The Social Animal

CHAPTER 17 GETTING OLDER

OVER THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS, MOST married couples are compelled to navigate a transition between passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is the kind that grips a couple in the first heady phase of their affair. Companionate love is the calmer state that comes after, filled more with quiet satisfaction, friendship, and a gentler happiness.

Some couples don’t make the transition. UN data drawn from fifty-eight different societies between 1947 and 1989 suggests that divorce rates peak around the fourth year of marriage. But Harold and Erica seemed to do fine during those years. Erica succeeded Raymond as CEO of Intercom around their twelfth year of marriage, while Harold was living in centuries past, writing his books. For the next ten years they spent more time absorbed in their jobs than really being married to each other. They each spent a lot of time at work, they each had their philanthropic causes, and most other parts of their lives faded away, including their ability to communicate with each other.

After they had both established themselves, and could relax a bit, they found they no longer had as much in common as they had supposed. It wasn’t that they fought. They just drifted into different interests and different spheres.

After years of ascent and struggle, they had grown weary of surrendering themselves to others. In her book The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine writes that often a middle-aged woman “becomes less worried about pleasing others and now wants to please herself…. With her estrogen down, her oxytocin is down, too. She’s less interested in the nuances of emotion; she’s less concerned about keeping the peace; and she’s getting less of a dopamine rush from the things she did before, even talking with her friends. She’s not getting the calming oxytocin reward of tending and caring for her little children, so she’s less inclined to be as attentive to others’ personal needs.” Men, needless to say, don’t suddenly become more nurturing and communicative either when they and their wives hit fifty.

Erica had become a minor star in the business world. Intercom had rebounded and was registering steady gains. She traveled from conference to conference, gave her presentations to admiring audiences, and it was always something of a comedown to return home and find Harold dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, pecking away at his computer. Their lives had taken different shapes. Erica loved to be on the go, her days stuffed with meetings, lunches, and commitments. Harold liked to be alone, exploring an earlier historical age, with nothing on his calendar. Erica was absorbed with the challenges of leadership. Harold was more and more lost in his world of books, characters, and documents.

To Erica, his endearing traits now began to seem more like signs of deep character flaws. Wasn’t his tendency to leave his socks in the hallway a sign of deep selfishness and narcissism? Wasn’t his tendency to go unshaven a sign of deep laziness? Harold, for his part, was sometimes appalled by Erica’s compulsive need to flatter anybody who might be able to help her company grow. When she dragged him out to receptions and parties, she’d invariably leave him within minutes. He’d be stuck in some pointless conversation, and when he looked around the room, she’d be yards away laughing with some CEO she probably privately detested. He was sometimes offended by the compromises she made to get ahead. She was sometimes offended by his essential passivity, which he coated with self-approving smugness.

William James once observed that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” In years past, they might have overlooked each other’s flaws, but now Erica and Harold made silent and contemptuous notations.

As the years went by, they fell out of the habit of really talking, or even looking each other in the eye. In the evening, she’d be on the phone in one part of the house, and he’d be behind his laptop in another. Just as sharing everything had been a habit when they were first married, now not sharing had become a habit. Sometimes Erica would have some thought she wanted to express to him, but their relationship now had an unwritten constitution. It would now be inappropriate to rush into his office with some enthusiastic notion or curious fact.

Harold didn’t even seem to listen when she spoke to him. About once a week, Erica would remind him of some party or task she’d committed them to. “You never told me about that,” he would respond crossly.

“Yes, I did. We talked about it. You just don’t listen to what I say,” she’d answer.

“You must have imagined it. We never talked about this.” They both acted as if they were sure they were right, but deep down they both wondered if they were losing their minds.

Marriage expert John Gottman argues that in a healthy relationship the partners make five positive comments to each other for every one negative one. Harold and Erica weren’t near that bar. They weren’t even in the game, since they didn’t make many comments to each other, positive or negative. Both of them sort of wanted to return to the old days, when they were spontaneous and loving around each other, but they were afraid they would be rebuffed if they tried. So they just withdrew another step from each other. As their relationship withered, they both blamed it on the other person’s character flaws. They both dreamed that they would someday go to a marriage counselor, and the counselor would utterly vindicate their view that the other partner was entirely to blame.

At work and at dinner parties, they were still cheerful, and they figured nobody could tell what was happening at home. But that wasn’t true. Harold would tell a story and when he was done, Erica would blurt out “That’s not what really happened,” and everybody else could feel the harshness in her voice.

