Impassionata

A friend posted this on his blog today, citing research – “Our emotional tone or mood is defined by the number of positive versus negative moments experienced during the course of a day.” To those of us who study human interaction, it’s a no-brainer but it got me thinking about why I don’t enjoy being around snarky people.

In a conversation with someone, I learned that while on the one hand, I probably should get better at tolerating snark and pay more attention to people’s intentions, there’s a degree to which I also consider interpersonal snark incredibly unhealthy (as opposed to actually wit – or humor used as incisive commentary on issues).

As my awareness of this has grown, so has what I consider to be a great skill in friendship and relationships in general. Namely, I think actively cultivating a positive environment for the people around you is part of the whole practice of what it means to be a good friend (amongst many, many other things), partly also based on the reasearch of John Gottman on successful relationships.  It’s something to think about – the ability to be a good friend is a SKILL set that one can work on, and like all other skills, there’s a journey from incompetence to greater degrees of competence.  I also think that the simultaneous skill you have to grow is the skill around having difficult conversations – the yin side to the yang of radical acceptance.  The best friends I have not only radically accept and love me, but they also help me grow – and they do that partly by telling me the things I do that don’t work for them, and give me feedback and input in ways I can hear.

Gottman’s research on good relationships show that there’s a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions and that really healthy ones have something like 23:1 ratio – because when things go poorly, there’s a reservoir, like a bank account, to draw on.  Even a 1:1 ratio doesn’t work so well because we take in negative more harshly than we do positive. (I’m drawing these numbers from my head – it’s been a few months since I last looked at Gottman.)

I also think it’s worth thinking about that men whose best friends cheat are 70% more likely to cheat themselves – which leads to the research that who you have around you DOES influence who you are and how you show up in the world. There are then two choices you have at the individual level – what kind of friend you are choosing to be and who you choose to surround yourself by.

I like to be around people who help me evoke my best self – and who see me, for all of who I am, at my best and my most challenged places. I’ve discovered that when I’m around people who behave in ways I don’t admire – I am more likely to behave in ways I don’t admire. Clearly there’s some inner work that needs to be done there, and step one would be exercising my abilities of choice – to not do same actions, and secondly, to make different choices about who I spend my time with.

I feel unsafe being around people who shred other people to make themselves feel better because of the extraordinarily high likelihood that they’re doing that behind my back to me. One of the things in learning about human trafficking is that johns believe that money exchanged nullifies the harm done. It doesn’t, but I was caught by the languaging because people think intentions nullifies the harm done. I would argue that intention at best mitigates it, like a harmful action done from a loving place is a different circumstance than a harmful action done out of spite, but nonetheless, mitigation is different than eradication.

I steamrollered my little sister on a decision recently. I meant well. But it doesn’t excuse my neglect of her feelings. Should I be judged on action or intention? Both – but not one to the exclusion of the other – and really, what I was ashamed of was my action, not my intention.

I would also comment that we live in a pretty armored society so it’s easy to dismiss the “small” stuff – but I would also say that people are by and large unaware of the accumulation of harm and only by starting to pay attention to the small interactions does awareness grow.

The best part of this, by the way, is that being with friend who I can relax with and also stretch me is that it’s just darned fun and becomes this completely awesome feedback positive spiral rather than a negative one. And when the negative stuff comes up, as it will, there is an increased ability to deal with it and an increased capacity to handle it – so it goes back to being  a no-brainer win!  The choice of self-work isn’t the choice to just make me happier – it grows my capacity to be a better friend too – another win! (As someone from ISE quoted someone else famous, you don’t do self work to save the world – you do it to save the world from you!)  And the last point – all of this takes constant practice of being in relationship – whether with Toben, family, friends, my mother, my clients, my colleagues, etc. so I’m never perfect at any of these – but it’s one of the core things I think are worth striving for because, to quote Mary Oliver, at the end of my life, I don’t want to end having simply visited this world.

Change shows up in remarkable, smallish, but really significant ways sometimes.

Toben is driving us home from pre-Christmas shopping, and this old guy in a Mercedes swerves into our lane, nearly hitting us and totally cutting us off.

