially those that don’t culminate in extreme violence, is unbelievably difficult. Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean . When I was a teenager, there was this girl in my sophomore-year English class. She had luminous gray-green eyes and a faint smattering of freckles across her nose. She was a little swaggery and butch but also loved the same movies I did, like Moulin Rouge and Fried Green Tomatoes .

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  278The History of Christianity II õAnother bishop stood up and said there was a huge gap between church doctrine and the contrary practice of the immense majority of Christian couples. Maybe, he said, the church should seek the advice of “married Christians” as well as theologians and other experts. õThe pope who had followed John XXIII and wrapped up the council was Paul VI. Some people thought of him as a progressive, so liberals were hopeful that he would reform the church’s teachings, especially after the papal commission came back and recommended that the church permit Catholics to use contraception. õBut Paul VI was unnerved by how quickly the church was changing, and he rejected the recommendation. In 1968, he issued an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, or On Human Life. He affirmed that the only birth control Catholic women could use was the so-called rhythm method based on keeping track of a woman’s monthly cycle. This had a devastating effect on progressive Catholics. THE CHURCH IN POST-COLONIAL POLITICS õThese debates were unfolding in an era when Catholic leaders found themselves thrust into the middle of complicated and violent political revolutions all around the world, particularly in places formerly ruled by European powers. õVatican II encouraged many liberal reformers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia because the council seemed to place the church firmly on the side of democracy and dignity for oppressed peoples. It seemed to give reformers theological tools to use in criticizing the economic and social policies that ground down the poor.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools. My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man’s car while he held a flashlight over the paper. The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner. Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude. Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house. Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn’t come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I’d been I told her lies.