Shamed.

(In advance, I apologize for the rather hetero-normative focus of this blog, for it is heavily inspired by my own life and my own research to manage it. I don’t suggest that these broad strokes below are the only assessment of my gender, but they are relevant to me at this point in my life.)

I am reading this book about men and women and relationships and about how no amount of communication is likely to really improve a relationship if closeness is the desired outcome. Forgive me if I am offending any relationship values you might have, but let me at least outline one of the book’s central arguments before you scream blasphemy or “quackery.” It suggests that no matter how skilled or intentional we are, more often than not we communicate and comprehend, especially when “unrefereed,” in ways that support our primary emotional motivations: fear and shame. It does a rather convincing job of explaining how women (I am aware of how broad these strokes may seem, but the book does a better job than I will do here of accounting for variety and diversity of perspective in its gendered samples) are largely motivated by fear and men, largely by shame. It talks about baby boys and girls and their different relationship to eye contact – specifically for infant boys it is overwhelming where for girls it is comforting – and draws a rather compelling connection from that research to the primal emotional instincts we have as adults. Since I have only started reading this book, and I don’t intend to write a book review, I won’t outline any more of its claims, but if you are interested, follow this link: http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=267095

What I will say is that I found what I have read so far on men and shame painfully pitch perfect at times. It argues that more than bodily harm or even death, men fear failure, loss of status, being unworthy of love, powerlessness, and inadequacy. And its most radical claim is this: Since men seem hardwired to be less emotionally astute/equipped than women (in comparison they generally have less facility to read non-verbal cues, to assess and express their own emotional experience, to negotiate realities that are not best understood by solely “logical” analysis), it is in relationships that men feel most inadequate and most ashamed of themselves and of their inability to positively maintain the relationship. And while it’s not the focus of this blog, the book then avers that talking about the relationship, something men do poorly already in comparison to women, is not likely to be the best or even a particularly effective way of bringing a man and a woman closer together, for the obvious reasons: most men lack the facility to fully and quickly engage in such emotional conversations and that so much of this emotional motivation, shame, lurks beyond the conscious mind (the book also offers solutions I don’t discuss here).

Those of you who know me may know me to be a talker. Even more, I think that I talk about my emotions relatively openly. So, that part of the analysis does not resonate with me so much. However, it is hard for me to communicate to you how much of every minute of my day is connected to avoiding shame.

For most of my life I have always been a “good boy.” I have been a child about which adults could always say, “That Okorie, he is doing things well.” I came in when the street lights came on, I went to a prep school and did decently in school, practiced my cello when told (mostly), never drank, never smoked (except for three months when I was twenty-five and I fancied smoking cherry Cavendish in a pipe because I thought it made me feel and look distinguished), never drugged, never sold drugs. Hell, I was a virgin until I was nineteen. I went to college, got married, had children after marriage. I got a respectable profession.

Even now as an adult, I concentrate hard on looking women in the eye, sometimes to the point of not hearing what they say, simply so that my eyes won’t wander. I smile and nod constantly at things that people mention that I don’t understand so that as soon as they are gone I can look them up on my Iphone and educate myself. I heard someone recently use a phrase from American Beach, a book about the Martha’s Vineyard of the South, that described the Black community there as “radically respectable.” I heard him say it and I instantly understood how desperately members of that community must have felt. For, I have been seeking respectability and, in some instances, glory all my life, primarily to keep as much distance between me and that third rail of shame as possible. And in the moments when I have felt that I have brought shame upon myself, I have been quietly and, in some cases, terminally depressed.

But the truth of the matter is that largely, I have been successful at staving off shame in my public life. More often than not, I am celebrated and embraced by the people around me. But in my marriage, I cannot fool my wife. Although there are plenty of areas in which I excel at home, there are things I don't do so well. There’s my daughters’ laundry. And, my socks. My wet towels on the bed. And, my inability to be as disciplined and animated as I am for work at home. There are the bills that I don’t manage and the calendar I don’t coordinate. There is birth control, which until just recently was also not managed by me. There is money and my self indulgent “noble” low paying profession (I could be a lawyer, right now earning much more than I do, but instead I chose fulfillment). And then there’s intimacy – that’s a-whole-nother blog. (The previous paragraph has echoes of “An Average Man at Home,” another blog I wrote last year.)

Some of these short comings have been brought to my attention by my wife. Others of them are my own private frustrations. And I don’t have the magic wand to erase or ameliorate them. These things get better with concerted effort, and they go away when habits are changed or new ones formed. I am neither perfect nor perfectible, so it’s likely some of them will never go away, or that once gone they will be replaced with others.