Anyone who’s ever been in a car with Toben knows full well what a typical reaction is.

Post-Hoffman-retreat Toben is mellow and, despite honking at the guy, says in response to my look of astonished shock at his lack of swearing or otherwise typical reaction, “I still think he’s a terrible driver but my getting upset is not going to change that.” And then he says, “My heartrate is still up, but that’s mainly ’cause I want to protect my sweetie.”

At the weekend facilitator WIM (Stanford’s Women in Management) retreat a few weeks ago, our teacher read us this:

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

-          Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”

I included it in a recent letter I wrote to Toben, because it captures for me some of the reason to be in relationship in the first place. For some posterity context, I’ve been in Egypt and he’s been at a retreat, so I write this in the remarkable absence of his presence – remarkable for how keenly I’ve felt it and the opportunity it’s given me to feel that.

For me, partnership is not really to assuage loneliness – though it serves some of that purpose – because loneliness exists sometimes most keenly in a dyad or a crowd. The delusion of loneliness is such an inherent part of our existence that love sometimes temporarily banishes a sense of it, but sometimes also throws it into stark relief. (I use the word “delusion”, not because the experience of loneliness isn’t real and doesn’t have its own very profound truths in it – but because the poet Jennifer Welwood said it so well that “willing to experience aloneness, I discover connection everywhere”, and the discovery isn’t an intellectual one of finding it with specific other human beings but the literality of our innate connection to everything. Full text of her poem included below.) I think those who seek partnership to escape their own aloneness, which really all of us do, discover all the whacked ways that it doesn’t. I could write a whole essay on the relationships that arise from this, but that’s a different blog post.

I think it’s frankly easier to be single. There are fewer other preferences or considerations to take into account. Being in a relationship means that there is someone in every day  interaction with who will hold up a mirror to best and worst parts of me, whether I’m willing to see it or not. Even in his absence, since I’ve not seen Toben for almost 3 weeks and am missing him terribly, I get to experience the tumult of emotions that give me data about myself, how I see the world, how I see him. I see the places where I find myself not as secure as I’d like or can externally project, and I see the places where his presence really enhances my life, and I see some of the parts of myself that are ungiven. Whether or not he’s physically around, I’m still in a relationship with him – admittedly as much with the image I have of him in my head in his absence in the realm of thought.

To descend another level, into the felt sense, I also am in relationship with the essence of who he is. My fingers just stopped on the keyboard for awhile. There aren’t really words for that.

Refining the truths we tell each other indeed…

I’ve just come to my own ending. I thought I had a point to this blog post. I have an internal sense of closure on my writing, while my critical writer has failed to see the point articulated – probably ’cause it’s not in the words. Oh, well.

Here’s the Jennifer Wellwood poem. I like it because it reminds me of something I said at dinner a couple of nights ago to friends, that my life became so much more full once I stopped pursuing happiness. Happiness flees in the direct pursuit of it, and it has been the welcoming of suffering, and even loneliness that have shaped me. The latter is a tug of war – I’d like to welcome all the experiences, but it’s an ongoing and necessary and painful practice. :p

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed…

It’s 2am and I’m wide awake, and thinking, thinking, thinking. It’s a lull in the night, sandwiched between the sleep-deprived haziness of very busy days. Yesterday a day at the Seasteading office, promoting a frontier dream, and tomorrow holding a wedding rehearsal and a dinner to launch a new venture and journey for me on the professional front. The weekend lies ahead with a bang – a busy family wedding on Friday, and more merging between two families on Saturday, a Sunday Spark sub-commitee meeting…and of course more family time through the Christmas week.

This coming Sunday, I get to finally see Toben – though I’ve been thinking of him regardless of which side of daylight I’ve been on in the world. There’s a solid certainty to the scheduling of events – booked solid through New Year’s – and there’s a complete uncertainty in not knowing the experiences and reactions of other people in environments completely outside their milieu.  I really miss Toben. It’s interesting to contemplate that whatever his experience is, it’s something I both have a great of experience with, and of course, none at all. What I mean by that, is that I’ve spent 15 solid years of my life consciously doing personal growth work  - enough to  trust the processes and also the deep uncertainty of it all.

