It can be difficult to break out of what you are used to seeing and experiencing. Who mentors young men (and women) who don’t already have good models for how to negotiate long-term, committed relationships when the honeymoon is over and real challenges emerge and compromises have to be made? Who teaches such young people how to communicate openly and disagree respectfully? What I see in my friends is generally couples recapitulating their parents’ model and experience. I see most people I know attaining a professional or graduate degree if at least one of their parents did. I see children of comfortably middle class and above parents generally attaining that level. What one’s parents did is not destiny, but it’s stickier than many seem to assume (most friends take their parents’ accomplishments and the model they provided somewhat for granted).
I grew up in (in spite of my mom’s best efforts) a very chaotic and at times violent household due to my dad’s serious mental and emotional problems and addictions. They were a couple who had married relatively late for their era (twenty-eight and thirty-three, in the late sixties) I suspect because both were less certain of their path. The default to marry and have kids was still strong, though. My dad was, I was told much later, likely a gay or at least bisexual man who of course had to be deeply-closeted. He’d grown up in a gritty Appalachian river town to parents who had finished school in the 3rd and 4th grades. He was the only one in his family to get a college degree or try moving away. My mom took a chance on a bright, interesting, somewhat tortured man and it blew up on her. Who knows why so many of her high school friends got married by the end of college and stayed married? After a long and acrimonious divorce and aftermath full of spiteful custody battles, my dad retreated to his hometown and died barely past fifty. My mom, a shy person with her confidence shaken and lacking a large family of other support network was understandably scared to death about trying to date strangers, let alone bring a new man into her kind of shellshocked remaining three-person family including two elementary school age kids. So she basically gave up on that part of her life to try and be a devoted and responsible parent. She was an only child. Her dad was an only child. Her mom’s younger brother had died in childhood and her older sister married a selfish eccentric investor who disdained family and they never had kids. Her parents had both been single by their late thirties, having both been burned by previous partners. By chance the minister of their large mainline Protestant Church saw something in them - maybe a quiet intelligence and character - and introduced them. I don’t think they were planning on having children and my mom was kind of a surprise. That world of almost default church attendance where a minister might serve such a role in connecting two good people who were a little lonely is largely gone in this country. We had no relationship with my dad’s family and few of his siblings had children anyway.
So I grew up with very romantic, idealistic hopes for how my first relationships would be, but with no practical, realistic idea about how healthy relationships worked. I had to learn the hard way how little I knew and how badly I’d been influenced by seeing virtually only my father, an unstable, self-destructive man I’d last seen at ten, in that role of the male partner. My serious girlfriend at the age most of my friends were settling into committed relationships, following all the steps, from grad or law school, to moving in together, engagement, marriage, home ownership, two well-remunerated professional careers, parenting, etc. knew for sure she didn’t want to have kids. We loved each other a lot but neither one of us was ready or really even wanted to try and settle down and play house. So I was single and mostly by myself in a huge city and fortunately could at least date a lot. By the time an almost absurdly beautiful, smart, accomplished, fun and funny woman decided she really loved me and wanted to bring me in from the cold, I’d been self-protectively emotionally closed off and had become so distanced from that path all my friends had followed, it’s like that opportunity before me wasn’t real. It only takes one person to end a relationship and they can end at any time. Relationships trap people and eventually bring out their worst qualities. That was all I knew and had seen first hand. Whatever my friends had seen and learned and shared from their parents and their large networks of siblings and cousins and professional peers was - in spite of our sincere friendships - like the contents of a black box. Maybe women share more much relationship and partnering advice. But I heard and learned nothing from my friends. My older sister had few relationships and has never married. While I have friends who, among five siblings, for example, all are married to their first spouses and have either two or three kids. Everyone seems to share best practices and contacts and so on within families. My sister and I have rarely spoken as adults. Her conclusion from our upbringing was: you can’t trust anyone and no man will come for me, so I have to take everything for myself, however ruthlessly. When my aforementioned candidate for potential marriage and child-rearing made her goals clear to me (the somewhat exaggerated idea of moving back West and having “three to five” kids and big house with south-facing windows) all I could see was disaster and divorce. There were practical reasons not to take such a risk: I knew no one in the part of the country she was headed and with her goal of soon making partner at a firm, I’d have been the underemployed stay at home dad, stuck halfway across the country from my sole close relative, my aging mother. It’s hard to explain to the people who routinely asked: WTF is wrong with you, most people would kill for this woman, that I simply had about zero idea of how I would remotely provide the stable, long-term role of partner and parent she needed and deserved. How clearly I could see quickly becoming a penniless divorced dad largely estranged from his kid(s) and unable to financially or geographically to contribute to their lives. A few years after she did move West, and not long before she met and had a daughter with her eventual partner (thank God) she visited me and said it had always bugged her things didn’t work out between us. I was enormously touched, but gestured at my cramped apartment and referenced my mediocre civil service job (still the most stable and solid job I’d had) as if to say: I love you, but do you really think I’m cut out to give you what you need?