So, living with the shame of my own imperfection in my family has been hard, painful even. But I also understand that it is life. I am not alone. And based on the reading I have done lately, I am actually quite typical - which may actually be my greatest shame of all.

When I was in college and in my twenties, I felt so certain and in control. I was a budding artist, hippie, feminist, and idealist. A privileged, relatively accomplished young African-American who thought he was too good to uncritically embrace the privilege that had been provided him for the last quarter century, too “enlightened” to intentionally choose a career simply to make money. Most important, however, was that I knew that I would not be typical. Of course, I knew that I would not have a typical job. But I also knew that I would live life differently. My relationships would look different, my performance of masculinity would be different, and my family structure would be different. Most of all, I would avoid the sins and weaknesses of the many men that went before me because I did not inherit their “unexamined” life script. I was writing it line by line, self inspired, informed, and bold. I knew that whatever I would be in 15 years would not be typical.

Yet, here I am now, reading a book by two people who have never met me, and they are theorizing about my life as if I were their ethnography subject – as if they sat in my living room and watched me. Reading a book that suggests that not only am I not atypical, I am as common as they come. This is the fourth book of this type in three years that has had this kind of insight into my life.

Worse than that, when I visit my other married friends, I hear echoes of the same dramas unfolding in their houses. People whom I think are categorically different from me and my wife say things in our presence about “I took me a while to realize that doing the dishes is foreplay.” Or “Sex? What’s that again?” Or, “I’ll have to check with my wife before I schedule that. Can’t make that mistake again.” Or, “I just wish he would handle the bills/calendar/laundry/groceries/cleaning/insert any managerial household task!” It’s like all of us are caught in our own ethnically flavored version of the 80’s TV show Thirty Something.

Stranger still for me is my new need to be around men. I was essentially raised by my mother and grandmother. All my life, most of my closest friends have been women. I hung out with my boys in high school and college, but I felt very comfortable around women, maybe even more comfortable around them because such a comfort confirmed my notion that I could perform a non-traditional masculinity – one that didn’t seek the company of men because it was uncomfortable around women.

Now, I find this uncomfortably powerful joy in getting together with the fellas, especially married fellas, because I somehow identify with them in ways I never imagined I would. I invited three of my good buddies out to a bar one night recently, and I don’t think I have felt that comfortable socially since I was in college. It was great. We talked about politics, work, sports, but we also talked about being married, choices, and challenges. We laughed at each other, full of an empathy that was effortlessly expressed. We raised our glasses in fellowship and rushed back home to get the sleep we would need to be fathers, husbands, and professionals the next day.

It seems I have become a man – in so many senses of the word that I would not have expected, that I couldn’t have imagined. And while I understand how, I don’t really know why.

What is it about the force of marriage and kids that completely reorganizes one’s own sense of identity and notion of autonomy? If ever I thought I was in control of my life and who I was, the above two forces changed that. All it took was for my wife to start showing, and all of a sudden I started playing out roles of provider that I didn’t expect to embrace so uncritically. Even more, my wife became someone she didn’t immediately recognize. And I guess in some ways it’s for the better, for we are a solid, committed unit for our family. But there’s all the other stuff that changes, too. What is it with the sympathetic/man/father weight? Many friends I surely suspected of being anorexic when they were in college now have a heft to them that befits their portrayal of a middle aged gangster. Where did my fixation with grilling come from? What is it with men and socks? I used to think that was something only written into movies out of a sense of tradition. Why are none of my married buddies having as much sex as they would like? Why did no one tell us? What is it with us and doctor’s appointments? It all seems too anecdotal and stereotypical to be true. And yet, I went to the dentist last week for the first time in two years.

The hardest thing for me to admit to myself about all of this is that I am ashamed - not of being a man. But of not being an exceptional man, or rather of not being a man of my own making, not being an “inertialess” man; of not being a man who because he was raised by women had no problem whatsoever managing the daily work of making a life with one; of not being the kind of man that was above all of this petty gender stuff; of not being the kind of man that was able to name and define adult manhood on his own terms. Come to find out, I am fairly common and fairly powerless to be bigger than the drama that has played out between men and women since the beginning of the species, and significantly less powerful than my circumstances of being a married father.

I see that my younger assumptions were amazingly uniformed and brazenly arrogant. But, they were who I was.

And now, I am someone different. I am a someone reading a book about men in relationships with women. I am learning about shame. And I am so ashamed that I have something to learn. I thought things would be different. I was certain I would be.

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If you’d like to respond, here are a couple of prompts to consider:

Is your emotional life shaped by fear or shame?

How have marriage and children changed what you know about yourself?

Are you the adult you expected to be? Why or Why not?