I've Admired You for So Long

I was walking into Bruno's grocery store this evening all by myself, as usual. Passing an elderly couple on their way out, I wondered whether they were happy together. My mind probably turned that way because I like thinking I'm happier not being part of a permanent couple. I've also been thinking a lot about such matters since Monday, when I read the following comment on a blog at the Washington Post:

The human species does not naturally mate for life. People in hunter gatherer societies today don't do that. People form loose pair bonds for the period of time it takes a child to be conceived, born, and weaned from its mother's milk. Then the chemical that is produced by the brain that causes people to want to be with one another is no longer produced in response to that person and they split up and form a new pair bond. This increases the genetic diversity in a small tribe where everyone is related to everyone else, and therefore has survival value which was selected for by evolution.

Marriage for life developed after people invented agriculture. Once they owned land, it became economically unfeasible for them to be continually dividing it up every few years. Also, with the invention of the animal drawn plow, a male was needed to work the farm. Males also wanted to be able to pass down their land to their sons and needed to know that the sons were really theirs. Hence marriage for life.

Now that these factors are no longer in play, and now that the social and religious restrictions on divorce have been loosened, people are reverting to their natural behaviors. What you see in Hollywood with celebrities is actually "normal". It's the rest of us that are abnormal, or at least unnatural. (this commenter, I might add, identified himself in a previous posting as a former divorce attorney!)

You have to be careful not only to read things you already agree with, or that serve merely to confirm your ill-informed prejudices. Be that as it may, this made a lot of sense to me. People feel so horrible for "falling out of love" or for seeing their marriages end in divorce within a few years. At least part of what gets us in the mess may be a chemical in our brains that produces feelings we articulate as "love." Nature may have only meant for that chemical dose to last a few years, so that you could then mate with someone else in your tribe and prevent all your families' bad genes from ending up pooled in your and your mate's offspring.

In a society like ours, that means the divorce business is always going to be good. A cultural message reinforced by thousands of years of practice that pushes us to marry collides with a biological imperative crafted by the preceding tens of thousands of years of evolution that drives us to spread our genes more widely. People marry thinking they're in love, fall out of love (i.e., lose the chemical stimulus), and then either decide to stick with it and maybe transform the marriage into something workable but less than they had hoped for, or they get divorced.

With all this in the back of my mind, I passed the couple at the grocery store this evening. I then pictured older people grocery shopping alone, and for reasons unknown to me my mind moved quickly, for the first time in years, to its memory of one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. I've admired her for so long, yet I rarely have a chance to speak of her to others.

It was September 1988. I was 25 and had finished four years of graduate school, with two to go. I was about to spend a year in Germany, France, and England to research my Ph.D. dissertation. I had driven my car, a 1978 Chevrolet Chevette, back to my parents' house in Alabama for the year (and, if you're wondering about the recent collapse of the American auto industry, simply compare the number of Japanese or German cars you still see from that era with the number of Chevettes you've encountered since the early 1990s).

I had to return to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for my flight to Germany. I felt too poor to fly (and I was -- this was the only month in my entire life I was without health insurance). So I took my one and only long-distance bus trip, from Montgomery to Durham. I was excited but a bit apprehensive. Somehow I knew the buses I had seen portrayed in movies were inaccurate, and I would likely experience something different. That it was. It was a little worse in some ways, but far better in others. The worst part was the layover in the downtown Atlanta bus station. The best was meeting the woman I've admired for so long.

She got on the bus in South Carolina somewhere. I want to say it was Greenville. She took the seat next to me, and somehow we started talking. In her mid 60s, she was a single mother who had put many children through college, after which she got a nursing degree herself (a few years earlier, in her late 50s and early 60s). She had already retired and was on the bus all by herself at the start of a journey I couldn't even imagine, but which she had longed for. As a black woman who had been born during the worst of Jim Crow, she had come far just by getting on the bus in her retirement after seeing her children through college. A moment later I would find out how far she really intended to leave the restrictions of her younger years behind.

"Where are you headed?," I must have asked. "Nova Scotia," she replied. After some immense internal astonishment had died down, I brought myself to inquire, "Why Nova Scotia?" She laughed a little and said simply, "Oh, I just always wanted to go there." I had been worried about riding between Alabama and North Carolina. Now she was going to forge ahead for days, change buses, and endure layovers in inner-city bus stations at odd hours, only to arrive by herself in a sparsely-populated, wind-swept maritime province she had only dreamed of. I took my leave at the Durham station in awe of her. My admiration subsided quickly enough in the face of my own upcoming adventures, but it was only lying dormant. It awoke this evening to remind me that no one is a success because of whom she is with, but only for the content of her dreams and her bravery in bringing them to life. I hope one day I grow up to be just like her.