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What Happened Next, or How My Open Marriage Started to Derail

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I alluded to the difficulty of setting up rules and regulations for an open marriage in my last post. One of the biggest challenges couples in open relationships face is the fact that both partners will meet other people. People that they might like a lot. People that might eventually threaten their primary relationship.

This is exactly what happened to us. And I was the guilty party. I was the one who met someone and started to have inappropriate feelings for him.

Here’s what happened:

I met a Swiss man named P online. He was already in a relationship – although he was not married to his girlfriend and they were not living together. P didn’t seem particularly unhappy in his relationship, apart from the complaint that his girlfriend didn’t seem to like any of the “cultural” activities that he did. She didn’t want to go to museums or plays and couldn’t talk about art or books. This, P decided, could be remedied by going outside the relationship. I was perfect to share these experiences with him, since I loved many of these things myself, and so we decided to meet at a hotel bar for a drink.

From the very beginning, I was enamored with P. When I first saw him, he was sitting in a corner booth in the hotel bar with a glass of wine. Blond, tall, well-dressed, he seemed poised and calm. I liked him instantly, but he made me nervous. He spoke German, French, and English fluently. He had plans to learn Japanese. He worked for a very famous creative agency and had been a professional volleyball player. In other words, he was slightly intimidating.

I had a glass of wine. Then I had another. After three glasses, we had gotten through the awkwardness of the first meeting, exchanged stories about our motives for having an affair, and made plans to see each other again.

He walked me back to my apartment entrance. As he was about to leave, I decided to kiss him. I was tipsy and I very much wanted to, so I stood on my tip-toes and said, as I leaned in: “Do you want to kiss me?”

It wasn’t really a question, though, it was more like a statement. That first kiss sent a shiver down my spine. It was like a spark that awakened long-dormant sexual urgings. I felt 16. His hand slipped down my back and gently cupped my ass and I almost swooned. I think I fell into him.

After he left, I kept thinking about him. We made plans to go to a museum together a few days later. And when I saw him again, standing in front of a piece of art in a light blue sweater, I felt a happiness that I hadn’t felt in months. And that should have been my first clue. Right there. That I was happy simply to be in this man’s presence. To gaze at him as he read about the painting in front of him.

We had something else in common, something that I’ve never had in common with anyone else: both our mothers had died when we were the age of 14.

That should have been my second clue. That is a type of bond that is unusual and dangerous. One feels that the other understands him perfectly. That no words are needed. It’s like being in a very private club that no one really wants to be in, but offers a certain kind of understanding that isn’t available to those who have never experienced an early, and tragic, loss. We liked each other for it. We felt attached and comfortable from the instant we discovered our common experience.

It wasn’t planned, in other words. What began between us was spontaneous. We only meant, I think, to have a fun affair. To spend afternoons at a museum or to go out for a drink and talk about life. But that’s not what happened next.

What happened next was I made a disastrous decision to see P when my husband was visiting me in NYC, after I told my husband that I wouldn’t see anyone else for the month we were cohabiting. It was a difficult month for S and I, and I desperately wanted to see P, to see his face, to hear his accent as he talked about his job, to drink a glass of wine with him. I wanted to see P to escape the difficult conversations I was having with S about our marriage. P was like my safety valve. I needed to blow off some steam.

I told myself that I would only see P for a drink. Just a drink. That one drink wouldn’t necessarily be breaking the promise I made to S. And S had gone away for a few nights to visit his father. I was alone in NYC.

So I made plans to see P after all. And when we ended up in his office, having sex on the receptionist’s desk, I shouldn’t have been surprised by my own capacity for betrayal and deceit. I shouldn’t have been shocked by my desire to flout the rules I had agreed to with S. I should have recognized the seed of my growing affection and need for P for what it was: I was falling for him.

And that would be my biggest mistake of all: Not being honest with myself.

The Challenges of an Open Marriage

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After I began seeing K, I told my husband (S) about him.

It’s not that I wanted to exactly, but S guessed that something was different. Maybe it was my bubbly attitude. Maybe it was the way I talked in generic terms, such as: “I went to a restaurant with a friend last night.” Whatever it was, S asked me abruptly one day if I had been seeing anyone. I told him the truth. That was our #1 rule: total admission of events and complete emotional honesty.

The biggest challenge of an open marriage is negotiating a policy that will guide your actions. Rules are a must. As my favorite sex columnist, Dan Savage, often attests.

