Writer & Columnist | Santa Barbara, CA
Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a gen-X everygal loves to dish about.
Published bi-weekly, 2 or 3 times a month
Down underground, in the basement of UCSB’s psychology building, behind two locked doors and another emblazoned with red hazard signs, a man lies in a pitch-black room, his skull in a scanner. Behind a window, lab techs stare silently at black-and-white renderings of his gray matter.
If this clinical scene doesn’t make your heart flutter, your face flush, and your guts flip-flop with jumpy juice, then you’re clearly not a scientist at the university’s Brain Imaging Center.
But Bianca Acevedo is. She’s a postdoctoral research fellow (am I the only one who enjoys calling women fellows?) who studies the neuroscience of love. “It’s a relatively new field, but it’s flourishing quickly,” said Acevedo, who spends her days translating lofty romantic notions into precise scientific terms. Working with the campus’s “Close Relationships Lab,” she uses a “Passionate Love Scale” to evaluate the “neural correlates of long-term pair-bonding.”
All of which would be funny if it weren’t just a little bit creepy.
If you ever need a friend, introduce yourself to a kid. Unguarded, transparent, and loyal, kids collect pals like pennies.
You never see toddlers nix a friendship over political ideology, or renounce a terrific rapport just because their buddy has a nicer lunchbox and it makes them feel bad about themselves. Their only requirements for friendship: proximity and a grin. And a pile of goldfish crackers doesn’t hurt.
This is a remarkable character trait. Beautiful, really. Until the unchoosy little chums force it on their picky, prickly parents, and then it’s annoying as hell.
Have you ever been thrust unwillingly into crony-hood with other parents simply because your kids are friends? Forced to play nice with a mom you can’t stand — to meet for play dates, chat in schoolyards, attend awkward barbecues — because your children can’t bear to be apart?
It’s irksome. Adults are far more fastidious about investing in friendships. We’re lazier, less patient, more close-minded, but …
“It’s hard to give up valuable time to people who drive you nuts,” explains a mom I know who’s experiencing this now. “I have nothing in common with this woman other than our daughters being friends, and she is so irritating, it’s hard to tolerate more than five minutes of her.”
It’s June. Wedding season. Only a few days left to dig out that embossed invitation, navigate your buddy’s online bridal registry, and take a Sharpie to the scuffs on your party shoes.
During the reception, the deejay will spin “Single Ladies,” and you’ll want to hit the dance floor and show off your mad self-spanking skills. But the groom’s gabby Aunt Joan and sozzled Uncle Ted will stop you to tell The Story. The treasured “How He (or She) Proposed” anecdote. It’s told and retold at these events, laying the foundation for the couple’s mutual mythology, the oral history of their romance.
Our culture loves a good “Will you marry me?” narrative. It’s the dragon-slaying folktale of our modern world. How’d he do it? How’d he fell the beast? Did he use wit, or brawn? Did he bury the ring in bean dip or convince the philharmonic to bust out Dramarama’s “Anything, Anything,” falling to one knee and wailing, “Marry me, marry me, marry me …”?
Outrageous proposals abound in recent news. A San Diego tattoo artist inked “Rachel, will you marry me?” onto his own leg. (I’d marry him for his perfect punctuation, but that’s my freak-ness weakness.) A New Jersey valedictorian popped the question by calling her beau and fellow grad to the stage after her speech. A New York fella edited himself into Back to the Future, rented a movie theater, and took his girlfriend to see the flick — in which he shows up on screen, looks into the camera, and asks her to be his wife. They all said yes. Aww.
There are certain things you expect to see at a kids’ soccer game. Gatorade bottles and orange slices. Coaches’ clipboards and cans of spray sunscreen. Here’s what you don’t expect to see: A 9mm handgun.
Michigan dad James Sherrill was arrested recently after pulling a pistol on another player’s dad at a high-tension soccer match between — get this — 6- and 7-year-olds.
We’d like to gasp in horror. We’d like to grimace in shock. But anyone who’s ever schlepped a folding chair to a field knows adult tempers percolate vigorously at kids’ sporting events. All too often they boil over.
“Coaching seven years of Little League has left me believing that parents at all games should be muzzled,” says a dad I know. “I had a guy threaten to not only kick my ass but have his son kick my son’s ass. Over playing time! It was a sad sight to behold.”
He once saw a father spit on an umpire. “Parent ejected, kid embarrassed,” he says.