At new medical appointments and some other institutional settings, I’m sometimes asked, often with a slight tone of disbelief: “Never married? No kids?” Well, the women I dated (and as many dates as I went on, I always favored monogamous, long-term relationships, the best I knew how) didn’t get knocked up. We used birth control. If worst came to worst, they didn’t stop everything else in their lives and careers, when they’d no plans to have a kid, maybe ever. They got abortions. People look at me sometimes seemingly almost in disbelief that I’ve not somehow, someway just by sheer chance, produced an offspring. I look at all of the people who seem to pop out kid after kid almost as a default, regardless of age or how stable a relationship they’re in, or what kind of job they have, and I marvel at that: how do they so casually, if not recklessly, manage to always be with someone, and, in spite of whatever birth control they may use, so often seem to produce kids, even with the other biological parent barely in the picture.
Not all of our family histories or models or personal proclivities or priorities add the same. I come from generally shy, slightly melancholic, somewhat introverted and intellectual people who seemed, across generations, to have a deep ambivalence about their own existence, let alone authoring the lives of multiple others, let alone as a default. It’s hard to explain to friends who virtually only know other stable, financially comfortable, professional couples with kids, as far as the eye can see, how bafflingly opaque that reality and the path to it are to me. When I think about marriage and parenting, you bet I’m risk averse. My first thought is: do no harm. If you’re not sure about marriage and parenting - aren’t sure whether it’s right for you - and you know you lack both the personal tools and family and community support network to make the best go of it, you don’t effing get married; you don’t effing have kids. First, do no harm. I’m glad to be alive for sure. But it took everything my mom had and she needed help from her own already quite elderly parents to even have a chance. I don’t have any close living relatives. Maybe it’s sad, but unless I’m sure - sure about myself, sure about my partner and our relationship, I’m not exposing a child to chaos and trauma. I’m not placing that burden on society. And I’m not risking derailing a good woman’s own dreams and goals, by pretending to be someone I’ll probably never be. So I volunteer a lot and do a lot of animal rescue and fostering and adoption. My dad instincts come out strongly and effectively that way and I care for many smart and very vulnerable creatures who’d have little or no chance without me. Sure I’d love to have a son or daughter to throw a baseball with or take to the museum, but those are the highlights, the fun times. I don’t know what the demand is for aging, shy and somewhat socially awkward single, never married men with no kids or their own, to mentor or volunteer, but I’m open to doing that, too. I know there is a crying need. And I can remember the often anxious, uncertain boy I was and how I craved having a dad, or an uncle or cousin, or devoted family friend - someone, anyone to help show me the way.
It can be difficult to break out of what you are used to seeing and experiencing. Who mentors young men (and women) who don’t already have good models for how to negotiate long-term, committed relationships when the honeymoon is over and real challenges emerge and compromises have to be made? Who teaches such young people how to communicate openly and disagree respectfully? What I see in my friends is generally couples recapitulating their parents’ model and experience. I see most people I know attaining a professional or graduate degree if at least one of their parents did. I see children of comfortably middle class and above parents generally attaining that level. What one’s parents did is not destiny, but it’s stickier than many seem to assume (most friends take their parents’ accomplishments and the model they provided somewhat for granted).
I grew up in (in spite of my mom’s best efforts) a very chaotic and at times violent household due to my dad’s serious mental and emotional problems and addictions. They were a couple who had married relatively late for their era (twenty-eight and thirty-three, in the late sixties) I suspect because both were less certain of their path. The default to marry and have kids was still strong, though. My dad was, I was told much later, likely a gay or at least bisexual man who of course had to be deeply-closeted. He’d grown up in a gritty Appalachian river town to parents who had finished school in the 3rd and 4th grades. He was the only one in his family to get a college degree or try moving away. My mom took a chance on a bright, interesting, somewhat tortured man and it blew up on her. Who knows why so many of her high school friends got married by the end of college and stayed married? After a long and acrimonious divorce and aftermath full of spiteful custody battles, my dad retreated to his hometown and died barely past fifty. My mom, a shy person with her confidence shaken and lacking a large family of other support network was understandably scared to death about trying to date strangers, let alone bring a new man into her kind of shellshocked remaining three-person family including two elementary school age kids. So she basically gave up on that part of her life to try and be a devoted and responsible parent. She was an only child. Her dad was an only child. Her mom’s younger brother had died in childhood and her older sister married a selfish eccentric investor who disdained family and they never had kids. Her parents had both been single by their late thirties, having both been burned by previous partners. By chance the minister of their large mainline Protestant Church saw something in them - maybe a quiet intelligence and character - and introduced them. I don’t think they were planning on having children and my mom was kind of a surprise. That world of almost default church attendance where a minister might serve such a role in connecting two good people who were a little lonely is largely gone in this country. We had no relationship with my dad’s family and few of his siblings had children anyway.