An open marriage isn’t something you can just “wing.” But that being said, it often requires diligent maintenance and on-the-fly renegotiation of the rules. Because no one really knows how they will react to being in an open marriage until they find themselves in one.

Before S and I decided to try opening up our marriage, we had countless discussions about it. Over many hours. We read articles and advice pieces about it. We sorted endlessly through the pros and cons and the potential effects on our new marriage. In the end, however, every couple – every individual – needs to make her own decision. Comfort levels differ on this topic. Indeed, some of my friends couldn’t even talk to me about this; it made them too uncomfortable to imagine themselves in a similar circumstance. Also, it made them queasy to envision their husbands or wives having sex with someone else. Open marriages, I know, are not for everyone.

(Maybe marriage isn’t for everyone – but that is a discussion for another day.)

Jealousy, I suspect, is the biggest monster in every open marriage. Even if we want the opportunity to stray, we don’t necessarily want our partners to have sex with anyone else. I’ve heard about one-way open marriages, wherein only one partner has sex outside the marriage, but I can’t imagine that is any easier than when both partners are doing the deed with others. We might not be programmed to stay with the same person for 25+ years, but neither are we programmed to stand idly by while our sex partner meanders.

S and I felt strongly that honesty would quell jealousy. After all, most things are never as bad or as scary or as great as we imagine them to be. This was no exception. The greatest danger was in our own imaginations (we are both writers, after all). And so we built in the honesty clause so that we could dispel any fears we had that the other person was falling in love with someone else.

Because that is the elephant in the room when you open up your marriage: The potential for one or both of you to fall in love with someone else.

Sex – even if it is “just sex” – is intimate. It’s hard to keep personal details or “feelings” to oneself. And I think this goes for men as much as it does for women. Sex is connective. It is bonding. It is the sharing of oneself with another. And so, there is always potential that one person will develop an emotional attachment to someone.

In the end, that is what happened to S and I. And it was me who developed the attachment. It wasn’t “love” per se, but it was something other than “friendship.” And it was dangerous.

And it wasn’t, as you might be thinking, with K…

The Open Marriage – Part 3

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Here are the things I regret now about that first night with K: We slept in his bed. We drank champagne leftover from his wedding (to be fair, I didn’t know this at the time). I played with the family dog.

He opened up a door into his life and I willingly walked through it.

At the time, I didn’t know what this would mean for either one of our marriages. But I should have. I’m not saying that I regret my affair with K; it brought me too much happiness and insight for me to be sorry that it happened. But I might have made different choices. That being said, I do feel some guilt over the depth of our intimacy. What he said to me was far more intimate than what we ever did in bed.

My biggest mistake, I suppose, was in thinking that I could control the situation. In every way. I thought I could contain my emotions, manage his feelings for me, and keep everything in check.

And then we saw each other three times in succession in just one week.

He came to visit me in the middle of the day the day after we began our affair – skipping out on work for a few hours to sit in the park on a rare warm day in the late fall. We ate sandwiches and he asked to see me again that night. This should have been a red flag. I blame my inexperience for the fact that I said yes and didn’t see this as a warning sign that we were going too deep, too fast.

We had dinner at a place down the street from his apartment. He was playing roulette and I was aiding him. We went back to his apartment for the second time and had sex on the couch. He rented a movie so that there would be a record of him being home, I suppose. It was playing in the background.

Everything felt comfortable. It was like we had known each other for ages. That was the surprising thing.

I began thinking about him all the time. We went one night without seeing each other and then went out again. This time in my neighborhood. When he said he wanted to see my apartment, to see how I lived, I balked. I didn’t want to let someone into my home – the home I was supposed to share with S – because it felt too close to me. Sure, I had already seen his pictures and taste in furniture. Hell, I had tripped over his wife’s running shoes on my way to the bathroom.

But I didn’t want him to see inside of my life.

Because, if I’m honest, I knew what that meant. I was letting him in. Literally.

I did, though. Let him in. When we were lying there, wondering aloud what the hell we were doing with each other, he said to me: “Everything about you is ace.” It was the way he looked at me, I guess, that made me realize we had crossed a barrier. Some unwritten, unspoken, unseen boundary had forever been crossed and we both knew it. We had changed our marriages in some way – unalterably and willingly. And, no matter what happened, we were going to have to live with it.

A week later, my husband S would ask me if I had slept with anyone else since we had opened our marriage.

