A Silver Divorce

Corneliu Baba, Self-Portrait

Once upon a time--just long enough ago for a life story to play out from start to finish--there was a young man of exactly the character that I like the most: incredibly intelligent, incredibly driven, taking no assumptions or institutions for granted, and rising above what was expected from him. Even though this is exactly the character type I like the most, I acknowledge that each character type tends towards its own set of flaws, and that he had exactly the flaws that you would expect: he was stubborn, argumentative, and not easy to get along with, and his rare excellences made it very rare for him to find a real connection.

Analytical, driven, stubborn, argumentative: let’s say he was a lawyer. Let’s zoom in on a specific time and meet him in law school. He was first in his family to attend college, where he identified his specific talents and the quickest path to use them; he left college three years later, without a degree, for law school. Institutions were starting to be stricter about degree requirements by then, so as a first-generation-of-college dropout from a working class family, he stood out on campus. He was very proud of standing out.

One of the people he stood out to was a young lady who was very different from him. She came from a good family, and so she had less reason to question institutions, and more reason to expect she would do well by doing what people expected, and what she had seen other people do. Her family didn’t expect her to go to law school, any more than his family had--and thank goodness they hadn’t, because if they had expected it she would have tried her best, and failed. But they did expect that she would get a man, and keep him.

These expectations gave her an investor’s mindset. A lawyer was a good prospect for a husband, because lawyers are smart and hardworking. A lawyer who had overcome obstacles would be even smarter, work even harder. If he had exceeded expectations so far, you could expect him to keep exceeding expectations. She didn’t think this through word for word. But when her high school sweetheart took her to the Barrister’s Ball, our hero found himself asking her to dance, and thinking that the dance was his idea.

She was so pretty, so genteel, so graciously accepting of his stubbornness, his prickliness. He had been a lonely kid, a lonely teenager. His first real friendships were in college. Staying up all night to discuss books and ideas, a meeting of the minds, was a revelation. He didn’t want to go to sleep when he was with her either. He knew it was different with her than it was with his friends. But he was inexperienced enough to think the difference was just that he had something more with her.

You would not be jealous of their marriage. He took a Mr. Bennet attitude to anything silly or thoughtless or inconsistent in her--the kind of wit that wins over audiences, but doesn’t look quite as good to acquaintances. She was not a Mrs. Bennet, though, because she did not complain. If she married him with more of an investor’s mindset than he would have preferred, at least she did not objectify him as an income producing asset. When he whisked the family off to his small southern hometown to do Atticus Finch things, she never said a thing to imply that she had expected, or would prefer, a white-shoe law firm in her own gracious city. And their differences did not prevent the steady accumulation of a large family of children, who came out better than you’d expect from the Mendelian charts of a gracious, lovely, traditional, religious, & otherwise unexceptional mother--& a father who was ungracious, unlovely, untraditional, unreligious, & exceptional.

He had a sense of justice. He felt it was wrong for him to make her a single mother, or to reduce her standard of living. But he did not think he owed it to her to stay with her. He knew that more happiness was possible. He compared their marriage to his friendships, or even to teaching their children. His love language was precision, he loved arguing, even with his children; he told them that (except at work) he would rather lose an argument than win one, because that meant he had learned something new. But when he called his wife out on some illogical thing she did, she would meekly change her ways, or, more often than he knew, meekly continue what she was already doing. He didn’t care which, you can believe this or not but he just wanted to understand her, and arguing was how he understood. But when she did try to argue once or twice, he tore her words to shreds, as well he could, and neither of them came away better satisfied. He read about Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire, or Heloise and Abelard. He felt that what he wanted was a love between equals. He could not believe that he owed her his life at the expense of looking for that happiness. Shortly after their youngest child received his doctorate, our hero divorced his wife, leaving her everything.

But it’s not like they’d had an arranged marriage. He picked her! And it’s not like naively picking a wife who’s a little bit of a gold-digger is a sin that should bar you from the chance of true love, or a crime for which a jury of your peers would condemn you to the loss of true love. I can’t say that, in either of those two senses, he didn’t fully deserve true love, an intellectual match. But the fact was that he had a bad track record at achieving it.

He picks a woman who is pretty and makes him feel good egoically. Again. Like he did the first time. Only she’s somewhat worse, because at his age, with his kids, he’s a worse prospect, at least for any woman with a low time preference. Eventually he leaves this woman, leaves her everything he has, like he did the first time, only it’s a somewhat worse everything-he-has than last time, because he’s had less time. He does it because that’s what he’s used to. Even though that makes a lot less sense with a woman he’s been with for a few years who’s not the mother of his children. And then he does the whole thing again. Again.

It was an easy mistake to make and remake for someone like him. When you are weird in a way that makes you useful, it’s easier to find users than matches. Until you’renot useful anymore.

Thank god for all the first-round kids; by the time he can’t work any more, his chivalry and magnanimity to his exes has made his children the only retirement plan he has. Irritable, broke, and single, grating against his dependence, he is not an easy man to care for through decline, especially because he is still somewhat difficult towards his first wife, who needs her children’s care as well. Fortunately, she needs it less. What he left her when he left her probably wouldn’t have seen both of them through retirement, but she’s tended it carefully, and she can make it last.