Why Marriage Was Allowed To Collapse (1)

In the previous post I decided that the payoff from marriage - absent old-school fantasies - was net less than zero, and one serious contribution to that is the fact that the UK lifetime cohort divorce rate is around 40%. I didn't know that until I wrote the previous post, and it turned my head round. 

Forty freaking per cent. No businessman would go into a venture with a forty per cent failure rate. No Western armed force now would take any mission with a projected forty per cent loss of its troops. No engineer would build a structure that had a forty percent chance of falling down. I'm guessing a serious poker player would fold at the forty per cent prospect of a one hundred per cent loss. The only people who think that 3:2 on is good odds are people who bet on horses - and people who open restaurants.

And this institution is one of the pillars of our society? Nuh-huh. The way you know it isn't is that not one politician or commentator makes a fuss about that forty per cent lifetime divorce rate. Not. A. One. They make a fuss about the consequences, but not the cause. "Broken homes" are like the weather: it's what happens and we have to deal with the results. Anyway, it seems marriage never was a pillar of society, more that society was a pillar of marriage: the experiment run by Western societies since 1970 shows that marriage needed to be propped up by tax breaks and punitive laws, and created a lot of misery when it was enforced. Marriage isn't the cure, it's the disease itself. It was an institution designed to solve problems of legitimacy and inheritance, to resolve feuds and cement alliances between families. Marriage was always a social institution intended for an economic and political purpose. It was made redundant not by the Death of God and the Sixties, but by the Joint Stock Company, the Trust and laws codifying inheritance for tax purposes, which did the job much better. When passing on an extra couple of goats could mean the difference between poverty and comfort, inheritance and marriage mattered. By the mid twentieth-century, two wars, inheritance taxes and a rise in asset prices meant that inheritance was minimal in effect, and therefore irrelevant to the economic circumstances of most people.

The married couple were never supposed to be happy - that was a nice-to-have - they were supposed to be solvent and fruitful. All that advice to husbands and wives was not given because they were unhappy, it was given because they had been pushed together and were being told to make the best of it. By the mid-twentieth century, married couples were not happy, but nobody was pushing them together, so they had to accept it was their own dumb fault for getting married in the first place. Whereas in the past a divorce might have had serious economic consequences for the families, now it just affected the couple, and this began to look lie a decision that if made badly, should be reversible. In 1969, the legislators passed the Divorce Reform Act (1971) as the first step in removing the social and legal props supporting the institution.

The dissolution of marriage wasn't a feminist conspiracy: it was simple legal engineering. The legislators could not have been more clear about their purpose without actually stating it: marriage was a dysfunctional institution that was no longer going to be supported by the State. They created no-fault divorce, removed tax breaks for married couples, separated husband and wife for tax purposes, re-framed Family Law so that divorce was a viable financial strategy for women, and privileged the mother in custody settlements. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made it politic to employ women. Married men lost their income and career advantage over single men. The legislation was done in about five years. Divorce rates have soared, marriage rates have fallen, and not one legislator is saying "Ooops. Looks like we went too far with this one." Not even the Church of England is calling for a change to the divorce laws.

Then the problems hit.

Crows In The Car Park

Apple send their apologies for the blurry pictures, but I had to use a lot of zoom on my iPhone camera. The fact it took these photographs at all is pretty amazing. This is half-past six in the morning in my local Cineworld car park on my way to the station.

My 463 Bullet Point Checklist

As I matured in life (okay - got older) the women I met had more baggage and often turned out to be slightly bonkers. And that's not counting the people I have met in the Twelve Step Rooms. Even then only a very few had anything like a full-blown DSM-IV personality disorder.

I think about this stuff for way too long, and it slowly dawned on me that any one of those DSM-IV type symptoms is a big red "Uitgang" sign. Some, like self harm and actually attempting suicide, are obvious enough for anyone to notice and consider a reason to be leaving. Others are a little less obvious. So adapted from DSM-IV, and my experience here's the Single-Symptom list... 

a) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation,

b) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self, 

c) impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, excessive spending, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving)

d) chronic feelings of emptiness

e) a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

f) a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

g) a belief that they are "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

h) a need for excessive admiration

i) a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations)

j) a pattern of being interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

k) A lack of empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her

l) arrogant, haughty behaviour or attitudes

(Symptom b) sounds abstract, but it translates into things like missing appointments, not keeping promises, changing her mind a lot, changing her likes and dislikes a lot.) 