They both became profoundly sad. Erica would cry while blow-drying her hair. She wondered to herself if it would be worth trading all her career success in exchange for happiness at home. Harold would sometimes see couples his own age out for a walk, holding hands. That was unimaginable for him now. For Harold, as for Erica, the profoundest source of satisfaction was work, and it wasn’t enough. Harold wasn’t going to commit suicide, but if someone told him he had a fatal disease, he felt he could face the prospect with equanimity.

Loneliness

Harold and Erica’s relationship was completely illogical. They both wanted to repair their marriage, and yet they were caught in a series of negative loops. There was the loneliness loop. People who feel lonely tend to be more critical of those around them, and so they judge others harshly, and thus become more lonely. Then there was the sadness loop. Both felt emotionally fragile and both sensed the other was no fun to be around, so both retreated further out of some emotional-survival instinct. Then there was the fatalism loop. People who think there is nothing to be done grow even more passive and more depressed.

Harold gained weight in this period, especially around the middle, where stress-related weight gain tends to appear. He drank too much. As was his wont, he turned his sadness into a philosophical problem. He lost himself in the Stoic philosophers. He concluded that people weren’t put on this earth to be happy. Life is about suffering, he told himself, and except for his marriage, his life had turned out reasonably well. He tried to make himself impervious to what was going on at home, immune to his own feelings.

Erica saw her limping marriage through the prism of her worldly success. Maybe Harold was envious of her achievements. Maybe he felt humiliated and wanted to take it out on her. When they were first married, he was the more sophisticated of the two, but now she possessed more savoir faire. She was the one who got most of the attention. She was the shining star. It had been a mistake to marry someone so lacking in ambition, and now she was paying for her youthful indiscretion. She unconsciously aimed to free herself from this problem area in her life. She spent less time at home, and when she was there she grew more disengaged, so as not to feel hurt.

The stereotype is that men initiate most of the middle-aged divorces. They find trophy wives and run off. In fact, more than 65 percent of the divorces that strike couples after age fifty are initiated by women. Many simply find they no longer need their spouses—the chores, the duties, the taking care of them, when they get nothing in the way of affection and companionship in return. And so Erica, in her forward-looking strategic way, began to think about the future, about divorce and its consequences for her and for Harold. Could a separation be managed without too much blood on the floor?

Doldrums

One day, after a dustup over some minor thing, Erica told Harold that she’d been looking at apartments. Maybe it was time to divorce. She spoke to him analytically. They’d been heading for divorce for some time now, she observed. It had been a decade since the possibility of divorce first crossed her mind. She wished they’d never been married. There was no evidence to suggest they would ever turn this around.

As the words tumbled out of her mouth, she felt like she was taking a step off a cliff. Surely there’d be no going back now. Her mind was racing ahead: how to explain the divorce to her cousins and her coworkers. How to begin dating again. What would the official story be?

Harold wasn’t shocked or surprised, but he didn’t take the next logical step. He didn’t start talking about what they should do. He didn’t talk about getting divorce lawyers, or offer any ideas about how they would divide their property. He just absorbed her words, started talking about arrangements for a roofer they had engaged, and then went off to the kitchen for some scotch.

In the days and weeks to follow, it was as if nothing had been said. They fell back into their separate orbits. But Harold did feel the tectonic plates shifting inside him. A person’s perspective can change on the inside even as life goes on without.

One day a few weeks after Erica’s outburst, Harold was having lunch alone at a deep dish–pizza restaurant. He looked out the window across the street to a schoolyard. There were hundreds of elementary school-kids out on a blacktop for recess. They were scrambling, sprinting, climbing, wrestling, and kibitzing. It was amazing: You could just unleash kids on a flat, empty space, and they would turn it into a carnival of joyful mayhem.

When they had married, Harold had assumed that of course he and Erica would have children. All families he knew did. But Erica was so busy in the first several years. The time was never right. Once, about five years into their marriage, he mentioned his desire to have kids, just in a normal, conversational way. “No, not now!” she screamed at him. “Don’t you ever burst in on me with that!”

He was startled and stunned. She stormed off to her office.

Those words were the only ones they had ever exchanged on the subject. It was one of the most important subjects of their lives. It had been their most important disagreement, a cancer at the center of their relationship. And they never spoke about it again.

Harold had thought about kids every day, but he’d been afraid to raise the matter again. He shrunk from conflict with Erica, knowing he had no chance in any test of will with her. Somehow he’d thought by his very passivity he could bring her around. Surely she would see he wanted children and feel sympathy for him and do the thing that would make them both happy.

She had been aware of his passive-aggressive side, and it repelled her. He’d fumed privately about her gall in making the decision about kids without him. This had been one of the most important choices of their lives, and she hadn’t even thought to consult him.

