why are relationships seemingly so hard for so many people when it's the thing we need the most to feel alive to feel happy and feel connected?
Love and work are the two pillars of our lives.
The simple feeling of loving and feeling loved is actually a very complex thing just as nature is very complex, so too is human nature very complex. I'm a boomer and in my life I have seen Human Nature change at its fastest pace ever recorded. Human relationships today are certainly more complex and often more painful than in the past we should try and understand why this is what has happened?
We should start to find an answer by comparing relationships in our modern developed advanced economy with the way people live in more traditional societies.
In more traditional societies, relationships are clearly codified, there are clear rules, there are roles and roles have obligations. There's a tight structure that you can't get out of, that tells you clearly your place "at table", who you are where you belong, where you are rooted and what's expected of you and you don't have too ask too many questions about eg whose career matters more? who's going to wake up to feed the baby? who has a right to demand sex?
Everybody - every husband - knows exactly what they can ask and expect from their wife .
And the wife knows exactly what she should not tell her husband!
And the children know their place at table and their sibling rank.
And same for interactions between adults.
Life was highly codified and regulated for people. You knew exactly what you'd be doing - on for example a Sunday, you would have a family meal together, you would visit the grandparents, you would go to church, or maybe it's the mosque on a Friday.
Furthermore, everyone knew this and it didn't need to be explained, it's just what people did, they didn't ask any questions, they just did it, "that's the way we do things here round here", that is just what happened.
And why do we do it that way? That's because we've always done it that way and what would the neighbours say if we didn't? So it's a community of narrow streets and close habitations where everyone watches over everyone else and there is what is called high social control and conformity.
In my university days, I lived in a village like that, Great Tay, with its church, its pub, its post office, its round about ... maybe a bit more than this.. and there was also the just-built "new estate" for commuters, the "blow-ins", but you get the general idea.
My life, my love life, was spent in a traditional village where everyone knew everyone and no one was alone; while my working life was a world away at the university where only the common cause of of education and the student bar saved us from a terrible sense of anomie.
Today, we live pretty anonymous lives, we don't know what's going on in the neighbour's house and we may not even know that our best friends are breaking up and a couple is falling apart. And why?
SHEENA
I lived there in the village, a tight-knit community, with my first girlfriend, Sheena, who was admired for her outrageous non-conformity, but who was also as a consequence an outcast. And in fact Sheena went on to have Nathan, a black baby, shocking the whole village....you can imagine! And she went on further to be a single mother and advocate for womens' rights.
She was what today we would recognise as a little bit of a narcissist, but at the time she would entertain and shock us all with her imaginative humour and stories, her desinvolte as regards sexual matters, her disordered life. And we wouldn't worry too much about how little she cared about any of this disaporoval, ostracism and chaos, or what people thought of her She showed little interest in the lives of people not from the village, leaving me puzzled though not dismayed, indifferent rather than saddened. I was from the university and it didn't matter much to me as I was part of many bigger groups of friends. That is what it means to be young.
I was living a life in the village where everyone knew what was going on in each other's houses and no one was alone, where noone had reason to question who they were or what they should be doing. This society of tight knots contrasted with a life of loose ends and frayed university networks, with people from all over the country, from varied social backgrounds and classes, thrown together; where meetings could be fleeting, commitments transactional; where you might experience the loss of someone for whom you had intense feelings albethey shallow feelings of youth, from one day to the next, without warning or explanation: none given, none expected.
MY PARENTS
My parents were from the Greatest Generation, they understood little and said less. They were born during The Roaring Twenties, boom time, came of age during the Great Depression, bust, and participated as as young adults in World War II, which kicked off the American Order and digital technologies.
So for them, econonic, political, social and technological upheavals, not to mention Hollywood and comic books, jazz and swing, and visits by the new messiah, Superman. Most formative in my father's life, though he has never spoken a word of it, was the war and the rationing that followed. "Money was tight", he would say. My mother was an air raid warden during the blitz. People from this generation supposedly got through the hardships of the Great Depression with an ability to know how to survive and to make do on shortages and solve problems that the welfare state had not yet been born to take over.
These experiences made for a conservative, responsible people, trustful of the government that had coordinated them into winning the world war. My father was reasonably proficient on the portable computer.
