Marriage Sabbatical

Yesterday my wife and I made the 80-mile drive up I-91 to a college in Massachusetts, where we dropped our daughter at a week-long gymnastics camp. As we drove away from the college dormitory where Isabel will be staying we both felt lonely, but only some of that loneliness was attributable to the absence of our girl. Another big chunk of it, for me anyway, was a sort of premonitory loneliness. I was sitting in the car with Erica, listening to her read from our current out-loud book and sharing an intimate conversation, yet I was already missing her.

Back in early June Erica and I started to wonder just what we should do with a week to ourselves. It is often hard to find more than just a day or two with Isabel safely and happily in someone else’s care and we wanted to take full advantage of the week. As we were wondering, we were also spending some time talking about our marriage and what was working and what was not. Something in the “Not Working” category was the quality of our daily conversations. One of the ways we came up with for bringing some interest back to our conversations was to spend time doing interesting things apart from each other. This idea led to the proposal that we spend Isabel’s camp week as a “marriage sabbatical” week.

As soon as Erica said the words, we both felt an excitement at the prospect of a week to go someplace interesting and do something fun or challenging or new. It was like finding a whole bunch of money and getting to spend it on whatever we wanted. We set some quick ground rules to the week and both started trying to figure out where to go and what to do. The ground rules were these:

1) stay in the country in case anything happens to Isabel and we need to get to her fast,

2) don’t spend a lot of money,

3) don’t tell each other much about what we are doing so that we can share our stories when we get back together.

I made a long list of possibilities for the week and was having a very hard time settling on one destination. At the same time, I started talking with friends about the idea of a “marriage sabbatical” and getting their ideas about where to go and what to do. At some point in the process I stumbled upon the guiding idea for my week. I decided to let fate and other people decide for me where I would go and what I would do. I took suggestions and tabulated them and then I asked people to vote. The winning destination was Montreal, Quebec.

So right now I am sitting in a hotel room in Lee, Massachusetts, on my way north. At each step of the trip this week I am going to engage strangers in conversation and ask them what I should do. As I get near Montreal I will ask people where I should stay and then I will take their suggestions. I will ask someone where to go for breakfast tomorrow morning and then do as they say. I will ask my waiter or waitress what they would do if they had a day free in Montreal and then I will do what they come up with. This plan will force me to talk to lots of strangers, (which is no easy task for an introvert like me), and allow me to experience many new things I would probably otherwise not have done. I am looking at the week as an experiment and I am excited about it.

It was funny to get the reactions of our friends when Erica and I told them about our marriage sabbatical. Many people had the wrong impression right away and assumed we were both going to go fool around with other people. (Projection?) That is most certainly NOT what this week is about. Rather, it is a chance to get out in the world and do things and meet people and have experiences that we can then bring back to each other as a way to make ourselves more interesting and more complete. Nobody can be EVERYTHING for someone else and this week is a way to remind ourselves of the importance of being separate so that when we come together, there are still things to discover and learn from each other.

Some of what I experience will be posted here, but not so much as to have nothing left to tell Erica about when I get home. If you have ever been to Montreal and have something you think I should do, respond to this post or send me and e-mail and let me know. I’ll do it.

Right now, I am going to take a run before I get in the car and drive 250 miles north. I wonder what the best four-mile running route is? Think I’ll go ask at the desk and see where they send me…

How Pleasure Works

I have just finished reading a wonderful book by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. It is called How Pleasure Works but perhaps it should have been called The Varieties of Pleasurable Experience. In his book, Professor Bloom catalogues the many ways humans get pleasure, ranging from the basic, (food, sex), to the sublime, (music, art), to the shocking, (cannibalism, memorabilia collecting).

While discussing examples from history, literature, current events, news reports, and laboratory and real-world psychology studies, Bloom makes accessible the theories of many insightful researchers who have spent years studying aspects of the common but complex set of emotions we call pleasure.

