New Year

Happy 2010, everyone! It doesn't really feel like a new year; the same snow is covering the frozen earth and we're all back to business as usual for the most part after weeks of festive holiday cheer. April 1st probably was a better choice for the start of the new year; spring evokes that feeling of rebirth and renewal that we usually seek when the new year begins.

Anyway.

I've been reading "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy in the last week or so. It's a novella about two men conversing on a train, mainly about marriage and family life. The twist is, one of these men, Posdnicheff, recently murdered his wife.

Although "The Kreutzer Sonata" is horribly misogynistic (Posdnicheff is of the opinion that a woman's greatest virtue is remaining a virgin and that, because of women's education, the only control on their coquettish behavior is pregnancy and nursing children), it does raise some interesting questions about male-female relationships. None of the characters have happy, successful relationships; an old man at the beginning of the story claims that married people are doomed to misery because wives have lost their sense of fear of their husbands and husbands no longer fear God, so they commit all sorts of debaucheries. Posdnicheff, meanwhile, struggles with what really attracted him to his wife in the first place, and he concludes that he only decided to marry her because he admired her physically and wanted sexual contact. He convinced himself that this feeling was love, he heaped all of these impossible ideals upon her and then found himself disgusted by her once they consummated their marriage and she gave up her only virtue, her virginity.

Obviously, this guy has a major Madonna-Whore complex, but I think the story is still relevant in that question of human relationships. How do they develop? How much of love is actually idealization divorced from the reality of human flaws, and how do you cope when the other person departs from your idealizations?

Tolstoy wrote this story at a time when marriage was undergoing a significant transformation in Russia; arranged marriages were beginning to fall out of social acceptability, in favor of love marriages. But the interactions between the sexes were still constrained to superficial venues like ballrooms and the theater, and guided by very scripted conversations that included the same behavioral tropes: calculated charm, excessive enthusiasm for certain subjects that one does not really care about but feigns interest to become more intriguing to the prospective mate.

Is it all that different today? Male-female interactions are much less constrained in contemporary America, but there's a disturbing parallel to Posdnicheff's description of dances; he says that the women all put themselves on display, and the men peruse the options and choose to dance with whichever woman strikes him as most attractive and desireable. This reminded me of internet dating; you search through profiles and although there is personality information, it's all a calculated image designed specifically to attract. It's not necessarily the entire truth, but a particular version of a person that s/he uses to attract as many people as possible. Even in the "real world," there's still that element of superficiality, of calculations to figure out what will best attract a desireable mate.

But it doesn't have to be that way. One problem that I've noticed with a lot of young women my age, is that they are constantly trying to figure out "guys." They complain on Facebook that "guys are so dumb" or that they "just don't get guys," and they search as though there is some formula, some mathematical calculation that will solve all of their relationship problems.

The problem lies in that generalization, in the assumption that there is something universal about "guys" that will suddenly clarify and guide all interactions once that something is discovered. It's a version of Posdnicheff's problem, obscuring the individual with these abstract ideals and notions of behavior. When we relate to individuals as individuals, rather than a representative of a gender or as a manifestation of ideals that we privately hold, only then is love possible.