And I would have to tell him yes.

Dating After 40

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One of my good friends from graduate school asked me if I would ever write about my dating adventures in New York City. She’s about my age, and is now married with new twins, and so she gets her vicarious kicks through my random Facebook status updates. But she wants more details. And I’ve got good stories, it’s true.

Dating past 40 is definitely a different experience than it was in my 20s. I spent the majority of my 30s married, so I suppose I had been out of the game for awhile. One of the biggest shocks to my system was that I was suddenly considered a “cougar.” A term that someone should now only use around me if they want me to embody the deadlier aspects of that totem animal, deep cuts with claws and teeth and dismemberment are possible outcomes. The term itself is disrespectful, I think, and doesn’t really capture the nuances of women over 40 who date men in their 30s (and, upon occasion, in their late 20s).

At any rate, I was surprised to find how much has changed and how much has – sadly – remained the same about dating. I’m on the fence about whether or not to talk about all this here. But I do claim that nothing is off limits. And since I can’t afford therapy, this may be as good as it gets.

I’ll ponder.

At any rate, the Dilettante is back in business. I’ll be checked in more often here and writing about writing, art, music, books, and – maybe – my dating life. And just life in general, in all its glorious messiness….

The Stars Club – Membership of One

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I must have blown up 100 balloons myself. Long ones, short and fat ones, red ones, blue ones, yellow and pink. I carefully looped pieces of tape around my chubby finger – a jerry-rigged double-sided tape – and affixed one side to a balloon, one side to the ceiling. It took me hours of gingerly stepping on and off one of our kitchen chairs to get everything to look “just right.”

I was 10-years-old and hosting my first party. It wasn’t my birthday and it wasn’t a holiday. It was a party for a “club” that I wanted to start called “The Stars Club.” It was 1982 and I had just seen the movie Grease. The Pink Ladies with their shiny satin jackets just blew my mind. An exclusive, fun club for girls. Surely that would be my ticket to popularity.

For weeks, I labored over the invitations. I cut colorful pieces of thick construction paper. I glued. I glittered. When the invites were done, I marched them into class and boldly handed them out. And then I anxiously awaited the date of our first club meeting.

There I sat, on the first Saturday of summer, on one of the four chairs I had arranged in the middle of the den (one for president, VP, secretary, and treasurer). I nibbled from bowls of Doritos and Cheetos, listened for the sound of feet on the gravel driveway or a knock at our front door. Nothing. The minutes ticked by interminably and still nothing.

I sat there for over an hour, well after the start time on the invitation, hoping that someone would show up to the inauguration of The Stars Club. I made up excuses for my friends. I imagined that I had gotten the date wrong. I pictured car accidents and last-minute sicknesses. I ate more chips.

When my mom finally came into the den to check on me, I had already elected myself as president, VP, secretary AND treasurer of the club. I don’t remember what she said to comfort me, partially because I was far too humiliated to actually listen to the words coming out of her mouth. Even in front of my mother, I never wanted to cry. I never wanted anyone to know that I was hurt or injured, ever. (Point of fact: I once  ripped off the entire nail on one of my pinky fingers at a church bake sale and yet managed to calmly ask one of the ladies where my mother was with blood dripping off my hand.)

But I was hurt. Deeply. To the core. Being an outsider isn’t easy, never mind your age. We’re all acutely aware of our “status” in social circles and to be left out of things is almost always injurious to our sense of self-worth.

My friends eventually apologized and made their excuses and we all moved on, but I never forgot what sitting alone at my first party felt like – the sting of it. I never really got over it. To this day, whenever I throw a dinner party, I secretly expect that no one will show up. I steel myself to sit all alone with my crudités and party favors. It has never happened again, the dreaded sequel to The Stars Club disaster, but one never knows.

I still throw parties – despite the fact that my first one was such a resounding failure – because I have a desire to connect to others, to befriend people, to know them a little better. It’s who I am. It’s true that I’m not always successful, and that people don’t always like me or want to attend, but sometimes they do.

P.S. I remain the president elect of The Stars Club, but the VP, secretary, and treasurer positions are still open. Did I mention that we have cool jackets?

My Mortified: Worst Dramatic Poetry Ev-ah

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If you are not already familiar with the comedy performance series called Mortified, then you should check it out.

