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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
My musician boyfriend says he needs to be burning for me all the time but now he doesn't feel the spark.
Sep 3, 2002 | Dear Readers,
I have a question for you. In fact, I need some advice. But the advice must come from those of you who are young. Because youth has slipped away from me. It slipped away just as my parents said it would. It slipped away just as yours will slip away. But before yours slips away, I want you to write to me and tell me what it is like.
Of course, I want to know what it is like to be young and be in a relationship, but I want to know how your larger world affects that. When I was young, there was a war on in Vietnam and there were riots in the streets and there was no AIDS and the birth control pill had just come on the market and all those facts influenced the relationships we had, and who we had them with. When I was young, speaking at a demonstration could get you laid.
I have the feeling that today things are different, but I am not so presumptuous as to think I could know just how things are different without asking those who know. And those who know means you, who are young and articulate and bursting with visions of how life should be. (Or am I, even in that phrase, reproducing a '60s notion of youth?)
No generation ever celebrated being young the way mine did. We are therefore profoundly unsuited to be old. Yet we are old. By any measure, face it, we are old. I wonder what we look like to you. Do we look like doddering fools? Do we look like people who have not accepted our age? Do we look to you the way our parents looked to us? I wonder. (Until a few years ago, I did not feel like an adult. When I was around other people my own age, if they had children or responsible jobs, I still felt that they were adults but I was not. I felt as though I needed their permission to go outside. Isn't that strange?)
Please tell me what you think. You can write to me at advice@salon.com as usual. It will help if you put "youth" in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you. I think it will be fun and it might also be profound and useful.
Dear Cary,
I am friends with a girl, Lily. Her friend Della is also an acquaintance of mine. Recently, Lily let me in on a philosophy that made them feel better about their singlehood, but which deeply offended me.
Della is a recent law school grad who left a potential boyfriend back in Albany. Although she really liked him in every possible way, one reservation kept her from dating him: He was a mechanic. Blue collar vs. professional. Della spoke to her priest about her dilemma and its resolution and his response was, "Well, life is like a tree and everyone has to find someone on their branch."
Am I just naive about the way the world works or is this incredibly snobby and elitist? I can see how perhaps class differences could manifest themselves in other ways and therefore cause problems. However, that wasn't the case here. Della just felt that a mechanic wasn't quite good enough for her.
Does everyone have to find someone on their branch? How are branches defined? Some of the most intelligent people I know never went to college and are not professionals. In fact, Lily, who agrees with Della's opinion (she only wants to date professionals), is very intelligent and changed careers last year and became a catering chef. That's not exactly exalted work by her measure (it took her less schooling to get her culinary arts degree than it does for most mechanics to get through school), but she's decided her "branch" includes doctors and lawyers? We all grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood alongside folks like mechanics, so it seems bizarre that they would think this way. Am I silly to think this is hypocritical?
Blind to Branches
Dear Blind,
I'm passionately, patriotically egalitarian. I hate snobbery. I don't see much hope for democracy in the face of such class-based blindness. Sure, there are cultural differences, but if someone can't appreciate the skill and intelligence it takes to be a good mechanic, or a good baker or garbage man or cop or Sheetrocker or roofer, they're just small-minded.
On the other hand, I am moved by the way education and careful choices in life can allow one to improve one's family for generations to come. The first generation of a lower-middle-class family that goes to college and learns the language and manners of the professional class can profoundly affect the prospects of their progeny for the next hundred years. Think about it. How did my father's ancestors -- hardy, rough-hewn Celts, seamen and adventurers -- acquire the manners and social standing that allowed them to grasp a shred of respectability in the South? Well, they were white for one thing. That helped. And my grandmother at least, so I understand, converted to Episcopalian. But they also became educated. They were, I sense, gifted with language, as many Celts are, and they learned Latin and Greek, the languages of learned people.
They are still rough-hewn individualists but what they bequeathed to us kids was a facility for language and subtlety of thought that has allowed us to pass, as it were, among the professional classes -- even though we are still wild pagans at heart -- and thus improve our lives and the lives of those who will follow us.
So I think that class striving can be a good thing. The ways in which we all find ways to pass in society, to impersonate those who are in favor, to play down the telltale signs of our humble origins, is wonderful and amusing and ultimately a good thing. On the other hand, simple class prejudice is horrific and deadly, and I abhor it.
Making inflexible class judgments turns people into objects, or products. Are you going to have a relationship with a bottle of shampoo? Are you going to have dinner with a brand of mouthwash? I know you have to be practical, but rigid class distinctions just contribute to misery and oppression, and I'm sorry but I'm totally with you -- that's bogus. If she likes the guy, she should at least go out with him and see what the possibilities might be.
