A: I've talked to a lot of Divinity School students about the problem this fall, and it's not that the problem is non-existent over there, but I have a feeling that oddly enough people in the Divinity School setting, male people, may be a little more realistic about their expectation for themselves. They don't have as many options and they often don't come from quite as privileged backgrounds.
But I think I see the problem existing more in the graduate school and the undergraduate school than in the professional schools, and I think it really does have something to do with the combination of the very high expectations on those people for job performance, the relatively large amount of leisure, or at least the amount of time that they have free to direct for themselves, which means a requirement for incredible internal motivation and definition, and a fairly isolated existence in some ways. Many of them just have a very hard time as a result of all that dealing with relationships.
Many of the women just know far more about it, have far more experience, because it's probably been far more important to them as they've gone along. What I'm saying at the moment is not at all profound, it's just basically common sense.
All I'm saying is that women at a certain age are more mature than men, which is something people have always said. I do think that there are ways in which American society expects women to be more mature. It's even a complicated thing what we mean by mature, except that I would say that it's a positive characteristic, in the sense of being able to have long-term intense relationships--society expects women to learn the skills that go with that, ranging all the way from compromise on the one hand, to ability to make a man feel at ease, ability to perceive, ability to listen, all that kind of stuff. I don't think there's any intrinsic reason why women should do that more than men, but it's a fact that women are trained to do so, in incredibly subtle ways. None of this is at all original.
Q: Do you think this is a particularly intense problem at Harvard, as opposed to other places?
A: Obviously, that's what I'm talking about. I was trying to be descriptive about a certain sort of environment, because I did find myself thinking, as I wrote, about my brother-in-law, who teaches at a small state school in Pennsylvania. I thought to myself as I was writing it, now, he wouldn't know what I'm talking about, partly because his relationship with his students would be different from my relationship with my students and partly because his students would be different from my students.
Male undergraduates these days expect of themselves a level of ability in relationships that I don't think any man ten years ago in his early 20s expected of himself. Then he was just supposed to be dominant and masculine and kind of tough and not show his feelings much and dictate what he wanted and that was what women wanted. That's a stereotype, but there's a lot of truth in it.
I do think that both for graduate students and undergraduates this is a tremendously isolating place and I think that that also contributes to the problems that people have with both friendships and sexual relationships. For reasons that I don't even fully understand, this is an environment in which many, many people are very very lonely. I think it has a lot to do with competitiveness. It has something to do with age structure around here too.
Q: Don't you think that the increased pressures might make people look harder for satisfaction in personal relationships?
A: That's one thing that's very curious of course, because I think that what happens with many males is that yes, the competitiveness and the loneliness do lead them to look very hard for some kind of intimate relationship. It's exactly because then too much in a way is loaded onto the relationship in terms of expectations, expectation of the relationship solving old problems, many of which are job-related and couldn't possibly be solved by a relationship. Men have much too high an expectation of themselves. Often they've never tried before, and they expect to succeed fantastically. Indeed, I think the increased expectations, both of themselves in terms of the ability to achieve intimacy and also of the relationship as being able to solve all their problems is one of the main reasons why you have people almost as soon as they get involved in something backing out in absolute panic--this feeling of, my goodness, I almost had a relationship with somebody, what was I getting myself into? And that of course is the pattern that everybody recognizes, the fear, the lashing out, the saying, you were too dependent on me, you were making too many demands on me.
It's mostly just a matter of a person who expected a great deal--the business of destroying what you want is a pretty common thing to do, and you're more apt to do it if you have unreasonable expectations of the thing that you want.
Q: Why do you think that some men here find it easier to settle into the dominant roles that their fathers occupied than others?
A: I don't know ...I'm inclined to think that there are certain people who because of aspects of their family and the way they were brought up, and the part of America that they've grown up in, and this kind of thing, are sort of quite closed to emotional responses and go through fine, and never really get thrown by things, and go right on back into the pattern that was expected of them by their families. I would think, oddly enough, that it might be the sort of people who came from slightly more emotionally open families and maybe even slightly more privileged family situations who in a way might end up having more trouble, because of daring to open themselves up to these sort of questions.
But it also has to do with all the things that people say about American child-rearing patterns, and parents not having any self-definition themselves in many cases. How many people really grow up in families where there is both open warmth and sexuality and also really mutual respect and equality between the parents? It's just not around, and many of the two-career families that one sees are families where the other dimension is just not apparent in the relationship between the couple. There can be something about career pressures that can kill the possibility of a complicated emotional life between two people. If that's what you expect, that's a really hard thing to achieve. And part of what's happening is that people are saying: if I can't have that, then forget it. That means that an awful lot of people are saying forget it.
Q: How do you see this phenomenon working itself out in other kinds of situations, in classrooms and dining rooms, for example?
A: I think there has been a tendency in the past few years for coed friendship groups to form, in which occasionally there will be sexual contact between some of the members--often there'll be one or two people in the group who make a habit of picking up the others in sexual encounters--but where it's totally superficial if it happens at all that way.
In these friendship groups, although people will be together a very great deal, there will be a kind of superficiality about the contact, a kind of tendency to achieve the lowest common denominator, a kind of talking about food, or talking about where you might go to get something to eat, or a grinding of a private joke down into nothingness, or little comments on little personality characteristics or verbal quirks or whatever of somebody in the group that can go on to the point where you feel that the whole group is working to protect anybody in the group from having any kind of intense contact with anybody else. These groups will sometimes last two years. You have a feeling that by the time people are ready to graduate that they have been kind of held back from the kind of growth and friendship that they might have had.