Activities as wide-ranging as playing sado-masochistic sex games, collecting and looking at paintings, riding vomit-inducing roller coasters, killing, cooking, and eating a volunteer “victim”, and reading books about pleasure are discussed and examined in order to lay out an overarching theory of pleasure.

Bloom argues compellingly that much of what we experience as pleasure is rooted in the human belief in essentialism. It is a widely-studied and documented tendency in humans to attribute an almost magical power to some people and objects. We see it with small children and their favorite blankets, with athletes and their lucky talismans, with keepsakes and souvenirs from special places we have visited, and with our willingness to pay huge sums for objects once used by celebrities.

Just try replacing a child’s security blanket with one that is slightly different. Brad Pitt’s sweat-stained undershirt would sell for much more than mine would on eBay. Two visually identical paintings are worth vastly different sums of money if one is done by Vermeer and the other is an exact copy by someone else. Much of what we experience as pleasure comes not from the object or experience itself, but from some hard-to-define quality we attribute to someone or something connected to the object or experience.

Bloom’s book gave me much to think about while on vacation in Montana last week. I had a lot of free time to read because we were staying at Erica’s grandfather’s cabin and there is no Internet access at the cabin. Reading his book engaged my mind, entertained me, and gave me things to talk about with friends and family. I liked the book a lot. And, as I said, the reason I was able to finish the book in just a few days was the lack of Internet access.

But now that I am home, (and once again able to access the Internet any time, day or night, in any room and even on the front porch), I am pondering an aspect of pleasure Paul Bloom did not address in his otherwise excellent book. Specifically, I am wondering why it is that I am awful at accurately predicting how much, (or how little), pleasure I will get from spending time on my computer?

When I step back and watch myself, I am forced to conclude that I MUST get a lot of pleasure from spending time on the Internet. After all, I spend hours a day checking the weather in Billings, MT, looking at my checking account balance, reading news of politics and gossip on the Huffington Post website, seeing how many people have visited my blog, catching up with all of my friends on Facebook, reading the newspaper, and following my unfettered curiosity as it crashes haphazardly through the limitless trivia and marginalia available on the Internet.

I must like it, right? After all, time is the single most precious commodity humans have. Our hours are numbered and the total is unknown to us. And for me to spend so many of my hours on the Internet clearly means I must derive immense pleasure from my time there, right?


And yet…why, when I finally hit the “Sleep” command and step away from the laptop, why do I feel like shit? It is not pleasure I get from my time online. In fact, it is the opposite. Spending a chunk of time on the computer usually makes me feel slightly manic, somewhat angry, and mostly depressed. Tell me something Paul Bloom, why do I consistently choose to do something that gives me the opposite of pleasure?

Love the Way You Lie

My daughter has recently graduated from riding in the back seat of the car to sitting up front in the “shotgun” seat. As a result, I have gotten a crash course in the state of pop music in 2010. Before the move, our car radio rarely strayed from the far left end of the dial where our two public radio stations reside. Now the tuner makes regular forays all the way to the other end and I know far more about Jason Derulo and Ke$ha than I frankly care to know.

Isabel is ten and it was right around ten that I started to develop my own musical tastes, so I am trying to be as open-minded as possible about what we listen to. My parents somehow made it through ad naseum playings of entire albums by Styx and Foreigner so I figure the least I can do is bite my tongue as Isabel goes from station to station looking for Usher’s OMG one more time.

However, just last week a song that entered our car made me seriously consider my laissez-faire approach to Isabel’s musical exploration. It was Eminem’s duet with Rihanna called “Love the Way You Lie.” The song is a passionate first person look at a dysfunctional relationship and it ends with a threat of murder. It includes an infectious chorus sung by Rihanna in a sweetly angelic voice. Problem is, the words of the chorus excuse horrific male behavior, lies, and threats of violence with the refrain, “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn, but that’s alright because I like the way it hurts. Just gonna stand there and watch me cry, but that’s alright because I love the way you lie, I love the way you lie.”



