Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [90]
Yet, in the final analysis, we believe it is worth it, because no matter how painful it can be to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance. At the age of sixty-five, the feminist writer and activist Vivian Gornick wrote a dazzlingly honest essay about her lifelong efforts to balance work and love, and to lead a life based on exemplary egalitarian principles in both arenas. “I’d written often about living alone because I couldn’t figure out why I was living alone,” she wrote. For years her answer, the answer of so many in her generation, was sexism: Patriarchal men were forcing strong, independent women to choose between their careers and their relationships. That answer isn’t wrong; sexism has sunk many marriages and shot holes through countless others that are barely afloat. But today Gornick realizes that it was not the full answer. Looking back, without the comfort of her familiar self-justifications, she was able to see her own role in determining the course of her relationships, realizing “that much of my loneliness was self-inflicted, having more to do with my angry, self-divided personality than with sexism.”15
“The reality was,” she wrote, “that I was alone not because of my politics but because I did not know how to live in a decent way with another human being. In the name of equality I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love.”
Chapter 7
Wounds, Rifts, and Wars
High-stomached are they both, and full of ire, In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.
—William Shakespeare, Richard II
ONE YEAR AFTER HE had confessed his affair, Jim felt there was no letup in Diane’s anger. Every conversation eventually turned to the affair. She watched him like a hawk, and when he caught her gaze her expression was full of suspicion and pain. Couldn’t she realize that it had just been a small mistake on his part? He was hardly the first person on the planet to make such a mistake. He had been honest enough to admit the affair, after all, and strong enough to end it. He had apologized, and told her a thousand times that he loved her and wanted the marriage to continue. Couldn’t she understand that? Couldn’t she just focus on the good parts of their marriage and get over this setback?
Diane found Jim’s attitude incredible. He seemed to want compliments for confessing the affair and ending it, rather than criticism for having had the affair to begin with. Couldn’t he understand that? Couldn’t he just focus on her pain and distress and quit trying to justify himself? He never even apologized, either. Well, he said he was sorry, but that was pathetic. Why couldn’t he give her a genuine, heartfelt apology? She didn’t need him to prostrate himself; she just wanted him to know how she felt and make amends.
But Jim was finding it difficult to make the amends Diane wanted because of her intense anger, which made him feel like retaliating. The message he heard in her anger was “You have committed a horrible crime” and “You are less than human for doing what you did to me.” He was deeply sorry that he had hurt her, of course, and he would give the world if he could only make her feel better, but he didn’t think that he had committed a horrible crime or that he was inhuman, and the kind of groveling apology she seemed to want was not the kind he was prepared to give. So instead, he tried