The waiting-on-this-end then is a good opportunity to Practice, as so much of life is. What a bitch sometimes though. I have the chance to practice acceptance and patience, examining my expectations, my own ability to be a non-anxious presence, to see the contradictory longings in myself and others, my own capacity to tolerate ambiguity…practice is all for when the rubber meets the road, except the rubber is really always already on the road, sometimes whether you know it or not.

By the way, I am still ridiculously pleased that I rode a camel. It wasn’t what I was expecting to be up there with things I wanted to do in this life. Climbing around inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was more of a life goal. But hey – I rode a camel…for about five minutes.

Egypt, Day 2 – Cairo

Jetlagged girls – we were up bright and early, or dark and early as the case may be since I was wide awake at 3am…and 4am…and 5am…and 6am. We lasted til 6am in bed before popping out and heading for breakfast. Natural, thick yogurt with fresh honey dripping right off the comb was delectable.

We booked a half-day tour to get a taste of Islamic Cairo and Khan el-Khalili.

We also visited a papyrus museum where the steps in making papyrus were demonstrated. I find the papyrus plant fascinating, and the strength of the paper is amazing as well! Toben and I are integrating papyrus into our wedding invitations. He chose sheets of dark papyrus from Flax Art in SF – I’m going to keep an eye out for it here in Cairo but the large sheet of plain dark papyrus at the “museum” was way overpriced.

After the museum, we visited a pair of mosques (the Mosque of Al Rif’i and the Mosque and School of Sultan Hassan) – sitting within the latter to learn about Islam. It’s interesting to learn about Islam from a Muslim, to finally learn about the difference between Sunni and Shia, and to out some of their customs. For instance, a woman who is unhappy in a marriage has a right to petition her husband for divorce. He didn’t say what happened if the husband denied that petition, though. Men may take more than one wife, but not vice versa. According to our guide, having women stay in the house is not about the oppression of women but a revering of them, and the reason for women to be home is to teach the children the ways of the parents, so that they are not taught the ways of strangers. I can get that, since I know personally that I will feel torn between wanting to be with my family and also having a career I truly love. Yet it seems one of those belief systems that could have a beautiful aspect but also a shadow side, potentially one thing in theory but the actual practice is probably highly variable. For me, it comes to – how much can women make a choice? And I think that there is more than one way to raise children well.

Anyway – other interesting tidbits – sexual interaction between men and women is reserved wholly for marriage, supposedly for both men and women. If something happens without wedlock, it’s very bad for the girl and her family (what about the guy?). There is no concept of girlfriend/boyfriend – just husband/wife. Our guide mentioned being from a small village in central Egypt where a bridal tradition some 15 years ago was to accompany the groom to his house and wait outside until the sheet with the blood of the virgin was displayed. I was appalled. He assured us that this is no longer the case now, as practices are changing with the times. I suspect that is only true in some areas, and not at all true in others. Female genital mutilation is still a widespread practice in Egypt, according to my guidebook. I’m very grateful to Spark for its widening of my lens on gender issues, and also wary of my own judgments.

There was something beautiful, though, about sitting in this gorgeous open-air setting amidst soaring walls in a sacred place to learn, as so many others have done before us, about Islam – to be able to ask questions, and to understand a little more from a specific perspective about a people whose world certainly influences mine. The setting was amazing. The two mosques we visited have a serene, gorgeous beauty. The artistry of the inlaid stonework, the marble, carvings, etc. were stunning in these glorious patterns. The openness of them – one with a ceiling so far up that it was hard to contemplate, and the other open to the sky overhead – was another element I loved, as well as the lack of pews. In the center of one of the mosques was an enormous beautiful fountain for the ablutions required before prayer, which takes on even more of a sense of abundance in the desert setting with harsh streaming of the sun. The fountain is dry now – replaced by modern taps of water.

