Transforming Love

Orangutan

Bonobo's Lament

I wish I were orangutan,
for that brav nam would turn you on,
and straight from here, I'd be right gone.

We'd make a happy couple, us,
and never curse, nor ever cuss.
(We're not so verbal, all that much.)

We'd argue only over who, must
love whom most, and whom the mostest,
and who'd be best termed mostly mostness.

But dialect is wee too weak,
to utter what my heart should speak,
so I can give no proper speech.

Yet you, dear miss, and missing one,
could dialogic turn me on,
with that brav nam: "Orangutan!"

Postmodern Proverbs: Marriage of Convenience

Bad/Good

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions . . . and also bad intentions."

Moral: The Cat's Paw

Hermeneutic of Dissuspicion: Know left from right, but let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

Conclusion: The Entirety is Incoherent.

Celestial Witticism Nr. 42

Lightning Sparking in the Heavens

Google Images

Prenuptial Agreement

A marriage made in heaven to plans drawn up in hell.

(Not my marriage, of course, and not yours either, just those other ones.)

Five Easy Paces . . . to Beer

P1

P2

P3

P4

P5

A silent toast to my wife, Sun-Ae,
in a Dongdaemun Design Plaza pub,

on the occasion of our twenty years of marriage,

last week, on October 21st,
but celebrated on Saturday, October 24th;

I took some photos of her as well,

but she didn't include any of them,

perhaps because I'm not so handy

with smartphone cameras

and don't do a fitting job . . .

Advice for Squabbling Couples . . .

Professor Keith Sanford
Looking a bit conflicted himself . . .
Baylor University

In my ongoing though nonexistent series on maintaining a good marriage, I cite today a professor from my old, beloved alma mater, Baylor University, whose research results first came to my notice in this autumn's 2012 issue of Baylor Magazine, presented in its Research Briefs under the heading "Anger in disputes . . .":

"[I]f your partner is angry, you are likely to miss the fact that your partner might also be feeling sad," said Keith Sanford, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience in Baylor University's College of Arts and Sciences. His study -- "The Communication of Emotion During Conflict in Married Couples" -- is published online in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Family Psychology.

Sanford found that while a partner will easily and immediately recognize expressions of anger, the spouse often will fail to notice the sadness.

"A take-home message is that there may be times where it is beneficial to express feelings of sadness during conflict, but sad feelings are most likely to be noticed if you are not simultaneously expressing anger," Sanford said. (page 21)

Good advice! Every couple has disagreements from time to time -- cross-cultural couples perhaps more often due to cultural misunderstandings -- but these are commonly expressed in agitation, even anger, when expressions of regret and sadness would communicate better what the problem is.

Keep that point in mind, whether in a bicultural marriage or not, and the next time you're yelling at your partner, be sure to scream out:

I'm so sad at you!

The message will be better understood that way. If you find expressing your more sensitive, vulnerable feelings in this manner to be rather difficult, you can always try first practicing in front of a mirror.

You see, reading this Gypsy Scholar's blog is worthwhile after all . . .

Happy 17th Anniversary, Sun-Ae!

Sun-Ae on Cheonmasan
South Korea, 2012

I don't know precisely why Sun-Ae agreed to marry me, but she did, and I've been happy our seventeen years of marriage, plus the three years prior to that, making 20 years of happiness for me . . . and I hope for her, as well.

From a man hopeless in love to a man hopelessly in love . . . within the space of a few minutes on a train.

Thank-you, Sun-Ae, for making me so happy, still now, so many years later . . .

Gay Marriage and Evangelicals: I Was Sort of Right

On Wednesday, I posted an entry on gay marriage and speculated that the younger generation of evangelicals was less opposed to the position than the older generation, adding that I suspected the older generation of having softened on this issue.

As should happen to turn out, I was right, more or less. Click and take a close look at these statistics posted in an article that I found by Tobin Grant and Sarah Pulliam Bailey on "How Evangelicals Have Shifted in Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage" (Christianity Today, May 11, 2012):

If evangelicals are roughly equivalent to "Born-Again," there has been significant decline among them in opposition to same-sex marriage. Now, look at these related statistics:

Evangelicals aged 18-35 are only 44 percent opposed to same-sex marriage. I suspect that this percentage will continue to decrease.

I therefore hold that my local experience reflects a larger American shift between older and younger evangelicals -- and evangelicals vis-à-vis non-evangelicals.

Go to the entire article for the various complications . . .

The Ironic Pitfalls of a Public Intellectual: Niall Ferguson on the the Blight of Divorce and Illegitimacy

Niall Ferguson and Hirsi Ali

(Image from Daily Mail)

Some readers will recall the above photo from my snarky post from March 2, 2010 that parodied Ferguson's chaos theory on foreign affairs by applying it to the chaotic breakup of his own marriage, but I'll let you read that on your own.