I am no prude when it comes to lyrics. I cannot put my iTunes on shuffle when I am at work or when Isabel has friends over for fear of the “wrong” songs coming up while other people’s children are in my care. I am not especially protective about what Isabel sees, hears, or reads. Nor do I have a problem with Eminem—I find his brash, insulting, violent, and misogynistic singing persona interesting, insightful, and often very clever.

But at the same time I want my daughter to grow up to be a strong, self-assured, independent woman who will not sublimate her feelings and needs to those of an asshole. This song has presented me with a real parenting challenge. It is so catchy and so compelling a song that it is sure to be everywhere all summer long. I certainly can’t ban it from Isabel’s ears. Nor do I really want to.

What I have decided to do is to let it play every time it comes on, even to sing along full-throatedly as we tool down Whitney Avenue. And then, sometimes when the song ends, to have a conversation with Isabel about the lyrics and why I find them so horrifying. I do not want to be one of those humorless liberals who takes all the play out of life with political correctness, but I just cannot let his lyrics stand unchallenged. When I look to my right and Isabel is singing along with Rihanna’s excuse of atrocious male behavior, I want her to know that Rihanna herself was the victim of a violent man and that there is no excuse for violence in a loving relationship. Eminem is a masterful provocateur and instead of censoring him from our car I want to thank him for writing such a catchy conversation starter.

On the other hand, when Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” comes on, I simply exercise full parental control and change the station within the first four notes.

This Year's (Illegal) Garden

Here are some pictures of our front garden. It has been an excellent year for our tomatoes, the sunflowers are 8-feet tall, the beans are hugely prolific, and the basil is feeding my pesto addiction quite nicely. The zinnias, black-eyed-susans, and mums are doing what they always do. A friend watered things for us during the heat wave while we were in Montana, (thank you, Sarah), and now we are gearing up to eat a pound of green beans per person per day for the duration.

Swingball

Keeping in the spirit of simplicity that ended my last post, Isabel and I have invented a new game. To play you need a ball and a swing. (We call the game Swingball, for obvious reasons.)

When we come to visit the relatives in Laurel, Montana there is the danger that Isabel will wake up early and watch way too much tv. It is a constant parental struggle to get her outside and active—partly because she wants so badly to vegetate and partly because we want so badly to vegetate while on vacation here.

When we are at Grandpa Andy’s cabin or visiting the “cousins” in Bozeman, there is no such struggle. There is no tv at the cabin, and in Bozeman there are too many kids and too much fun to be had to waste time staring at a screen, watching other people pretend to do stuff.

But here in Laurel life can quickly settle into a bad pattern of staying up late in front of a movie and then waking up early, (since we are often still on Connecticut time), and turning on the television to kill a few hours before everyone else is up and about.

This morning at 7:30 Isabel and I went over to the park just around the corner from Grandpa Andy’s. We brought a shiny red soccer ball with us but had no real plan. We both just knew that in the direction of the tv lie sloth and self-loathing.



Isabel started swinging and I started to throw the ball at her feet as they climbed on the upswing. Sometimes things connected just right and the ball went flying over my head and over the fence surrounding the playground. We quickly devised rules and a system of points to be awarded for each player based on goals and saves.

Here is what we came up with, though you should feel free to modify it based on your particular setting and skill levels.

The goal is roughly 30 feet wide. The goalkeeper stands 25 feet from the swinger, with the goal behind the keeper. The keeper throws the ball at the swinger’s feet as the swinger begins to come forward—you may need to practice the timing of your throws.

If the swinger connects and the ball goes forward it is the keeper’s job to make the save. If the ball is stopped on the ground by the goalie, the goalie is awarded one point. If the ball passes the goalie on the ground, the swinger gets a point.

If the ball passes the goalie in the air at a height between the goalkeeper’s feet and head, the kicker gets two points. If the goalie stops the ball in the air between his/her feet and head, the keeper gets two points.

If the ball goes over the goalie’s head without being caught, it is three points for the swinger. If the goalie manages to block or catch a ball over head level, it is three points for the goalkeeper.

You play until someone has 20 points. Then you switch roles and start over.

That is all there is to it. We are off to play another round and take some pictures.