The sun IS more harsh here. I was very aware watching the first day of the sun rising over Cairo that this is the land of Ra, and the other sun gods, and it made sense at a far deeper level than intellectual.

Our guide mentioned something poetically beautiful, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile. I could see how ancient people believe that. The Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt, and the contrast between the relative greenery of its banks and the harsh desert has shaped its people, myths, culture. I am fascinated by how the environment shapes a people, like the openness of the American frontier shaped us so much during our early years.

I really liked our guide, named Mohammed. (It is very common name – there are a great deal of very common names amongst the men. I haven’t met as many women.). I have, on the whole, found people to be quite friendly and approachable, and while some women are dressed observantly (everything covered but the eyes), there have also been very beautiful women wearing designer skinny jeans. We have, admittedly, been traveling in more affluent/touristy areas, so I’m trying to take various contexts into account as I experience the city and its people.

Via taxi, we passed by the sprawling Cities of the Dead and the fortress of Suleman. The cities of the dead are vast acreages where tombs lie, some in splendor and some in squalor, with apparently quite a large population of squatters turning it into a slum. The fortress of Suleman is sprawling – and it is evocative to hear this name from the time of the Crusades!

Our last stop was at Khan el-Khalili – this bazaar has been around since the Middle Ages, named after Khalil, a Master of Horse who founded a caravanserai in 1382. The street of the goldsmiths is still the street of the goldsmiths! Small stalls sell tons of stuff, mainly aimed at tourists. It’s fascinating to see accumulated wares in the dimly lit backs of these stalls – old telephones and typewriters, mingled haphazardly with brass lamps and bronze camels. Perfume bottles seem a major tourist item, along with papyrus and bellydancing outfits. Our guide tells us most of the goods are made in China. Becca and I mainly stuck with our guide and took a few pictures. I was fascinated by some of the examples of old houses with their heavily screened windows – so women could look down at the street without being seen – that still exist in this part of Cairo. My geek brain had flashbacks to “Quest for Glory II”, a computer game I played as a child set in an exotic desert city.

Upon our return to the hotel, we had lunch and napped. I had an icky encounter in the elevator where an older man in his 50s in a suit with native coloring tried to proposition me. He smiled at me, said something complimentary about my appearance, then asked where I was from. I said the U.S., and he reached out and touched my hair which I found icky. The elevator stopped on his floor, where he stood in the doorway and said “come, come”, with gestures. I very definitively said no with big shakes of my head. It was uncomfortable. I think I need to watch my eye contact – which I read in my guide book that it can be seen as a come on. Yesterday, I was observing a very oddly dressed blondish-man – and by oddly, I mean garishly unattractively dressed in pink – and he caught my eye and then yelled across a room in a language I don’t speak to importune me and licked his lips at me in an icky way. By most men here, we have thus far been treated respectfully – I’ve liked most people, but I’m definitely aware that my inner feminist is vocal. The last time I remember being this uncomfortable as a woman was in Mexico.

We try to sleep on the overnight Amsterdam-Cairo leg, and manage to doze a little. We arrive in Amsterdam at 2:30am. I have to buy another visa because the Egyptian Embassy in SF dated my entry visa for 2006 instead of 2009, and my ATM card doesn’t work. We have minor hassles with immigration. The pre-arranged transport from airport to hotel fails to materialize. We sit outside the Cairo airport at 4am looking for a non-existent airport shuttle. We are bugged by cab drivers wanting to charge a higher price than our guide book suggests. We eventually find someone who arranges a cab for us. He tells us tip is taken care of in the higher-than-usual fee. Our cab driver finally delivers us to the hotel.

Our room, of course, is not ready. Becca sweet talks the guy at the front desk – he offers to give us a room at 5:30am if we go have breakfast. We have breakfast. We then check-in and go up to our room. – The corridor outside the room smells like cigarette smoke – as though we’re on a smoking floor. We hope (in vain) for a non-smoking room. We try to change it. No other rooms are available at 6am. We decide we don’t care… It is dawn and the Nile flows outside our room – it is beautiful, and there is something about the early morning light that is magical. Lying down horizontally is complete bliss. I cannot reiterate this enough. The second bliss is that of hot water for a shower .  Forget heaven after we die – it’s about a Marriott when one is in an exhausted stupor. We pass out for 7 hours.