But, for the sake of time, let me sum it up for you here: Real, average, everyday, normal people like you and me bring in their old pre-teen and teenage journals (you know you had one) and read excerpts from them live on stage (because they have serious cojones). Because, you know, nothing is funnier than how seriously we took ourselves and our “problems” at that age.

I have no doubt that the stuff people read is 100% real and not written recently, because you cannot fake that kind of sincerity in writing style as an adult even if you try really, really hard. The reason that these journal entries, old letters, rap lyrics, and poems are so hilarious is because they have that distinct whiff of “truth” about them. Our old selves believed the stuff in that journal wholeheartedly.

Recently, I’ve been going through my old things and I found an old journal from my first year in college. It’s some pretty good, terrible stuff. I’m going to share a few excerpts below because I’m braver now than I used to be.*

Background: I was 18. I was a newly-cool freshman in college who had been a total nerd in high school (no dates, no parties, no life whatsoever outside of calculus homework). In my dorm, I met and “fell in love” with a defensive lineman on our football team. These poems are about him. Enjoy.

“He Returns” – written on Sept. 18, 1990

After a long absence he returns,
Ending the solitude which was mine -
To keep the memory inside and to wither away,
To meet the world with feigned beautiful smiles,
A little less bright and content with each day -
But the loneliness has ended; he returns.
And if it is fate to no more receive his caresses -
To linger within his smile and feel warmth,
To receive his gentle attention,
Mother, sister, lover as he needs them -
Then the change must be endured
For the fragile new bond to be preserved.
A new happiness which is mine
After a long absence her returns.

(Note under the poem reads: “I am unhappy.”)

No Title – written on Dec. 16, 1990

I watch you more these days.
I watch for a sign that will tell.
It will speak for itself -
No, no need to explain.
It will tell me of your thoughts;
They linger on your mind,
Never passing your lips -
Never speak of the pain.

Your Eyes – written Dec. 18, 1990

I look into your eyes,
But the truth eludes you.
The words pouring from your lips
Are not sincere.
Something hides behind the
Cold stare of those eyes,
But the truth eludes me.
The tears falling from my cheek
Are in vain.
I wonder at those eyes,
The truth stabbing me
With blue icicles through the heart
Filled with love.
Turn away your beautiful eyes,
They lie to hurt me.
Sorry coming from your sweet mouth
Has meant nothing.

Let me give you a more “accurate picture” of this “love affair.” We “dated” for about two years. He punched his hand through a dorm window one night; I ripped up his football jerseys because I found out he was “dating” other people; he carried me over mud puddles like a doll; I made him a poetry chapbook; he nearly ripped my dorm room door off because I refused to talk to him; I flirted with his best friend from high school as revenge. Um, yeah. That kind of stuff happened with us on a semi-regular basis. All I can say in my defense is that we were young, there were hormones involved, and I have a tattoo I regret of a broken heart and his football number as lingering proof of my stupidity. Is that mortifying enough? I think so.

*(Contextual note: I signed up to be in a Mortified show, and then backed out because I felt strange making fun of my teenage self. It felt like I was betraying something. But then again, the material was more personal, about my family, so maybe that’s it. It’s easier to make fun of lost loves than your mom.)

Football player in question, circa 1991. He reminds me of Chris Pratt's character on Parks & Rec. And yes, I might have been a little Aubrey.

For some reason, this song seems appropriate for this particular disclosure:

A Good Neighbor Policy

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I first met the older woman who lived next door when her son inadvertently parked in our space in the shared garage of our apartment building. Frustrated, I knocked on her door to complain, but when Pearl answered, she was hobbling. She had just broken her ankle and she needed the space. I felt like a big jerk. It shouldn’t matter, after all, whose parking space was whose. We moved to another empty space in the lot. A few days later, Pearl slipped a handwritten thank you note under our door expressing hope that we might continue our “good neighbor policy.” She invited me for tea, but I never went.

In the months that followed, I saw Pearl in the hallway or on the stairs. Her ankle had healed and she began walking around our neighborhood in her brightly-colored sun hat and dark glasses. After the parking incident, we said hello to each other in passing. Then, slowly and hesitantly, we started to exchange pleasantries. She asked me what I did for a living, since I was home during the day. I told her I was a graduate student and writer who studied science and medicine in China.

“I am from China,” she said. “And I am a writer, too.”

A few days after we discovered our shared mutual interests, Pearl knocked on my door with a book in her hand, an autobiography of her life growing up in a village during the Chinese Revolution. Her latest book, she said, was the story of her time as a famous revolutionary’s wife. Then she asked if I might accompany her to a reading of her work in San Francisco.

