My child is trying to buy herself new bedding on Amazon and it’s like little obstinate drops of water dripping on a big flat angry stone that’s about to stand up and shout to just pick already. It is hard to spend money, I get it, but I feel like she should strike out on her own and just do whatever her heart tells her…now she’s reading the reviews, oh preserve my soul.
I finally finished A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. It took me long enough—not because I am a slow reader, but because if I want to read more than one sentence in a row I have to hide in the car. Today I sat in the Wegman’s parking lot for an hour, running the heater at full blast, so that I could finish a paragraph. Even then I wasn’t free from interruption. Lots of people walked by and rudely stared at me as if I were doing something untoward. I could feel them and would look up, and there would be their long Paddington stares.
Which is to say, you have to read this book. I mean, you don’t have to, I guess, but you should. Don’t you want to know how things work? Don’t you want to read interesting anecdotes? Don’t you want to learn to draw out your triangles? If my child can be water on a stone, so can I.
The thing that really struck me—well, several things struck me (like a healing blow) but this one is at the top of my mind—is the part about stress:
The conventional view of stress is that it has to do with overwork. Once again, the thinking processes involved in the social science construction of reality move toward quantitative formula and solution. For if stress is simply the result of hard work or too much work, then obviously the answer to stress is not to work too hard. This is a totally unrealistic concept given the type of person who tends to wind up in leadership positions. Trying to be creative and imaginative is stressful, being responsible is stressful, maintaining vision is stressful, being on the lookout for and trying to deal with sabotage is stressful. Yet all leaders move in that direction and not all leaders experience burnout. If the problem is simply quantitative, how do we ever know when too much is enough?
No kidding Dr. Friedman. I never know when too much is enough. I am always going just slightly too far, trying to fix things that are none of my business or working a little harder at tasks that amount to almost nothing until I crack. Anyway, here is the key insight:
The concept of emotional triangles, however, suggests a systems view of stress. To the extent that you (A) become enmeshed in the relationship of B and C (either because you have taken on the responsibility for their relationship or because they have focused on you—that is, triangled you out—as a way of achieving togetherness), you will wind up with the stress for their relationship.
Which is to say that
The stress on leaders (parents, healers, mentors, managers) primarily has to do with the extent to which the leader has been caught in a responsible position for the relationship of two others.
Motherhood, as Friedman points out far too often for my comfort, is uniquely suited for the wrong kind of “togetherness” where you are caught in the web of managing everyone’s emotions for them so that they never have to deal with those realities themselves. It’s so much easier if Mother carries my emotional baggage, or picks out my Egyptian cotton botanical duvet for me, or drives me to school in the snow—easier for her too because when I express my displeasure at her failures, her day will be wrecked and she will learn not to do that again.
I jest, slightly, but this video is a super fun illustration of intergenerational triangulated madness (I think if you click on the pic it will take you to the tweet but then you will still have to come back here to discover my deep thoughts):
So basically, in case you didn’t click, but you totally should, Young Lady in Love desires to be married to Insensible Young Man who, I pray, has been reading A Failure of Nerve because he’s going to need all the help he can get. It would totally be within reason to wonder what kind of relationship he has with his parents. Why are these youngsters getting married at this particular moment? What kinds of things happened in their extended families to precipitate this rash event?
Young Lady in Love has a problem though. She’s been raised to be an “independent thinker” which means that she’s imbibed a bunch of half-baked thoughts from TikTok that her friends are all thinking at exactly the same moment as her—like this Young Person who prefers to keep her father’s name then take her husband’s hashtag overthrow the patriarchy. Young Lady in Love doesn’t therefore understand that there are many layered and various ways that people are tied to each other. Parents and children have deep connections that can’t be blithely swept away by throwing out the emotionally laden but dumb word “property.”
I guess I will just assume that you did not click the link and go through her fascinating reasoning. First, she admits to having this astonishing revelation:
If you let your parent pay for your wedding you kind of have to do it their way.
This is almost biblical in its heartbreak. Remember how Esau, after he married a couple of foreign wives, discovered his parents were unhappy with him and tried to mend it, badly. If only they could have been more open with him before he struck out into the delightful world of love. But some things are too complicated to say aloud, and so Young Lady in Love finds herself in a place she never expected—her parents do have a claim over her despite everything they have said to date. Indeed, they sent her off to places that minimized and underestimated the claims they so deeply assumed they never thought to question them. Which leads her to make this dumb dumb dumb statement:
It’s the year 2023. Women are not property anymore which is why I decided I will be walking myself down the aisle.