Eventually, we drag ourselves out of bed and decide to go for a walk. We change rooms – thank goodness, because the smell of smoking rooms is even more awful without exhaustion to mask it. Our neighborhood is called Zemelek, on the island of Gezira in Cairo. The central core of our Marriott was once a lavish palace built for Napoleon’s wife Empress Eugenie, and it’s beautiful. I used to have paper dolls of her when I was a child, as I loved Victorian fashion.

We took a walking tour out of Becca’s book – what’s prominent about our neighborhood is that it’s supposed to be one of the safest in Cairo. There are many embassies located on adjoining streets. It reminds me a great deal of Mexico City. I’m more aware of my first-world eyes, that this upscale neighborhood reflects a level of dilapidation and a worn air. It’s quite clear that we’re in a very different country. I feel my own sense of discomfort arise as we get honked at yet realize that while it’s out of my norm, I don’t feel unsafe.

I’m fascinated by the sounds of Cairo – the honking of horns, the calls to prayer at the different times of day, the birdsong in the trees of Gezira island. When Becca and I took our walking tour, it hit 5pm and we heard this beautiful chanting voice from a nearby mosque, calling people to prayer. It’s deeply connecting to me, this same call to prayer repeated simultaneously throughout the land at the same time, as it has for thousands of years. It reminded me of hearing the bells toll at sunset in Carcassone, France, standing atop the ramparts and hearing it in the valley, and also being called to meditation in a small retreat center near Yosemite for Vipassana – crossing a field in single file with other women at dawn to be called by the bells.

By the time we returned from our self-guided walking tour, we were pretty hungry so we opted for dinner at the hotel – this fabulous Egyptian meal with the best hummus I’ve ever had. I’m a big fan of Middle Eastern cuisine, so quite happy here. It’s a famous Egyptian dessert that truly sold me, a recommended confection called Om Ali, this custardy confection that is hot and creamy made with pastry, milk, sugar, coconut, and cinnamon, flavored with nuts like almonds. It may well be my favorite dessert now, along with hot Chinese tapioca pudding (not anything like American tapioca). We also tried a characteristic Egyptian drink called karkaday – “a deep red infusion of hibiscus flowers”.  It is heavenly – especially cold and sweetened by honeyWhat seems to be characteristic in a really joyous way with Becca is that our meals are a lingering concoction of yummy food and delectable conversation!!

We both express our gratitude at this life, this experience. Neither of us take it for granted what great privilege we have, and it is humbling on multiple levels – for the gift of friendship, for the gift of travel, and the gift of comfort and also of safe discomfort.

Settled into Cairo at last. It is dawn, and from outside our window, I can see snippets of modern Cairo and a glimpse of the Nile flowing by. It’s been a comedy or tragedy of errors since we landed – more tragic given that we haven’t truly slept well since waking up in San Francisco at 7am on Tuesday morning! Becca and I have calculated that we’ve barely slept in the last 50 hours!

Starting on Wednesday morning – Becca and I chatted and then dozed a bit uncomfortably on the long flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam.  The plan was to use our long layover in Amsterdam to hop briefly into the city and take a walk around. When we arrived exhausted and bleary-eyed in Amsterdam at 11:30am, we hopped a train to the city center,  passing some beautiful countryside with lovely wintry trees and green fields with sheep.

We follow other tourists off the train. We ask the TI help lady how to get to the city center and she points us at an escalator down and out – we feel comforted in the surety of her answer. We enjoy walking around for awhile despite the cold and drizzle, seeing canals and the bicycling culture. We take some pictures of a beautiful church, and wander into a beautiful cloister garden. I started noticing that nothing was quite as I remembered it, despite it only being a couple years since I last passed through Amsterdam. None of the street vignettes in seem familiar. I also pride myself on foreign city navigations (am terrible at it in the U.S. but have wandered streets from St. Petersberg to Shanghai by myself with ease), so I was disturbed that I couldn’t find any street names on the map we bought in the airport.