“You see,” she said, “my son cannot attend. He is too busy. And I am afraid to come back to Berkeley at night by myself.”

“I’d be happy to come. We’ll drive you home,” I replied. “Good neighbor policy.”

Months, then years, passed as I struggled with my degree requirements and the onus of writing my own memoir. Pearl and I became closer through our chats about books, China, life in California. When she asked me what I was working on, I explained that I was trying to craft an account of my own childhood, about learning to survive the separate early losses of my brother, my mother, and my father. Unlike most people who heard my story and either felt sorry for me or were simply shocked by all the tragedy, Pearl placed her small, wrinkled hand on my arm as we stood in the bare stairwell of our building. She looked up into my face with sharp eyes and said: “I know what it is to lose people, to have a difficult youth. We are a lot alike. You are strong, so I will not worry about you.” Whenever I saw Pearl after that, she asked me how the memoir was coming along, what I was reading in my classes, when I would head back to China.

Then one afternoon Pearl left me another handwritten note – almost identical to the first in its brevity and formality – asking me to stop by. She was moving to a smaller apartment and wanted to give me some things. When I entered her home, books were everywhere – on shelves, on tables, on her desk, on the floor.

“I can’t take everything, so I want you to have some books. As many as you like,” she said as I started combing through the titles. She had original editions of Jonathan Spence’s famous works on China, all of Van Gulik’s mysteries set in China, and a host of old, dog-eared paperbacks of classics – Gide, Gogol, Flaubert, Kafka, Beauvoir, Herodotus. I was in heaven. As I piled up stacks to take with me, Pearl talked to me about losing her husband, about grief, about aging, about living alone.

“The time comes,” Pearl said, watching as I flipped casually through her reading life, “when you have to let go of the past. It is too much to carry into the future. I love these books, but it is time for me to let them go.”

Pearl moved out and I forgot about her books for years, buried as I was in my own reading and the writing of my dissertation. But as I prepared to relocate, I started going through my books, Pearl’s books. They are filled with underlines and scribbled notes. As I read her underlined passages, I realized that Pearl had not given me books, she had given me her intellectual history, a roadmap of her thinking, a key to becoming a better writer. In her last act of good neighbor policy, Pearl had given me a part of her past so that I could use it to write my own future.

Life Lessons on a Long Hike

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On Sunday, my husband and I went on a long hike. We drove out to the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve in the East Bay. The weather was gorgeous: warm without being hot, sunny, bright. It was one of those days you long for whenever the weather is awful, the kind of day that you daydream about in the dead of winter. In other words, it was a perfect day.

For our hike, we chose an 8.5 mile loop that delved into the lush, green valley, sloped by the remains of former coal mines, curved through open fields and through a grove of pines and eucalyptus trees, and then back over the ridges of the hills. In retrospect, 8.5 miles seems a bit ambitious, even if we were well-stocked with hearty snacks and copious amounts of fresh water. By the end, I was exhausted.

Even on the trail, however, I knew that there was something special about long hikes, something symbolic of the journey that we all take through our long lives (if we are lucky enough, that is, to have long ones). Going on long hikes is good for the development of the soul; it is like going to church without organized religion. On this particular hike, I realized that going out for a long, long hike is like going to nature’s school. There are lessons to be learned.

1. Don’t be afraid to go “off the path.”

Maps are essential to any good, safe hike. But sometimes, the plan itself takes over and we forget to explore. This is a particular problem for me. I am a control freak; I feel like I have to be in charge of our route because I think I have a superior directional ability (which is only partially and sometimes true). I get so wound up about being on the “right” trail that I lose sight of the scenery on the trail I am on. In other words, I am so consumed by being on the path I originally chose that I’m afraid to diverge from it at all. I’m scared that I’ll lose my way, that I’ll get lost, that I won’t make it to my destination. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s okay to change course, that as long as you are on a path you aren’t really “lost”, and that things will work out

2. Look around you; enjoy the view.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hike, I spend a lot of time looking at my feet and the ground ahead of me.  I’m terrified of slipping or of stepping on a snake. In the minutiae of walking through uncertain terrain, I forget to stop and look up. It’s easy to get lost in the details and forget about the big picture. Stop to enjoy the view.

Challenge: DON’T rush to take a picture. Just look at the view. Try to remember it without a photo, the “old-fashioned” method of capturing a scene.