Another friend once saw a shoving-turned-punching match between two dads at a soccer game. “One of the wives joined in and took a swing,” he says. “The kids came running off the field, then the guys’ kids went to blows. A lovely lesson to teach your 10 year-old.”
I always thought kids hated to practice. It’s an easy assumption to make if you’ve ever plunked down payments for piano lessons, then had to beg, badger, and bribe your kids to crack the “Teaching Little Fingers” songbook just once a damn week.
I’ve recently realized, though, there are some things kids love to practice. In fact, they spend much of their childhoods willingly rehearsing for life as a grown-up. They practice parenting by caring for baby dolls. They practice working by donning plastic stethoscopes and lugging toy briefcases around the house.
And when they hit sixth grade, it turns out, they practice dating. My son has informed me that suddenly, and on an almost daily basis, girls are “asking him out.”
I try not to snicker, but the semantics alone amuse. Out … where? It’s a funny proposition for a child whose notion of “going out” still means hopping on his bike and cruising the cul-de-sac to spy on neighborhood cats.
“Where, um, do they want you to go?” I inquired the first time he told me.
“I don’t know,” he replied dubiously. “So I said, ‘No, thanks.'”
He has since informed me that “going out” simply means you like someone. “Not regular ‘like,’ but sixth-grade ‘like,'” he explained. “It means, ‘I’m attracted to you.'”
Couplehood is laid out in chapters. One chapter is rife with romance as your peers get hitched. The next is replete with pride as your peers have babies.
The next — the one I’m in now — is saturated with shock, anxiety, and discouragement as your peers bicker, cheat, and surrender their once-happy marriages to the life-hacking bandsaw that is divorce.
It’s ugly. Though my marriage feels sturdy, it’s hard not to wince and take cover, whimpering, under the storm of blame lobbing, heart wringing, and estate dividing that so many friends are weathering.
With national divorce rates around 50 percent, are half of us doomed to betray or grow apart from the partners we promised to have and hold? Are we damned to disillusionment for failing to cherish ’til death do us part?
Our grandparents managed to stay married, either through a stronger commitment to wedlock or a greater tolerance for misery. But if splits are inevitable in today’s live-for-the-moment culture, then can’t they be — shouldn’t they be — less painful?
What if, when our spouses’ faults begin outshining their favors and that irresistible yen for newness comes a-knockin’, we could gracefully excuse ourselves from the union with no hard feelings? What if marriage were a temporary construct? What if it simply expired, like milk?
You know the best thing about being an only child? There’s no math involved. No fractions required to divvy up the last piece of cake. No pie chart needed to see who got the most TV time.
Sibling-free, I got it all. All the love. All the attention. I got praise for the academic subjects I mastered, like French, and even those I didn’t, like trig. When there’s no competition, you get kudos for succeeding at arithmetic as simple as this: Love divided by one is one.
It wasn’t until I was an adult — and pregnant — that it first occurred to me that love might have a numerator and denominator. My husband and I worried how our beloved dog would cope with having a cooing, pink love-hog in the house. Isn’t it a crime to lavish affection on something and then ask it to share that affection with someone new? I asked our vet.
“Love grows,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked with a seriousness that should be reserved for conversations about heartworm and distemper.
“The heart expands,” he purred cryptically. He was one of those hippie earth-father vets with tons of his own kids and a fluffy, wisdom-indicating beard. “Love multiplies.”
Damn it! There would be math.
It’s a futile exercise, but once in a while, I do it anyway. I indulge in a little nostalgia for things that used to be. New York Seltzer. Grunge fashion. The theme to The Larry Sanders Show. These things made me genuinely, stupidly happy until, like gnat carcasses, they were wiped clean from the windshield of our whizzing culture.
But when I take my deliberately slow and doubtlessly ill-advised stroll down Reminisce Road, there’s something I find I miss more than anything else, something I never truly appreciated until it was gone — the asshole.
Have you noticed it doesn’t exist anymore? In bygone eras, they were everywhere you looked. The guy who refused to leave a tip, the boss who dumped work on your desk at 5:15, the driver who pulled in front of you and slammed on her brakes.
Different generations had different names for these loathsome blights on common courtesy. Shakespeare called them knaves, pignuts, clotpoles. Early Americans denounced them as scalawags and reprobates. Your grandpa may have cursed the neighborhood lout, heel, or cad.