He often rehearsed their one brief exchange on the subject. He wondered what had sparked Erica’s furious reaction. Maybe her own childhood had left some scar. Maybe she’d vowed never to bring children into the world. Maybe it was her devotion to work, or some lack of maternal instinct. Sometimes he wanted to force her to have kids, but you can’t bring a child into the world on the basis of compulsion.

He still gazed at children, though. In these midlife doldrums, he watched little babies on airplanes, surreptitiously inspecting their little hands and feet. He noticed toddlers out with their grandfathers—the old guys ineptly trying to feed them and wheel them around. He watched packs of kids on the sidewalks, joking with one another, so joyfully self-absorbed they didn’t even notice the heat or the cold or the bruises on their knees. In his angry moods, he saw his wife’s barrenness as a sign of her ruthlessness, her inability to give, her selfish and shallow commitment to job and career. At these moments he despised her.

Squandered

For a few years, Harold was mildly depressed. He continued writing his books and organizing his exhibitions, but praise for his work began to strangely depress him. Public admiration put his secret loneliness into sharper relief.

His marriage was dormant. He had no kids. He wasn’t active in some political or philanthropic cause. He had nothing to sacrifice for, nothing he could subjugate his own interests for. And of course Erica was always nearby, serving as his foil. He became contemptuous of her monomania and drive, and also sad that he seemed to lack that sort of energy and desire.

He’d always had a drink before bedtime. But in this period he began drinking earlier in the day. Scotch became his caffeine. His brain felt tired and inert much of the time. But if he had a tumbler of scotch, there’d be this moment of awakening, when ideas would surge and everything became sharp again. Then, of course everything would get blurry and he’d fall into one of those melodramatic moods, which were better than feeling nothing at all.

Most days, Harold downed a third of a bottle of scotch. He’d wake up in the morning vowing to change his life. But addiction weakens the learning mechanism in the brain. Alcoholics and other addicts understand what they are doing to themselves, but don’t seem to be able to internalize the knowledge into a permanent life lesson. Some researchers believe they suffer from this disability because they have damaged the neural plasticity in their prefrontal cortex. They can no longer learn from mistakes.

One day, a day like many others, Harold had an insight. It was very much like the insight Erica had had the day she tried to get into the Academy years before. Harold realized that he could not change his drinking patterns on his own, but he could put himself in a context that might trigger changes. He decided to go to an AA meeting.

This was difficult for a loner like him. But one day he showed up at a kids’ hockey rink, and in a side room, there was an AA group having their nightly meeting. He walked in and found himself in circumstances that went against every impulse in his body.

Harold had spent most of his life with the affluent and well educated, and here he was thrust in a room with clerks, salesmen, and bus drivers (a surprising number of bus drivers, actually). Harold had grown accustomed to living in his own world, but here, he was forced into deep fellowship with others. Harold had been raised in a culture of self-esteem and empowerment, but here, he was forced to surrender everything, to admit weakness and disempowerment. Harold had spent the last years not learning from his mistakes, but the 12-step methods threw his mistakes back at him. He had to wallow in them, time and time again. Harold had grown quite secular over the years, but a vague religiosity pervaded this group. The people there didn’t just tell him to stop drinking. It wasn’t a discrete and logical attempt to solve this one problem. They called on him to purify his soul, to rewire the deepest recesses of his heart and being. If he changed his whole life, abstinence from alcohol would be a happy byproduct.

Harold read the 12 steps. He kept the coins. But it was really the people in that group that saved him. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work for most people. Researchers have not been able to predict who will benefit from AA and who will not. They can’t even agree on whether the program works better than the other programs that are out there, or at all.

That’s because the fellowship of each group cannot be reduced to a formula, compared across groups, or captured in a social science experiment, and the quality of fellowship is what really matters. Harold’s group had three people at its spiritual core. There was an enormously overweight lady who loved opera. There was a motorcycle mechanic. There was a banker. They’d been together for nearly a decade and set the tone. They accepted no bullshit. One teenager in the group had died when he covered his body with antidepressant patches. They helped everybody through the trauma. There were always a few people feuding with one another. The leaders enforced behavior guidelines. Harold came to admire them immensely, and model his behavior on theirs.

Harold went almost every day for a few months and then sporadically thereafter. It would be an exaggeration to say the group changed his life. It would be accurate to say that he found it very rewarding. Some of the people there were narcissistic. Many were incredibly immature. Many had seriously screwed up their lives. But the sessions forced him to talk about himself. He had to become more conscious of the gnawing needs inside him. He found himself looking up to people less sophisticated and less educated than he was. He awakened some emotional faculties that had lain dormant since high school. He became more aware of the shifting tides in his own psyche.