Assuming our Young Lady in Love is getting married in a church, someone should whisper in her ear that she belongs to a lot of different constituent entities, not only her parents, but more alarmingly God to whom, whether or not she believes in him, she owes obedience and worship. If she doesn’t want to belong to people, she definitely shouldn’t get married and she better not have children. How horrific will be her lived experience if she ever tries to stagger down a church aisle with a bunch of kids in tow, whining (them, not her, hopefully) and shouting that they dropped a shoe and are hungry because they didn’t have time for a proper breakfast. What portends an “aisle?” It is a long walk toward another person—God, usually, but on the occasion of a wedding, a man who inhabits a whole world of claims and needs and obligations that throw the self into confusion and, hopefully, delight. I bet her parents never took her to a place that had one. Is it her fault that she doesn’t know? Maybe, but I feel like they bear some responsibility for how badly this is going.
And yet, feel their grief:
In his eyes, I’m taking away one of the most important parts of the day.
And, she quotes him:
We’ve never treated you as property, why would you say that?
And:
He’s also trying to say that I’m discrediting everything him and my mom have done for me which to me just feels unrelated. I’m just not a fan of that tradition.
I think what’s been so interesting to me—in a bad way—about the last twenty years is how bewildered everyone is. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in—I can’t remember where I heard this term but it’s right—a right-side-up world. A right-side-up world is any world that hasn’t been infected by the selfish fatuousness of post “Enlightenment” post-post-post-modernism. Right-Side-Up worlds are hard in every respect. They are physically hard. They are spiritually hard. They might not have comfortable plumbing. A lot of them never had antibiotics. They don’t include young ladies declaring to their fathers what they will and will not do at their weddings because “they are not a fan.” Right Side Up Worlds confer meaning and purpose. They aren’t perfect, and if you value excellent medical care and 1-day shipping from Amazon because you need a new duvet right now it won’t be the world you desire. Right Side Up Worlds are still rife with pain and misunderstanding. Young Ladies don’t even get the chance to be in love, in many cases, but are given from one family to another because of how valuable they will be both for themselves and the children they potentially bear. Our Young Lady in Love might use the word “property” for such a circumstance. But one thing that right-side-worlds lack is the sense of bewilderment that our world has because they have deeper and more meaningful thoughts —like that God exists and you owe him something. Right Side Up Worlds don’t let expensive, ideologically predatory universities form their young ladies.
Upon being informed they wouldn’t pay for this wedding our Young Lady in Love had this thought:
It to me still feels like if you’re not going to do your wedding the way I want then I’m not going to pay for it and that just doesn’t feel right to me.
And then also, she still wants to spend all the money:
I’m really hoping he comes round because there’s no way I can afford this wedding if he doesn’t help me with it so I’m just kind of holding out hope that he’ll come through.
I’m so curious how this will turn out. Because there is the cultural dimension, the lack of comprehension between two generations. But there is also a father and his own daughter, whom he loves. How will he communicate his affection? Who will bend? Beautiful things are hard to let go of. Mightn’t she discover that by leaning on her father’s arm and being handed to the Unwitting Young Man she is being honored in ways she never imagined? That being possessed and loved is a precious and terrifying experience?
So anyway, best of luck to her, and happy surviving 2024 to you—have a nice day!
Wow, that was hard to watch, her absolute cluelessness. I wonder if she understands that her father could construct an exact mirror argument to hers, using her same "logic."
"This is 2023, and my daughter is a strong, independent woman. Far be it from me to undermine her independence by having her depend on me to fund her wedding. Anyhow, that "father of the bride pays for the wedding" thing is so last century. And, anyhow, I'm just not fan of it."
So much wanting it both ways these days. Strike that--demanding it both ways. And absolutely blind to the incongruity and, dare I say, actual injustice of her view. It's cliche to point out the entitlement, but this girl thinks she's being so logical and reasonable. The saddest part (to me) is her lack of recognition of her parents love and the rich shared life experience of the transition of the girl from one family to a whole new one. She chalks it up to a dumb tradition. Were we this blind at her age?