3. Don’t obsess about how far away your goal is.

At about 6 miles into any hike, I start to freak out. (Ask my husband if you don’t believe me.) By the 6 mile mark, I’m tired. My legs ache, my feet are starting to develop blisters, and I’m pretty sure we’re on the wrong trail (see point one in this list). I start to wonder if I’ll make it. I whine – a lot. It’s hot. It’s all uphill. Can’t we take a break? Where the hell are we? What was I thinking?

At this point, I take a much-deserved break, sit down, and eat something. I try to focus on how far I have already hiked. I remind myself that I can do much more than I think I can. I have reserves. My husband usually reminds me that I have never quit anything in my life, that I am a strong woman, and that I’ll make it just fine. Then we laugh and start hiking again.

4. Don’t let fear keep you from doing and seeing interesting things.

At Black Diamond, you can go into an old prospecting tunnel. It’s a tunnel that is 400-feet into the side of a very large hill. It’s about 5 1/2 feet high and 5 feet wide. It’s deep. And black. And, well, cavernous. In other words, it’s scary.

I went in first and got about 30 feet before I started to freak out. I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know what was coming up. It was cool and clammy and damp – like a grave.

I went back out while my husband kept going. Outside, I rethought my decision. Was I really going to let fear of darkness keep me from experiencing something new? Really? Was I?

Then I realized that I still had my sunglasses on, which leads me to . . .

5. Do not make something darker than it has to be.

I took off my glasses and the tunnel seemed less scary. Duh. I had been making it worse than it was. I went all 200-feet into the tunnel that it is possible to descend. I did it. And I lived to tell the story. And it wasn’t that bad. Go figure.

6. Push yourself, but not too much.

Long hikes require endurance and the ability to push past your normal limits. But that doesn’t mean that you have to be a crazy masochist about it. Hikes should be planned according to your ability – neither too easy nor too hard. If it’s too easy, we don’t get stronger. If it’s too hard, we either hurt ourselves or give up on our goals. The middle ground is not easy to find or sustain, but it’s the surest way to enjoy yourself AND to get somewhere interesting.

7. Reward yourself for successes that happen along the way.

Hey, it’s not all about finishing. If you began every long hike thinking about its end, you’d never even start down the trail. That’s why trails are mapped out by segments. Go .31 miles and turn left. Check. Climb uphill for .91 miles. That’s doable. At the top of said climb, have some chocolate and an orange for a reward. It makes the climb easier and the reward sweeter.

8. Trust yourself.

When we came up to a poorly marked intersection on the trail, we had to choose which way to go. We checked the trail marker. Nothing. We looked at the map. Not much help there, either. We had to guess, based on our assumptions about the map and where we were, which way to go. We had a hunch that left was correct. We trusted ourselves, knowing that we could always track back, if we needed to correct our course. In the end, we chose correctly. If we had over-thought it, as I am prone to do, we would have gone the wrong direction. Sometimes our instincts are better than logic, especially when we don’t have all the information that we need to make a choice. Trust yourself.

Lately, I’ve been so focused on the uncertainty of my future (will I get a job? will I publish a book? will I ever have enough money to go around?) that I’ve been missing out on the present tense. I’ve been so goal-oriented that I almost lost sight of why I chose some of those goals for myself in the first place. I have been so consumed with worry about being on the “right path” that I forgot to enjoy the journey.

In his writings on nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us that in nature all things are fluid, in constant motion, and that only in understanding this could man begin to see the whole of existence. For Emerson, nature is the antidote to modern life because it reminds us that there is something greater than ourselves. It is a check on our hubris, on our worldly anxieties, and balances out our souls.

I’m not exactly a transcendentalist, and I don’t know if I think that nature is the highest approximation of god, but I do know that a good, long hike is sometimes necessary for me to recalibrate my mind/soul. It helps to remind me to get out of my own way. From this perspective, life’s trials and nature’s trails are alike after all; all the same rules apply.


Divorcing Duran Duran – Series Introduction, Part Two

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In college during the early 90s, I lied to guys in my co-ed dormitory about Duran Duran. I told them that I had once turned down an invitation from Simon LeBon (as if) because I thought that made me infinitely “cooler” somehow. Ordinary women didn’t turn down rock stars, that’s for sure. And I never wanted to seem ordinary, even if I was a textbook case of late-teen insecurities and low self-esteem. In public, I started listening to more “dangerous” or more popular bands – Red Hot Chili Peppers, NIN, Living Colour, GnR. To fit in, I abandoned Duran Duran, but still listened to their CDs and tapes obsessively in the confines of my room.