He didn’t quit drinking, but now he never drank until after eleven p.m. What really changed was his shrivel instinct. Somehow over the course of his life he had become hypersensitive to emotional turmoil. He would recoil at the first sign of emotional pain. He avoided situations that might cause him inner suffering. He fled from confrontations that might arouse anger, hurt, and unpleasantness. Now he was a little less afraid. He could look at these hidden phantoms squarely. He didn’t have to live in fear of sadness and hurt. He knew he could face it and survive.

Camp

His commitment to Incarnation Camp came about accidentally. A friend was going up to Connecticut to visit his daughter, a counselor there, and asked Harold if he’d like to come along for the ride. They pulled off a road in rural Connecticut and went over a long dirt driveway past tents and fields and ponds. Along the driveway, they came across a group of nine-year-old girls holding hands. Harold looked at them with soft fascination, the way he often looked at children these days. His friend parked near a cabin and he and Harold walked down the hill to a beach by a mile-long lake, surrounded by wooded hills. There was not a house or a road in sight. The camp was its own world, eight hundred acres of wilderness.

The camp served the rich and poor. Some of the kids were from Manhattan prep schools, and others were there on scholarship from Brooklyn and the Bronx. As time went by, Harold would come to see the camp as the only truly integrated institution he had ever known.

The first thing he noticed was that the physical equipment seemed worn and old. General-purpose camps like this faced grave challenges during the age of specialization, when most parents preferred resume-notching specialty setups—computer camp, music camp, baseball camp.

The zeitgeist seemed countercultural, too. There was almost a hippie spirit about the place. During that first day Harold saw counselors and children singing the old folk songs from the sixties—“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “One Tin Soldier.” Harold also saw some amazingly good basketball games. Mostly he saw physical contact. The campers and the staff frolicked like bonobos. They lounged all over one another. They braided one another’s hair and wrestled in playful piles. They played Marco Polo in the lake.

He met the camp director, who saw the gleam in Harold’s eye and asked him if he’d ever have time to volunteer at the place. Twice more that summer, Harold visited the camp and helped do a few odd jobs, like supervising some teenagers during a square dance. Over the winter, he raised money for a swimming dock. The next summer, he visited on the weekends and helped repair the walking trails. One day, he saw a softball game. The kids were great at basketball, but absolutely terrible at softball. Some of them had never been taught to throw. Harold organized a softball program and even put together an instructional league for it.

In early August, the director asked if he could spare five days to help lead a canoe trip down the Connecticut River. There were fifteen teenagers; two counselors, who were college kids; and Harold. He was three decades older than anybody else on the trip, but he fit right in.

As they were paddling down the river, he’d organize trivia contests. He taught them songs, and learned about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. At nights, they came to call him Daddyo, and in the earnest, heavy-but-open manner of teenagers, they told him about their problems—about their love lives, their parents’ divorces, their confusion about what was expected from them. Harold was so touched that they trusted him. He listened with rapt attention. The kids seemed desperate for authority figures. He supposed the teachers and other professionals knew what to say when the kids told them about their problems and fears. He sure didn’t.

The last full day of the canoe trip was arduous. They paddled all day, against a strong wind. Harold told the kids that, when they made it to their destination, they could take all the remaining supplies and have a food fight. When they made it to the final campground, the kids seized the supplies, and within minutes they began splattering them on one another. Great blobs of peanut butter were flying through the air. Everybody had jelly smeared across their shirts. Cake mix was gooped up into thick batter and rolled into sloppy warm snowballs. The kids, the counselors, and Harold hid behind trees, organized meatloaf ambushes, and warded off snow showers of powdered orange juice.

When the battle was over, they were all a mess, coated from head to shoes with gunk. They held hands and ran in a big line into the river to wash off. Then they came out, changed, and had their final campfire. Harold had brought no booze on the trip, and retired late that night to his tent sober and happy. He lay in his sleeping bag, feeling exhausted and lucky. It’s interesting how fast a mood can change. In an instant something turned in him. Suddenly, he felt like weeping.

He had never cried in his entire adult life, except occasionally in the dark at the end of a sad movie. And he didn’t actually cry this time. He felt tremors in his gut. He felt a pressure at the back of his eyes. But nothing actually came out. Instead, he had this weird sensation of imagining himself crying: He was floating above and got a glimpse of himself in a crouch heaving with sobs in his sleeping bag.

And then it passed. He thought about the life he had constructed and the life he would have constructed, if he had been a little more open and possessed a little more emotional courage. Eventually, he fell asleep.