I draw attention to that post now only because I see from William Skidelsky's Guardian article of a year later, "Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" (February 20, 2011), that Ferguson dislikes public attention focused on his private life:

I ask whether Ferguson has been surprised by the reaction their relationship provoked, the gossipy articles and so forth. His tone changes again and he suddenly sounds angry. "I was nauseated. Just nauseated. It makes me quite ashamed to be part of a culture that regards the private life of a professor as something that should be in the paper. It's just so tawdry . . . . making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood. I don't give a monkey's about the so-called celebrities that they write about. But the idea that my private life should be the subject of articles I find deeply, deeply infuriating. Because there's absolutely no way to control or resist that process unless you're very rich, which I'm not.

Given his dislike of such attention, I'm relieved that Ferguson isn't rich! But as a public figure of such prominence, he has to expect attention. Moreover, marriage and divorce are not merely private affairs, as he himself knows, for these issues come up in a recent Newsweek article by Ferguson, "Rich America, Poor America" (January 16, 2012), in which he calls upon Americans to harken back to the traditional American values:

[W]e should pin our faith on the four traditional pillars of the American way of life: family, vocation, community, and faith . . . . But can there really be a way back to an America in which divorce and illegitimacy are almost unknown and wholly deplored? An America in which nearly everyone can find fulfillment in hard work? An America in which whole neighborhoods are bound together by ties of trust and voluntary association? An America in which half the population goes to church every Sunday?

In writing such words, Ferguson surely cannot be unaware of their irony in his case, for his own marriage broke up over his affair with Hirsi Ali, with whom he has just recently had a child (December 2011), a baby boy who only barely escaped illegitimacy because Ferguson married Ali in September 2011, when she would have been five or six months pregnant. Divorce or illegitimacy . . . sometimes, one has to choose, I guess.

I'm not judging, merely noting the irony, given Ferguson's own words. In general, I'm an admirer of the views espoused by both him and Ali, and I wish them happiness in what I hope will be a long, successful life together.

Zündholzfabrik

Zündholzfabrik

(Image from Jugendherberge)

Some readers will recall the story of how I met my wife on a train. Not like the character in Ionesco's Bald Soprano who meets his wife on a train:

Mr. Martin: Madam, I took the 8:30 morning train which arrives in London at 4:45.

Mrs. Martin: That is curious! How very bizarre! And what a coincidence! I took the same train, sir, I too.

After a series of other bizarre 'coincidences,' e.g., living in the same flat and having a daughter with the same name, they conclude that they are husband and wife:

Mr. Martin: Then, dear lady, I believe that there can be no doubt about it, we have seen each other before and you are my own wife.

One of the other characters in the play does call this 'indubious' conclusion into doubt, but let us leave Mr. and Mrs. Martin happily married, for any state of affairs can be doubted by the most skeptical of skeptics, and if the Martins are not man and wife, then my own 'coincidental' meeting with my wife on a train might not inevitably lead to the conclusion that she is my wife.

But to the best of my memory, I met my wife -- though she was, of course, not yet my wife -- on a train to Lauenberg, Germany, for we were 'coincidentally' headed for the same Naumann-Stiftung orientation seminar to be held at the Zündholzfabrik, or translated into English, the Matchstick Factory. Apparently, matches were once made there.

The place seems to have retained a bit of its productive capacity, for it managed to produce another match, and one quickly struck, too, lighting a fire that still burns 18 years later, so our match must have been fated, designed, even if seen only through a glass, darkly:

At times, that match we kindled sorely sticks,
To burn within our craw, if we eat crow,
But most we glimpse the lines of that fabric's
Uncanny dark design we've sought to know.

We wandered down a street and saw a sign,
You took my hand in yours, to my surprise,
Then let it drop as if disdained design
Were little more than worthless alibis.

But later, when rejoined, that match to bless,
'Twixt two of us, by matchless deity,
That altar was a bloody, lovely mess
For you and me, if devil making three.

Or was it just we two, and no one else,
I and your own, most obscure, secret self's.

The devil's ever in the details, and there are always things to be worked through and out, but our marriage match seems to have been made in the heavens even if necessarily lived down to earth.

My "aye" and her "aye" in the "I do, I do" of marriage, and this has been a "Poetry Break" for the apple of my eye, who will understand it even when no one else does . . .

Niall Ferguson in Foreign Affairs: "Complexity and Collapse of a Marriage"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson

Out of Control?

(Image from Daily Mail)

The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has a new theory on the collapse of marriages, and it goes something like this:

Great marriages are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder -- on "the edge of chaos," in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England, or a femme fatale with a fatwa walks into your life and brings about the collapse of your marriage. (Niall Ferguson, "Complexity and Collapse: Marriages on the Edge of Chaos," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2010)

The trigger to Ferguson's own "phase transition" came when he and Ayaan Hirsi Ali met at a Time Magazine party in New York in May last year, as shown in the photo above. But there were signs of disorder already:

It is not the first time that Ferguson has been unfaithful. He has cheated on his wife eight times over the past five years, according to one family friend, and five of these affairs have apparently taken place over the past 18 months. (Katie Nicholl , Miles Goslett, and Caroline Graham, "The history man and fatwa girl," Daily Mail, February 12, 2010)

Obviously, Professor Ferguson's marriage was already at risk of spinning out of control, but there's always a bright side. We now have the man's new application of chaos theory to the collapse of great marriages.

Let that be a lesson to us all . . .