I developed a secret Duran Duran habit.

When their Wedding Album dropped, I was ecstatic. For a cultural minute, I could once again revel in the band. I could listen to their songs openly. Heck, I could blast Ordinary World on the radio. (Side note: The radio waves had been bereft of Duran Duran songs for a few solid years after the original group split and their second 3-member album tanked.)

Like they had done in my early teens, Duran Duran got me through the terrible awkwardness of my late teens. Something about the music soothed me and made me feel like it were possible for me to grow into the impossibly gorgeous, talented woman I had always wanted to be – but wasn’t yet. I was chubby (truth, though none of my friends ever believe me now), I was sheltered (my dad had banned me from dating, so my first kiss was at age 18), I had no idea what I was doing (by 18, I was living entirely without family).

Fast forward to 1998, and John Taylor on the phone with me, and the tape of our conversation that I now hold in my hand.

It had been nearly impossible to get John on the phone. He was touring as a solo act in the late-90s; Duran Duran was in the throes of what then seemed to be an interminable hiatus. I had several phone calls with his PR agent as we tried to schedule a time for us to talk for 15 minutes. In the midst of all this, John’s mother died. The PR agent was profuse in her apologies, but the interview would have to wait. My own mother had already been dead for 12 years, but I still felt the pinch of a sincere empathy. It was never easy, I knew all-too well, to lose your mom. So, I waited.

When my phone rang at the appointed time, I was too nervous to immediately pick up. If I had a dollar for each time I had imagined the moment that John Taylor would call me up, I would have had enough money saved for a better apartment in NYC. And yet, I never imagined it like a business call. I had to force myself to ask him normal questions, not Duranie questions (which, like Star Trek questions, can be overly specific). I was petrified of saying “I love you!” at some point in our conversation as a non sequitur.

What was supposed to be a 15-minute interview ended up being a 40-minute long talk. John was funny, thoughtful, and inquisitive. There were pauses where he would ask me questions and I would answer. He told me what movies I should go to see. And then, unexpectedly, I told him that I had to go. Something made me feel like I had taken up too much of his time; I almost felt guilty about it.

In the week that followed, I saw him in concert twice, and missed a phone call to meet up at his NYC venue. In the years that passed, I always regretted missing my chance to meet him in person. I filed the story on him; it was rejected because the editors felt that a story about the bass player for Duran Duran wasn’t half as interesting as its lead singer might have been. I moved on, but I kept that tape of the interview in my lock box. Until now, years later, as I prepare to listen to it again, for clues as to why I’ve held onto an infatuation for decades.

About a week ago, I met John Taylor in person at a record signing in Berkeley. I waited in a long line with other fans, slowly realizing that I wasn’t half the “Duranie” that I thought I was. No, I didn’t know Simon’s children’s names. No, I couldn’t name any tracks off of Astronaut. I had no idea that John had multiple tattoos, and I couldn’t tell you what they were. I felt like an alien in that line, like someone who looked like a Duran fan, but was a quasi-imposter. In truth, I had “moved on.” I had divorced Duran Duran slowly, over time, but I was still left with all of the baggage of a messy breakup. I loved that band and I always will. But something had changed.

This essay series will look at my life with Duran Duran, or, the band’s effects on my life. Our obsessions with bands are ultimately never really about the band, they are about us and what the band represents in our lives. For me, Duran Duran represents my youth, my potential, my future, and all the hope that I have poured into the figures of them over the years. These stories aren’t really about Duran Duran. They aren’t really about John Taylor, either. They are about a time in my life, about growing up, about discovery, about the passage of time.

We are all Duranies, in some sense of the word, even if the names of the objects of our affection and efforts change. Our affections belie our dreams. Our fandom reveals who we want most to be.

Suffering as Social Currency

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Suffering, it seems, has transformed into a form of social currency. For women, primarily, but a few men have started to see the appeal of admitting to a certain level of misery to gain likability. Is it me? Or do we all seem more likely to trot out our sad stories not only for catharsis but, increasingly, for profit?

Perhaps this isn’t really a *new* trend. Certainly suffering has been a bit more of an asset since the advent of the best-selling memoir and the ad-revenue-generating reality television show (or blog). Pretty much everyone knows – intuitively, by now – that to win anyone’s vote or garner a lot of publicity, one has to open up about life’s trials and tribulations.

