Mommies, and the boys they married *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Jun 08 2008 at 6:41 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
Over the past several years, about once a year, a friend announces that she’s getting a divorce. What’s interesting is the pattern I see in the marriages that don’t last (and most of my friends are in marriages that are lasting). The breakdown seems to be bounded by wants and needs. The men in these divorces are defined by their wants: What they want at any given moment is of paramount importance. Often intelligent and successful, although seldom charming, anything that interferes with their desires is seen as an insult to their sense of self.
The women are defined by the needs of others: their children’s needs, their husband’s needs, their aged parents’ needs, their job’s needs, their car pool’s needs, their neighbors’ needs, the school system’s needs. They therefore parcel out their time and attention on a constantly sliding scale that measures whose needs are most urgent at any given time, and whose needs are manifestly less urgent. (Deal with vomiting child or get husband another soda from the garage? Hmmm. Which shall I do? Complete project that’s on a drop-dead deadline or help husband haul out the garbage cans? Decisions, decisions. Listen to whining neighbor or cuddle on couch with husband? That’s a no-brainer.)
During the course of these now broken marriages, from the outside looking in, it appeared that all of these women were good wives: they took care of themselves, respected their husbands, ran the household for the men (and the children), and didn’t seem to be shrews. Their husbands did not appear to be neglected (that is, the women were not Victorian consumptives who took to the couch, or maternal martyrs who made the children their dominant theme in their lives, or emotionally distant figures in a way that made any closeness impossible.) The one thing they didn’t do, though, and the one thing the men seemed to need, was devote 100% of their time and emotional energy to these men. And in each case, the man responded to his wife’s failure to satisfy his every want in the same way: with an affair (or more than one affair).
In the wake of the divorce (but not during the marriage), the women started to talk. It turned out that they had found marriage hard, since the men, focused as they were on their wants, had little room to spare for the little things that women value: a kind word, a night out, a helping hand at the end of a long day. Still the women stuck it out, knowing that they were needed. However, for each woman, the death knell for the relationship, the moment she could no longer tolerate an adult clamoring for 100% of her attention as if he were himself one of the children, was the affair.
One of the things I’ve sensed is that all of these marriages worked all right up until the kids were born. At that moment, the women peeled away a part of themselves for the child. And the men, all of whom love their children, couldn’t tolerate that loss. They somehow expected that the women would be able to provide 100% of themselves to the husband and 100% to the child (because the men, after all, love the children and want the best for them, including complete maternal love). And in each case, when it was manifestly impossible for that to happen, the men responded by increasing their demands to the point at which they could justify an affair by pointing to a wife who had abandoned them.
As I said at the top of this post, most of the marriages around me are just fine. Both husband and wife engage in the daily balancing act of giving attention to the marriage, the kids, the jobs, the parents, and so and so forth. Both partners to the marriage are sufficiently mature to recognize that, once you pass the toddler stage, your life motto can’t be “me, me, me.”
In the marriages that broke down, however, the man could not recognize that. The wife, however, was able to make that change, and that fact may, perhaps, be biological. Before the children came along, the wife might have been every bit as self-centered as the husband. The process of pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, however, in an ordinary woman, creates a bond that transcends selfishness. No matter how much you wish to put yourself first, you just can’t do it anymore. That helpless little thing needs you.
Before I get too locked into my biology theory, though, I should note that I’ve seen one divorce where the pattern (one spouse’s personal wants, versus the other spouses impulse to fulfill others’ needs) has been precisely the same, except that the one who couldn’t transcend pre-child selfishness was the wife. It was the husband who stayed at home, nurturing the kids and taking care of the community around him (parents, neighbors, school, etc.). The wife, despite loving her kids, had never bonded with them sufficiently to transcend her own personal goals, something that eventually halted the marriage. (I think the “affair” that finally killed the marriage in this case was a workaholic’s loving relationship with the job, rather than a flesh-and-blood romance.)
Anyway, these are just Sunday evening ruminations, brought on by the news of another broken marriage. I guess it’s also whistling in the dark — an attempt to put distance between others’ bad luck and my own life.
UPDATE: Mike made a good point in a comment, which is that I’m only hearing the women’s side of the story, and those stories are inevitably going to be self-serving and one sided. I agree completely. What’s interesting, though, is that these stories are so similar. One would think that, since these are different marriages, and these women aren’t friends, they’d have different tales of woe. And they don’t. It’s always the same.