Add to this minor and less psychological stuff like...

m) Is a princess / flake

n) Is on prescription anti-depressants

o) Has substantial credit card debts

p) Is divorced / has children / is in a long-term relationship / married

q) Is unemployed

r) talks about what goes on at work as if it matters a damn

s) Has divorced parents

t) Says she'd like to get married / have children "sometime" (this is a girl's way of saying "never")

u) Says she's focussing on her career

v) Eats a lot of take-away or prepared meals

w) Has cats

x) Has more than fifteen pairs of shoes

y) Watches reality TV / reads celebrity magazines

z) Doesn't exercise or play sports

As people you might want in your life on a full-time basis this cuts out a lot of women, at least for me in London at my not-so-tender years. Affairs are different. A little craziness and / or baggage is okay for a few weeks, but not a whole year. The old me used to think that "share my life" meant "share her problems", but I'm not in the rescuing / White Knight game anymore.

Bernie Spain Gardens, South Bank

"Bernie" is for Bernadette, and Ms Spain was a healthcare campaigner in the 1980's in the Coin Street area. I'm never sure about naming gardens and streets after politicos of any sort, because no-one will know what it means about ten minutes afterwards. Streets should be named after flowers, trees, local sights and places, or, of course, the places they go to or come from. If I walk along Nottingham Street, I should get to Nottingham. The gardens named for Ms Spain are just inland from the South Bank, and if I had taken my usual short cut from Waterloo to the Tate Modern, I would never have seen it.

Who are all those nice boys and girls lunching there? There are a lot of small but fancy businesses in the area between The Cut and the river, as well as Thames Television and IPC. Not quite Soho, but not somewhere you would avoid either. 

Career Development

At my age? I'm supposed to be waiting out the years until I can collect my pension. Yet my manager talks about "development opportunities" for me, and he means the political / people / organisational stuff that would make me promotable. Within the context of The Bank, I'm not interested: I don't want to spend my days in meetings, as everyone at the grade above mine does. They can't decide anything, they have no sign-off authority, they have no teams or resources to dispose - so I have no idea what they do in those meetings. I have no desire to do what passes for "management" at The Bank.

Can I honestly go on at The Bank until I retire? Not if they carry on short-changing us with 3%-5% real pay cuts. I'll be a poor man if I do. Promotion doesn't get me out of that either: on promotion, you get a 5% pay rise, no better than a "developing" rating at your next appraisal which means an even smaller bonus, and no pay rise, since you just got one. You're actually better off not getting a promotion. It has ever been thus.

I'm ambivalent about the quality of the projects and challenges that we get. The section I'm in is basically about producing posters. We don't develop real products and services - we don't have the budget to make software changes, and even if we did, we don't have the priority. No-one ever got fired for telling our product to go take a running jump. Morale is low, and what's worse is the senior management have no idea why. Start with why The Bank can't be bothered to pay the FM company enough to clean the toilets properly. It's actually worse at other banks and insurance companies. 

I used to think my medium-term need was to save as much money as possible for my retirement. Pensions are a joke, so at this stage, I'm talking cash. My short-term need is to make my life as bearable as possible to make enough money to save. At my age, there is no long-term.

Yet I'm pretty sure I'll be working until the day I die - which I hope won't be much past sixty-five. Insh'allah. In which case, why do I need to save? Because I don't think I'll be able to earn a decent living after sixty-five. Except everything I know about knowledge workers and working says that as long as I keep up, I will be able to. The competition just isn't that good - not in this country. As long as no-one has a prejudice about hiring sixty-eight year old contractors - which they won't. Not in 2022.

If all that is true, then the one thing I need to be working on is my technical skills. There's precious little opportunity to do that at The Bank, except for SAS - which I don't like and doesn't have a free version to learn on. To be honest, four months of hard slog would put me up in the top five per cent, and that gets me to Christmas. Even if I went flat-out on a job hunt, I wouldn't get anything by then (it's mid-July now). 

The next thing I need to be working on is getting some kind of client base, or a relationship with the recruiters and agencies. While SAS is sellable, it's a production tool for big companies or a handful of specialised data agencies, which means a Bank-like environment again. That's what I'd like to avoid. The question is where? 

Where do I want to work? It's probably going to be small(er). It's going to be in the West End for preference, but within the Circle Line will do. It's going to have an interesting product that I would actually use. It's going to use some interesting tech. It's going to need what I can bring, which is no-nonsense insight and decent analysis->synthesis->presentation skills. These will make them money and help them design better products, and market those more effectively. I am really good at making money by processing and interpreting data better than other people at other companies - but I have no interest in trying to get the attention of an indifferent bureaucracy. So if you're a big company floating on heritage cash flows, depending on brutal sales techniques to shovel in the new business (and that's a lot of big companies), then we should pass on each other.

The next question is: who's hiring that fits that bill, how do I find them and how do I get there? Goody. My three least favourite questions.