I could list examples here, but they are too many and too obvious. You all know what I mean. In reading this post, I’m sure you’ve already had a few examples spring to mind. You might even have a few “real-life” examples of people you know using their troubled childhoods to explain or excuse some present-day behavior. Don’t we all, on some level, engage in a pornography of suffering?

Listen, I am no stranger to this myself. But relating tales from my childhood is a relatively new phenomenon for me. For years, all I wanted was to seem normal (whatever that is), like I had a “normal” life. As Oliver Sacks once wrote about his patients, I spent a lot of time “acting being normal.” In the past decade, however, we have – as a culture – started to be more “open” about our abnormalities, our uniqueness, our peccadilloes. That’s probably a good thing, or at least has good effects (feeling closer to others, a relief that we are not alone in suffering or troubles, etc.). However, I also feel like the memoir/reality TV craze has upped the ante. It’s not enough to share the past, we have to dramatize and enact it in order to gain legitimacy as “sufferers.”

Sometimes I feel like we’re all engaged in a contest to prove Who Has Suffered the Most. Like there is an award for this, outside of life experience and insight. (Well, maybe there is. I know quite a few people – myself included – who got literary agents due to an interest in their abnormally sad tales.)

I remember when I first realized that my painful childhood could be an asset. It was while reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius. He had taken this awful thing in his life and turned it into a best-selling narrative. “Hey,” I thought, “I can do this. I’ve got a heartbreaking tale.” Clearly, I was not alone. In many way, Eggers’ and Frank McCourt opened the floodgates to a deluge of sadness, struggling, and sickness. We read about cancer, about being widowed, about alcoholic parents, about abuse, about homelessness, about depression, about divorce, about losing a child, about attempted suicide, about anger, about self-starving, about pain of so many varieties that I have lost interest in taken a full inventory of them.

Not to sound like a curmudgeon who doesn’t care about people suffering, but lately I’ve started to ask myself: So what?

Writing a memoir was the catalyst for the question. In unearthing and examining my own suffering, I started to wonder what purpose it all served. Sure, it was – in some ways – therapeutic for me, but why did I feel the need to share my pain with others? To what purpose? To what end? Then, as I struggled to find a narrative arc to the story of my childhood, I began to feel uneasy about my participation in the genre. Was I just dragging these stories to light so that I could gain readership? And if so, what the hell did that mean about me? About my potential readers? About all of us together?

Medical anthropologists are no strangers to thinking about the pornography of suffering (in fact, I stole this term). Why do pictures and narratives of people suffering move us? How do they move us? What work are they really doing? Does all this visible suffering make us numb to the real thing? (For an academic take on this, see Carolyn Dean’s article here.)

I participated in a “beauty” contest recently, and I noticed that in many of the women’s narratives of why they felt beautiful after 35 (which accounted for 50% of the judging), they often made recourse to their suffering. I am not saying I am innocent of this, since I, too, wanted to “win” the contest. I intuited, like almost everyone else, that to “win” people’s vote, I needed to relate a story that people could empathize with. Some of the contest entries are thus blatantly all about suffering and “survival.” It almost seems as if some of the women were trying to “out suffer” each other. Which is rendonkulous.

Needless to say, and especially after my literary agent quit the business last spring, my own memoir of suffering has stalled. Until recently, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue writing it. I wasn’t certain that I knew the reasons WHY I wanted to write about my life in the first place. I didn’t want to use tragedy as social currency. And I definitely didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea that I might profit off my brother, my mother, and my father’s untimely deaths.

In the end, I did decide to take up the project again, but in a different form. It’s becoming less about a pornography of my suffering now than an exploration of how we all deal with fear (of death, of flying, of losing our car keys, of cancer, of spiders, of *fill in the whatever you are afraid of here*).  I reorganized the story so that now I’m telling the history of viruses (what I study professionally), and why in the world a former journalist would ever want to spend the rest of her life writing about disease. Why? Because I want to understand fear. I’m interested in how we all get on with our lives despite the fact that we all know horrible things will eventually happen to us or to people we know. Maybe that’s why people can’t get enough of suffering; we want to know that we are not alone. I just think we need to be more introspective about our own interest in watching or hearing about other people’s suffering. Like regular porn, more isn’t necessarily better.