More than that, the sameness always involves describing a husband (or that one wife) who has characteristics that, I realized, precisely mirror the DSM criteria for narcissistic personality disorders:
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3. believes that he or she is “special” and unique
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement
6. is interpersonally exploitative
7. lacks empathy
8. is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
Perhaps the bottom line is that, when children come along, it’s impossible to maintain a marriage with a classic narcissist.
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22 Responses to “Mommies, and the boys they married *UPDATED*”
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I don’t know, Book. I’ve seen a lot of marriages where guy and girl get married over girl’s looks and guy’s earning potential and one or the other are just shocked that it didn’t work out in the end.
What was it about so many young women that I knew back in my college daze (oops…days) that caused them to gravitate to the shallow jerks? Perhaps it was their shared shallowness of values. I once shared a table with a very despondent woman who had been abandoned by her executive husband in favor of a trophy wife. She had done everything for him, she told me. She had also very obviously married a total jerk (words that I kept to myself).
Is it a surprise that so many marriages are train wrecks waiting to happen?
Not a surprise at all, I guess, Danny. It’s just that the selfish jerk factor tends not to become a problem until the kids come along — which is the worst possible time for a marriage to end, given the children’s economic and emotional needs. It’s so sad.
People are given second chances and many opportunities in today’s America. That doesn’t mean they will take them. That doesn’t mean they will use what they have to uplift themselves from misery. Some people will even use it to bring more misery on themselves or bring others to their state of badness.
It’s a quaint feature of a humanity and their government.
Danny, this occurs not just with shallow jerks. I knew an MD, an Ivy League graduate, prominent enough in his field to occasionally be quoted in the popular press for his arcane expertise. He did not seek out the press. Rather, the press asked him because of his expertise. Not only was he an MD, he was near the top of his profession. High achiever.
The MD’s marriage was fine, until the child came along, for just the reasons Book stated. He wanted 100% attention from his wife.
The MD was an only child nearly all of his childhood, and in his childhood he got plenty of attention from his parents. Both parents had terminal degrees. His mother stayed at home to take care for him. His father was a high achiever, perhaps an overachiever, as many viewed the father as being driven. The father was a Fortune 500 VP. Throughout the MD’s childhood the father was effusive in his praise of his son.
In reading between the lines between his childhood and his divorce, one would surmise that the MD’s high achievement had been predicated on parental praise. As an adult, he needed the complete attention from his wife as a substitute for the parental praise and attention he received as a child.
Absent the complete attention from his wife, when she needed to juggle the needs of their child and the needs of her husband, the marriage ended.
It strikes me that lack of communication is a major contributor here.
In any marriage, isn’t it true that conditions simply change? If they’re lucky, the husband and wife have talked the obvious changes through – how will we handle money, how will we handle children, how do we keep the love alive when the lust fades? How mature are each of us, and what are our expectations out of this marriage?
That kind of up front communication can avoid most of the issues that drive a couple apart.
But whether that’s done or not, unexpected severe stresses I think inevitably will occur. If there’s genuine communication, it seems to me, true understanding of each other, and compromise and sacrifice (and reforged bonds) are possible.
So I was wondering how well these couples communicated deeply with each other throughout the marriage.
I suppose that the way to help a marriage remain strong is a rational fulfillment of the marriage vows. (Duh) But what I mean is that the couple must always support each other. Some unions break down when the kids show up, and one spouse gives all attention to the kids to the exclusion of the other. Other unions break down when the kids leave, and the couple have no focus for their attention except each other, and they have neglected their union so long they have forgotten how to attend to each other. To be successful, each one needs to be strong within themselves, which eliminates the jerks from consideration for the job.
Al
Al,
I think if Book is correct, then these are all noble, well-meaning women who married utter jerks, and they just didn’t realize it. (Actually it speaks rather poorly about their judgment.) After years of neglect, affairs finally killed any remaining hope, and the women divorced. Given the disastrous choice of spouse that they made, it would be the better choice.
I have found that there are usually two sides to every story, however.
Are any of these wife-related tales simply the bitter one-sided and blaming-the-other result of a marriage gone horribly wrong?
It may be possible that these men are not quite as sorry as their divorced wives make them sound, and that the women are not quite the saints they have portrayed themselves to be to Book. I guess you would have to give equal time to the husbands to state their case, to be sure.
Each is a case by itself probably. Maybe it is simply true that there are that many immature little-boy-men in that neighborhood who were lucky to marry mature, highly responsible wives.