Inventory and Wishes

I have been on occasion full of self-pitying regret that I never had a wife, children, and a five-bedroom house in Barnes. Usually when I was drunk or hungover. Like any young man, in my twenties, I felt the pain of waking up alone again and hungover on Sunday morning, and thought I was weak, useless and failing, failing failing, because I hadn't pulled Saturday night. I never had an affable, easy social life and a commercially-valuable network of acquaintances. I could never "commit". When I was sober and nothing was going wrong at work, I didn't feel those things. Since I was hungover and depressed a lot, I spent many years wishing I was leading another life, and indeed was a different person. Of course I did: I was in psychological pain and I needed a way out and I thought that was it. There is no right way out of that kind of pain: just different ways that leave differing residual aches and have differing costs. 

I stumbled onto Twelve-Step Recovery, and that worked for the alcohol-related stuff. It took me a long time to embrace my inner ACoA, and a while after that to accept that some of the damage is irreparable: I was okay that as a drunk I couldn't drink again, and would get bored around drinkers pretty quickly; I was less willing to get that an ACoA can't do intimacy, fun and all that other Normal stuff, and that attempts to do so lead to irritation, boredom or toxic shock. You can see us in the crowd during any fire drill: everyone else is talking in groups, while we are zoned out, surrounded by totally alien behaviour. At some point I must have accepted my condition - at which point, of course, it stops being "my condition" and becomes "me". What me?

I'm still employed, and I work with a bunch of smart young people who keep me sharp. I do a combination of weight training, spinning, running, swimming and yoga every week. My blood-sugar, blood-pressure, pulse and general physical condition is top five percent for my age. I'm still learning new stuff at my day job, and reading hefty tomes of philosophy and mathematics for stimulation. I cook my own food, clean my own house, iron my own shirts and run my own affairs. 

I have no pension worth a damn, and I've been through some nasty periods of unemployment. I'm a recovering alcoholic - but you're the one with the hangovers. I'm an ACoA, and so I don't have to get bent out of shape about "not being intimate" or "sharing my life" with anyone, because that is toxic for me. My testosterone levels are down from when I used to look at girls and think they were magic, so now when I look at women most of them look like more work than they may be worth.

I have a little bit in common with a lot of people, which means I can make light social conversation with a lot of people. I do not have enough in common with anyone to make them want to go any further. I steer clear of screw-ups, and sensible people steer clear of me, so I don't actually hang out with anybody except a couple of people from my distant past.

So much for the inventory.

What am I really missing? I could list all sorts of things here, from the virtuous (intimacy, friends) to the slightly silly (fame, wealth, beautiful lovers), but you and I know I would be lying. We know what I'm really missing.

I'm missing getting high, whether it's on sex, booze, conversation, music, scenic panoramas, art or anything else that does the trick. The Rules say I can't get high any more, that I have to find satisfaction through service, being a "worker amongst workers" and all that good stuff. I'm missing the sick emotions that come with fake drama (real drama isn't accompanied by emotions, but adrenaline and action). The Rules say I can't do that any more either and I follow them because those emotions are caused by crazy people and I don't want those in my life any more. 

What would I like? I mean, aside from a flat in Soho, the Marais and the Centre of Amsterdam? And the work that paid enough to support all that. And being able to speak French and Dutch. So there's that fantasy.

What I don't want to feel "content". I don't want to feel "at peace with myself". I don't want to be "comfortable in my own skin". Those are not real emotions, but absences. Spiritual Vallium. I'm not allowed mood-altering chemicals.

I'd like one day I didn't have to invent from zero, that wasn't made up of to-do tasks, that I didn't feel was in some deep sense optional. I'd like to wake up feeling rested, and go to bed feeling tired. I'd like to feel sated after a meal and calm enough to be able to read for a couple of hours without breaking off to clean something or make a snack. I'd like to feel that there wasn't always something I have to do next and somewhere I have to be after here. I'd like to feel that it was more than nice meeting you, and that we might meet again. I'd like to be able to point to something and say "I did that". 

So that's what I have to make come true.

Hanworth Air Park - August Evening

I have an odd covenant in my freehold: I'm not allowed to erect any structure over fifty feet in height on my property. This may be to prevent any of us out-doing the local, very old (Hanworth is in the Domesday Book) Church, but it may also be because the original London Airport is a couple of hundred yards from my front door. Amelia Erhardt is supposed to have landed in Hanworth Air Park, as did the Graf Zeppelin, and in the 1930's it was, apparently notorious for aerial tea parties, pageants and races. Not so much now. Actually, never. The last flight was sometime in 1955. On a good summer evening, it looks like this...