Eventually, I walked up to a ticket lady, showed her the map, and asked her to point to our location. She looks at it for a moment, and then says, “This is a map of Amsterdam.” I think, I should hope so! She says, “We are in Utrecht.” Becca and I stare at her and then start laughing. They try to convince us to stay in Utrecht, as it is a smaller, less congested cousin to Amsterdam. We are mellow about our mishap, but also cold and tired.  I am comforted – my world is again right-side up, now that I am no longer trying to apply the wrong city map. We decide we need coffee, find an adorable little cafe to take shelter from the cold and rain, and enjoy a hot drink. Then we find our way back to the station, explain to the TI lady that we were dumb, and ask which train to hop to get back to Amsterdam. She looks bemused. We go back to Amsterdam. (I did, at some point, wonder aloud why the train station signs said “Utrecht Centrale”, and wondered what “Utrecht” meant…)

Amsterdam is lovely – and fortunately familiar, recognizable, and easy to navigate – since now we are in the right city for the map to work. I down a double shot of espresso (something I never usually do), which gives me the energy to wander arm in arm with Becca around the streets of Amsterdam for a few hours. Becca downloaded a walking tour of Amsterdam, and I have fun navigating the beautiful streets of this wonderful old city I am fascinated by the beautiful homes and businesses, and I love its canals. Favorite parts include finding a wonderful little cafe/chocolatier (Pompadour 148 Kerkstraat), and enjoying the golden illumination of the city decorated for Christmas, reflected in the beautiful canals, as it started to grow dark. Between the exhausted + cold, we manage to get back to the airport in a stupor to await our late night flight to Cairo. We haven’t slept in some 28 hours at this point, and both of us are feeling the kind of achy, sick nausea that comes with too much sleep dep. On to Cairo.

Toben was keeping me company last night as I was doing some packing for Cairo. Mellow night of spending some time together since we’ll be apart for awhile, and trying to get things done. Somehow when it got dark, fear hit me. It was a really deep fear, the kind of fear that comes with the recognition of the preciousness of this life and how ephemeral it is and how uncertain it is. There  was the certainty that now or later or sometime in between, this will end – and not just this life, but also this keen sense of loss. I was struck by words I once heard Michelle Williams say, that she had a deep sense of the “presentiment of loss” – the pre-sentiment, when you know in your bones the inevitability of its coming. And the miracle is that we love anyway. Sometimes I sit in the awe of that, that we fragile human beings love anyway, but awe wasn’t what I was feeling last night. I felt afraid. In having the joy of having Toben, it’s also the sense of loss – and of how brief this life will be at whatever and whenever the end happens to be. I was also struck by how animalistic the fear felt, how primal, how deeply humanly animalistic – looking out the window at the night sky and realizing that so many countless eyes over countless years, not just human, have looked out at that night sky and known fear, and I really knew in that moment that I wasn’t alone in feeling the fear and the aloneness of it (oh the fun of paradoxes).

Of course, the fear has receded with a good night’s sleep and in the light of day. I think we keep it at bay through the mundanity of our lives, the protective tasks that go on and on – dishes, laundry, packing.   I wonder if it’s always there – and what we do to live with it, how we deny it, or how we lean into it. Loving certainly seems one way to lean into it – to let intimacy and connection in. In a narrow way, we sort of can’t help ourselves – our societal structures (rightly or wrongly) are built to encourage coupling and procreation. Yet embedded in all that I think is a choice to love anyway. For some,  at least. I think the more consciously that choice is made, the more terrifying it is…but also the more blissful this existence, the more wondrous, the more ecstatic, the more full, and the more aching. Maybe. I’m still feeling my way through this.

I was thinking of the Buddhist notion of non-attachment, and how mixed-up and deepening I feel my understanding of it gets over time. It crystallizes for a moment, and then fractures – at least the cognitive understanding does, amusingly not the experience. That exists in various moments, and really in all moments, but only consciously in various moments – sometimes.   Right now, I believe deepening into love, the fullness of it, and the moment of it is part of the journey of non-attachment – part of growing the capacity to let go, but not an easy path. The delusion of non-attachment, I think, is detachment – from the world, from people – that’s not non-attachment. That’s fear.

