Renouncing ourselves

One clear indication of the importance of social life to us is our willingness to give up (at least under certain conditions) on our wishes and desires in exchange for being accepted. This all makes perfect sense, since the potential for conflict among people living close together is huge, so from on early age we get taught that there are certain rules that are to be followed and even get punished whenever we fail to observe them.

As life goes, when we are young kids we initially struggle even to understand the rules, then learn to follow them and eventually, typically but the time we are teenagers, reach the point of grasping the background for these rules and get to question them. Almost unavoidably some of the rules end up looking too stringent, unjust or simply random, which is why reaching adulthood and starting a life on our own feels for many like a liberation: it does not do away with every single one, but it certainly provides certain playroom with respect to which rules to observe more or less tightly in the private confines of our new home.

Photo: Carl Harper

However, this idyllic situation does not last long: the moment we find a partner the renouncement starts again. Admittedly, the situation is quite different to the parental home: parents (or even just the father) get to dictate the rules, while in most western societies both members of a couple are generally regarded as having similar status, so rules are negotiated instead of imposed. Still, many relationships are far from the ideal symmetry and it is not infrequent that one of the partners gets to push their understanding of the rules significantly more frequently than the other. And the accommodating partner agrees to this inequality, almost as if they were in front a parent, for the sake of the relationship: the company is worth for them more than sticking to their worldview. However, this is not an entirely harmless resignation. If this friction happens often enough the accommodating partner might eventually decide that they are yielding too much and that they should stand their ground instead.

This idea came to me having dinner with my friend Neil, whose fiancé is a bit of a picky eater. By his own account, whenever they are dining out she not only chooses what she wants to eat, but she also advises him what to eat because "I would like to try that one too". Neil, madly in love and goodhearted as he is, mostly agrees with the choice even it he, like Joey in the American sitcom Friends, "does not share food". One can only wonder how much yielding is too much, and sometimes the relationship breaks up because there is no possible division that is acceptable for both partners at the same time.

Unfortunately, the need to compromise and find a tradeoff does not necessarily get better with time. Especially when children come into play, parents find themselves having to cater to the needs of this new human being who is not only utterly helpless to provide for themselves but they cannot even express what their needs are, let alone negotiate them or reduce their expectations. This is how the unlucky parents of babies with bad sleeping habits end up completely sleep deprived: not supposed to sleep during the day, because they have jobs, and kept up at night by their uncompromising offspring. This is why my father told me already many years ago (and still says so every now and then) that having children is tantamount to signing a blank check and, now that I have children of my own, I can only subscribe the idea.

The problem with this situation is that it can easily erode any perception of agency. When the days become a cycle of obeying to your boss during the day, tending to your children in the evening and sleeping for whatever time is left, you quickly understand that, whatever wishes you might have, only have a chance to prosper is they can live in the cracks: activities that do not require preparation, which can be interrupted at the drop of a hat and which are inconsequential enough that nothing is lost it they never take place. 

Conversely, whenever it is time to really make plans you have to take into consideration much more than your own personal tastes and constraints, because the plan has to be suitable for all: it cannot be too far, because the kids get tired from walking; it has to be mild enough because your wife does not like scary shows; it has to provide vegetarian options; it cannot be close to a lake because there are to many mosquitoes; and the list goes on and on. It is just a matter of statistics that it will be impossible to meet everybody's wishes and a compromise will be necessary, but still, the exercise of gathering diverse requirements and trying to match them is already done. And, over time, it becomes a habit, particularly because the kids' needs and constraints evolve as they grow: one day you need a trail suited for strollers and just a few months later the stroller stays at home and the range of options changes substantially.

This thought arises today because I was recently on a business trip and suddenly found myself with a free evening. Having dutifully fulfilled my social obligations the evening before and with the meetings finishing early for the day I had to figure out what to do with the rest of the afternoon. The schocking realization was that I started considering options that would suit my family, not just me. Particularly after three years of spending all my free time with them, the habit of going straight for the activities that they would like has grown very strong. It is so strong that I do not even need them to object to my suggestions, everything goes as if on autopilot in my head. Only through a conscious effort did I manage to get back to the activities I would like to do. But the realization stirred something in me.

As in the case of my friend Neil, it is very hard to know exactly how many times you can give up on your personal wishes before the situation starts to itch a bit or, later on, when it becomes simply untenable. I have the impression that, in my case, I have internalized these constraints so much that I do not even realize about them. Had it not been for this trip, I might have continued to put their wishes ahead of mine for years without noticing or complaining about it. And now that I have thought about it, I will probably continue to put their wishes ahead of mine for years, noticing but not complaining about it, because that is what comes, in the end, with parenthood. Have a nice evening.