I myself wondered, Mike, if I wasn’t just hearing self-justifying tales of marriages gone awry. The reason I think I’m not is that these women (and one man), none of whom know each other, all describe precisely the same partner. One would think that each would have a different tale of marital woe with herself (or himself) as the central martyr. But in each case, no matter who is doing the telling, the story is precisely the same. That makes me think that, even if one removes the personal tendency to make oneself the good guy/gal, there is a typical type of man (and one woman) whose innate selfishness causes marriages to collapse.
This seems a little one-sided, Book. There are plenty of men who work 9-10 hour days, plus commutes, doing things they may not terribly WANT to do, in order to satisfy the “needs” of their wives and children. (And plenty of wives have “needs” which are really wants, which they insist upon having filled regardless of the impact on their husbands)
Another major cause of marital problems is one partner treating the other with disrespect. This certainly goes both ways, but in today’s world, it seems more common for the wife to do this. With couples I know and in public settings, I have often observed women treating their husbands with barely concealed contempt.
That’s a good point, iconoclast, but I should add that, in each of these cases, the women worked too, and the men did nothing to help out. In the working marriages I see around me (and they are the majority), while the women have primary responsibility for home and children (even if they work), the men lend a hand — even if only a symbolic one. They take out the garbage, mow the lawn, run a load of laundry, etc. In the broken marriages, one of the complaints is that the men seem to feel a sense of entitlement that means that all they have to do (in their own minds) is bring in the money, without any other contribution to family (or wifely) well-being. (Incidentally, that’s true for the one reverse marriage I described, where it was the man whose wife had this sense of entitlement.)
I’m beginning to feel more and more these women (and one man) were ensnared by the intelligence, focus, and charm of the narcissistic personality (Bill Clinton, after all, is a famous narcissist), but that the whole house of cards, built around the personality defect, came tumbling down when children came along.
The story of the high achieving MD who was an only child has some resonance. I dont’ mean to get into the only child discussion; what I mean is that for some time now such emphasis has been placed on children that they naturally feel that they are entitled. This is sea change. Before the technology boom and the era of relative wealth there simply wasn’t time to treat each child as the “center of the universe”. No wonder that growing up is such a shock for many. The mothering instinct may cushion some, certainly not all, young women. Guys don’t have that satisfaction. Wife is distracted; baby does not look to them as the food supply. Years and years of neglect, until the little guys are old enough to go fishing. They see themselves as losing their position as the center of all things, while being saddled with more responsibility. Poor Darlings.
Having said all of that, I am not sure that it is fair to blame the guys for all of the failed marriages among Bookworms’s friends. We all know that guys usually will not broadcast their greivances, while women love to share.
That the women all tell the same story isn’t surprising: that’s the female template. I doubt if everyone from whom you heard – or about whom you heard – is quite so noble and giving. (Really? All of ‘em?)
There is of course a different template from the male view – and all the males would probably tell a story that is no more than a version of their same story, and you’d have to offer the same disclaimer (they don’t know each other, etc., etc.) if you were reporting on them.
For example, I have a pal who is a divorce specialist, and before discovery begins she (yes, “she”) tells every male she represents the same thing: “don’t get mad. She is going to lie. YOU, however, cannot. We will stick to the facts, because the penalty for your lying will be greater than the penalty for her lying. Don’t worry about this: you know she’s lying; I know she’s lying; her own lawyer knows she’s lying; the stenographer knows she’s lying – and the judge and the Clerk know it too. We’ll handle it in negotiations.”
She tells the females she represents: “please try not to lie,” but says they mostly do.
Everybody has a template. It only became a template because it describes behavior well – from one point of view.
But I have to doubt that you know – or have heard of – nothing but noble, self-sacrificing women.
You’re right, Oldflyer, about the women downloading the info and the men not. And the women are my friends and the men weren’t.
Still, the stories are remarkably uniform and that’s intriguing. As I noted above, with different women, different men, different marriages, different child dynamics, I would have expected differing (albeit still self-serving) stories. That wouldn’t have been blog-worthy.
Also, none of these men have fared well in the judicial system. In California, it’s pretty much 50/50 custody from the get-go, both of children and property. The men, however, kept filing motions, telling their side of the story, and they didn’t shift the judges.
Then, in each case, something happened and the men pushed the judges too far (just as, with their wives, by having an affair they pushed too far). Thus, the men filed one motion too many and the judges (male and female both) lost all patience and not only denied the men’s pending motions, but took back a lot of what they’d already achieved, or were automatically entitled to, through the judicial system. It says something when even the Courts turn on them with incredible hostility.