The question has come up with friends and family about whether I will change my name. My personal answer is “no”.

What I’m most delighted by is that there are women in the world that have the right to make a choice. Because of that, I greatly respect the choices each woman has made about it. I have very good friends who have chosen to take their husband’s surname and I have very good friends who have retained their maiden name and I have deep gratitude and respect that it is a choice, and love that women I love have had the opportunity to be conscious about it whatever choice they’ve made.

My personal experience is that, having changed my name before in my first marriage without thinking about it as much prior, I was surprised by how much is tied to identity. It’s “something” (even if that “something” isn’t wholly articulateable) to write your name a certain way and to be called by a name for a couple of decades, and then to have it be shifted. What I appreciated was that it was a distinct marker of a major life transition, of consciously joining my life to someone else’s.  What I was negatively struck by was 1) what a pain in the ass it was, 2) that it took me a good 6 months to write my new name “correctly”, and 3) that it was a required shift on my part with no correspondingly conscious external shift on my ex-husband’s part.

I believe very much in symbols and acts of meaning-making, and a name change is certainly one such.  The more conscious I am of this, the more I personally would like to see it be more gender balanced. If one member of a couple has to experience this shift (”shift” is the generous word, “giving up” was my initial more judgemental term), why doesn’t the other? I understand and respect the traditional elements, the importance of clan and of names – and yet, there seems to still be an imbalance to me.  I have asked men how they would feel about changing their names – with varying results. (I know quite a few men who have changed their names, actually.) For many, though, it is unfathomable. It’s part of who they are, it’s the name they were born with, it’s the names of their fathers. Yet my name is also a part of who I am, it is the name my parents gave me at my birth, and the name of my father and grandfather (and I am proud to carry my mother’s surname as my middle name, per Chinese tradition). Why would I be any less attached or expected, because of my gender, to be somehow more willing to change my name? Or that it would be easier? (Because I was conditioned to? Because it’s expected? Because it’s what everyone has always done?)  As another side note, it actually is much easier legally for women to change their names than for men to. I find that enormously irritating.

In this arena, I don’t think we’ll find a good gender balance anytime soon. It’s hard to keep what is meaningful and traditional, and yet egalitarian, especially when traditional structures were typically inherently a bit sexist. I really love traditions, though, and think many of them are important anchors for our culture and society, so I struggle as I consider these different aspects.

As a historical note, the American suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone (1818–1893), made a national issue of the right to keep one’s own surname as part of her efforts for women’s rights in the U.S. Women who choose not to use their husbands’ surnames have been called “Lucy Stoners” ever since. (For me, the key word is “choose” whether to take their husband’s name or not – not being sheep about it.)

Returning to my own experience, when aspects of myself felt really lost/subsumed to marriage in an unhealthy way, there was a huge relief in reclaiming my own maiden name after my divorce, to be fully “me” again. From a personal standpoint, I’m less willing to give up one visible aspect of a much more difficult interior journey.

Now Toben and I are going on a different journey, and respectively taking up roles as husband and wife . I know there will be changes for both of us in that, and I don’t personally think it needs to be reflected in my taking his name.

The expression on his face when I asked him to change his name (as a joke) was pretty priceless, though!  “But it’s my name!”, says he.  (Toben Young sounds a heck of a lot better than Gayle Green does, in my opinion.)  Toben has 100% supported my decision to keep my name from the first moment it was mentioned. That there is no question that he’ll keep his name, while my decision to keep mine is questioned is something that still strikes me as annoying.  I’m as willing to uphold the choice of other women to keep their names or change them to their husband’s surname because they want to…or whatever other option they like.

By the way, my friend Elisa said that a country western song actually gave her some big insight on name change from the masculine perspective. The lyrics were something about a guy loving a woman enough to give her his name. From that vantage point, I can see the intention of it as an honor. I joked with Toben that I loved him enough to give our future kids both our names!