So I grew up with very romantic, idealistic hopes for how my first relationships would be, but with no practical, realistic idea about how healthy relationships worked. I had to learn the hard way how little I knew and how badly I’d been influenced by seeing virtually only my father, an unstable, self-destructive man I’d last seen at ten, in that role of the male partner. My serious girlfriend at the age most of my friends were settling into committed relationships, following all the steps, from grad or law school, to moving in together, engagement, marriage, home ownership, two well-remunerated professional careers, parenting, etc. knew for sure she didn’t want to have kids. We loved each other a lot but neither one of us was ready or really even wanted to try and settle down and play house. So I was single and mostly by myself in a huge city and fortunately could at least date a lot. By the time an almost absurdly beautiful, smart, accomplished, fun and funny woman decided she really loved me and wanted to bring me in from the cold, I’d been self-protectively emotionally closed off and had become so distanced from that path all my friends had followed, it’s like that opportunity before me wasn’t real. It only takes one person to end a relationship and they can end at any time. Relationships trap people and eventually bring out their worst qualities. That was all I knew and had seen first hand. Whatever my friends had seen and learned and shared from their parents and their large networks of siblings and cousins and professional peers was - in spite of our sincere friendships - like the contents of a black box. Maybe women share more much relationship and partnering advice. But I heard and learned nothing from my friends. My older sister had few relationships and has never married. While I have friends who, among five siblings, for example, all are married to their first spouses and have either two or three kids. Everyone seems to share best practices and contacts and so on within families. My sister and I have rarely spoken as adults. Her conclusion from our upbringing was: you can’t trust anyone and no man will come for me, so I have to take everything for myself, however ruthlessly. When my aforementioned candidate for potential marriage and child-rearing made her goals clear to me (the somewhat exaggerated idea of moving back West and having “three to five” kids and big house with south-facing windows) all I could see was disaster and divorce. There were practical reasons not to take such a risk: I knew no one in the part of the country she was headed and with her goal of soon making partner at a firm, I’d have been the underemployed stay at home dad, stuck halfway across the country from my sole close relative, my aging mother. It’s hard to explain to the people who routinely asked: WTF is wrong with you, most people would kill for this woman, that I simply had about zero idea of how I would remotely provide the stable, long-term role of partner and parent she needed and deserved. How clearly I could see quickly becoming a penniless divorced dad largely estranged from his kid(s) and unable to financially or geographically to contribute to their lives. A few years after she did move West, and not long before she met and had a daughter with her eventual partner (thank God) she visited me and said it had always bugged her things didn’t work out between us. I was enormously touched, but gestured at my cramped apartment and referenced my mediocre civil service job (still the most stable and solid job I’d had) as if to say: I love you, but do you really think I’m cut out to give you what you need?
At new medical appointments and some other institutional settings, I’m sometimes asked, often with a slight tone of disbelief: “Never married? No kids?” Well, the women I dated (and as many dates as I went on, I always favored monogamous, long-term relationships, the best I knew how) didn’t get knocked up. We used birth control. If worst came to worst, they didn’t stop everything else in their lives and careers, when they’d no plans to have a kid, maybe ever. They got abortions. People look at me sometimes seemingly almost in disbelief that I’ve not somehow, someway just by sheer chance, produced an offspring. I look at all of the people who seem to pop out kid after kid almost as a default, regardless of age or how stable a relationship they’re in, or what kind of job they have, and I marvel at that: how do they so casually, if not recklessly, manage to always be with someone, and, in spite of whatever birth control they may use, so often seem to produce kids, even with the other biological parent barely in the picture.
Not all of our family histories or models or personal proclivities or priorities add the same. I come from generally shy, slightly melancholic, somewhat introverted and intellectual people who seemed, across generations, to have a deep ambivalence about their own existence, let alone authoring the lives of multiple others, let alone as a default. It’s hard to explain to friends who virtually only know other stable, financially comfortable, professional couples with kids, as far as the eye can see, how bafflingly opaque that reality and the path to it are to me. When I think about marriage and parenting, you bet I’m risk averse. My first thought is: do no harm. If you’re not sure about marriage and parenting - aren’t sure whether it’s right for you - and you know you lack both the personal tools and family and community support network to make the best go of it, you don’t effing get married; you don’t effing have kids. First, do no harm. I’m glad to be alive for sure. But it took everything my mom had and she needed help from her own already quite elderly parents to even have a chance. I don’t have any close living relatives. Maybe it’s sad, but unless I’m sure - sure about myself, sure about my partner and our relationship, I’m not exposing a child to chaos and trauma. I’m not placing that burden on society. And I’m not risking derailing a good woman’s own dreams and goals, by pretending to be someone I’ll probably never be. So I volunteer a lot and do a lot of animal rescue and fostering and adoption. My dad instincts come out strongly and effectively that way and I care for many smart and very vulnerable creatures who’d have little or no chance without me. Sure I’d love to have a son or daughter to throw a baseball with or take to the museum, but those are the highlights, the fun times. I don’t know what the demand is for aging, shy and somewhat socially awkward single, never married men with no kids or their own, to mentor or volunteer, but I’m open to doing that, too. I know there is a crying need. And I can remember the often anxious, uncertain boy I was and how I craved having a dad, or an uncle or cousin, or devoted family friend - someone, anyone to help show me the way.