That makes me think that, even if one removes the personal tendency to make oneself the good guy/gal, there is a typical type of man (and one woman) whose innate selfishness causes marriages to collapse.
The blog posts from Kathy’s blog are always a great insight into the narcissist and malignant narcissist personality, Book.
Good point, Tiresias. None of the women are perfect — far from it. But I do see them in action: they work, they take care of the kids, they volunteer in the schools, they assist with sports, etc. In the broken marriages, the men are invisible. They work (most are very good wage-earners), but you don’t see them with the kids, they don’t appear at the schools, they’re not there for the sporting events — they’ve simply removed themselves from the community in which their wives and kids live, which is, to me, emblematic of the problem. These men (and one woman) seem not to be part of the marital community — and that’s from the outside looking in, separate from the wives’ (and that one husband’s) report.
Incidentally, there are tons of men in my community who work just as hard and are so there: they’re at the bus stop, they’re coaching the sports, they’re at the picnics. They’re engaged — and they’re lovely people.
This is not meant to be a rant against all husbands or men — it’s meant to be a rumination about the men (and one woman) who don’t want to be a part of it all.
I thought about questioning Book’s focus on mostly men, but ended up choosing other topics to bring up.
Hostility from the court: The courts being unfair to men in divorce is well documented.
Men are much maligned in our culture (consider the title of your post).
The more common dangerous modality that I see between married couples is not the “man desires 100% attention all the time” but more “man desires 100% attention SOMETIMES”. As a gender we are fairly low maintenance. If you show us that we are top dog every now and again that will last us through the weeks of inevitable and necessary neglect that both partners will show to one another as a result of the realities of raising children.
The marriages that have trouble are the ones where the couples fail to recognize that they have to carve out time away from the little
monstersangels and focus exclusively on each other even if for just a few hours a week. Since women are biologically and socially more attached to the kids, I more often see the women as failing to recognize this need.You can buy your way to alone time with nannies, trade for it with other parents or cajole family into helping. But it hinges on both parties recognizing the NEED for the alone-time. The failure to recognize that is shared equally by both genders.
And it goes without saying that if the sex life is not meeting the needs of both partners, then your marriage is hosed. It is probably even more important than money as a trouble indicator.
The most important part of this is that you’re hearing stories designed for public consumption, and seeing “public” faces.
Nobody knows what’s really going on where it really goes on: behind closed doors, and in private.
And you won’t find out. You’re probably happier that way.
Just as an amusing side comment, notice how perfectly the DSM mirrors someone from Chicago currently running for President…
Tiresias, your amusing side comment is right on the money. I’d noticed that as well and was wondering whether to do either a playful or a serious post on that subject!
Book says,
“Perhaps the bottom line is that, when children come along, it’s impossible to maintain a marriage with a classic narcissist.”
I think that sounds about right. Can a narcissist ever really take care of another person’s needs? And as Book pointed out, small children are quite helpless and needy!
I definitely get the impression that these particular couples did not have any early discussions of what their lives would be like when children arrived on the scene. All the sacrifices that the couple must make for the children – and the sacrifices are I hope VASTLY rewarding – do mean that there is less spontaneous time. Which leads me to wonder: how good are narcissists at making sacrifices for other people?
And man, when I look at the list of characteristics of narcissism that Book listed in her Update, I gotta say I would have to flee the room in less than an hour if I had to constantly put up with a full-blown case!
My foster daughter still lives with us. She says she wants to get married and have children. Her choices in men say something else. Every one of them falls pretty much into the category of the sort of person Book describes – it’s all about MEMEME!!!
She came from a broken home, and lived with an emotionally abusive mother (in my opinion). She’s moved up in her choices – going from outright emotionally abusive young men to simply egocentrists. I’m not sure I know the difference between a narcissist and an egocentrist – to me, an egocentrist centers his entire life around himself. “Himself” is all that matters. She, on the other hand, has this dreadful need to be needed. Works quite well with guys who want someone to fulfill their every whim.
So I agree with Book that these guys are the problem, but the women who married them have a problem as well…they have a strong mother instinct, and just don’t have enough sense to pick a _husband_ and _father_ instead of a young man who is out there looking for a mom with sex, and who appeals to the “mom” in them. Then they have real children, and the guy sort of falls along the wayside. I agree with the guys a bit here – he thought he was getting one deal, and ended up getting another. So hubby also got a raw deal…
Sometimes I think that the old way of having parents arrange a marriage wasn’t such a bad idea!!
Ran across this, this am and thought it was something to consider…
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/06/lonely-old-men.html