JULY 2024 SULLYGRAM:  Sparks my pilot light to read about couples in long relationships who successfully bond. Staying together is not an easy thing these days and always a work-in-progress without a net. No one-size-fits-all formula either; but in the main, such couples keep intimacy alive, even if it morphs from the kind of sex they had early-on. They survive issues, survive parenting, survive empty-nesting. Some credit having separate pursuits away from each other with keeping their marriage from stagnating. Others bond just the opposite, sharing virtually every moment (as my parents did), anchoring evermore to each other through each experience and discovery.

Sound Pollyannish as opposed to Barbie world? Hard to tell. Admittedly, “happily ever after” is a relatively small percentage of what people confide in me. Most of the response to what I post or write about relationships in Sullygrams comes from women, and most of them are as disillusioned as ever about men. How long has it been since the sexual revolution, “women’s lib” and the Me generation? The first graduating alum are seasoned enough to make some considered re-examinations now, and the results seem to reflect a lot of disillusionment. Many dissatisfied women bought into the grandiosity of “you can have it all.” But designer husbands were always problematic, and musical chairs was never going to yield plural winners.

So what’s the path forward for the disenchanted feminist in a cold marriage, or the faithful wife who feels discarded, or the dormant husband who feels buried alive in silent alienation? Divorce and try again? Second marriages may flourish, yet can often seem like negotiated business arrangements when what each person really wants is to be valued and blindly in love again.

Hard questions beget hard answers, and I have no answers at all. If unanswerable confidences from thoroughly unhappy people didn’t weigh on me, I wouldn’t be trying to write this Sullygram. Truth be told, I’m paralyzed when someone poses a rending dilemma that only they can solve. Long-term investments in a shared life are complex and unique. No one should offer judgements that only the individuals therein can weigh. But for those who have already stepped away from a relationship and are struggling, maybe I can ask a few honest questions that offer some perspective.

To the exasperated feminist still searching for a late life partner who meets all her criteria, is it worth your trouble? You can seethe and blame till frustration turns your battered heart to stone, but no one was ever going to actually win the Battle of the Sexes. That very characterization belies love and hints at something more like scorched earth surrender. Can you overwrite someone else’s nature? Celebrating your own nature, however, was and might still be a good plan. Discovering your freedom and living independently in the relatively secure modern era has great benefits for some. And to the lonely man clueless on how to fill a void, the options haven’t really changed. Sit down in that last remaining musical chair and hope some fantasy sits on top of you for a lap dance, or man up to the stunted part of you that women regard as romantically viable.

Society and its mixed messages are particularly brutal to women on the rebound. Culture, if not nature itself, conditions women to live like flowers and slowly die when the bloom is off the rose. But the same thing is happening to men, less visibly perhaps, less dramatically and more psychologically. Thing is, you don’t have to wither to the ground or feel used up if you’re a single woman headed for the far shore past menopause. Seeing yourself through the eyes of males since puberty in order to make them desire you may not have ended up where you wanted it to; but instead of feeling defeated, why not use your accumulated wisdom to clarify the dynamics? The male animals who are educable, or programmable, are pretty much in the barn by now. The outliers who refuse the bit and harness are similarly running on masculine instinct and are probably never going to be what you once wanted them to be. What price companionship? What’s the saying: a woman marries a man thinking she’ll change him, and she can’t; a man marries a woman thinking she won’t change, and she does”? I’ve sometimes said that in my observation women often get what they ask for but seldom get what they want. Ironically, the more that archetypal men become vestigial, the less women who are conflicted seem to like it.

It sounds simplistic, but the fundamental disconnect in communications may be as elementary as the difference between what is said and what is meant. Men tend to see every problem pragmatically in its own terms; women tend to see issues as test cases that prove their worth to a man or lack of it. And if the man appeases the woman, she may be frustrated because she has only won his behavior not his understanding (“…yes, dear”). I’ve probably offended both genders by now, and more power to you if none of this fits your experience or viewpoint, but if you said that both men and women in modern times are prone to trip over their gender imperatives, methinks you win a kewpie doll. 

In any case, relationship amendments are a fait accompli since the sexual revolution. Entertainment, commerce, legislation, education, social media and political correctness have carried the messages for some six decades now. The recipe revisions are baked in the cake, and whatever is is right. It’s not like there are men’s study programs and degrees. Feminist revolt and toxic masculinity have hammered away at generations; one glorified, one criminalized. It’s settled dogma unless the world goes back to cave people Uglak and Penelope in some dystopian future (alarmingly possible) where the rule of law, standing armies, and police forces are no longer around to check the tyrannies of men. You can shape behavior with settled law, but the caveat is that deeply buried evolutionary and emotional instincts will survive separately from lip service.

So, what’s the lasting lesson? …wazzat, lasting lesson? Like I wrote to someone recently, life is a frame capture in an ever-changing movie. Be careful what you ask for or demand. Winning the visible may cost you the invisible. You won’t understand others, if you don’t understand yourself first. To the lonely man, be sure you’re not still looking for your mother. To the lonely woman, before you condemn men, think of all the things women complain about, then be of great cheer and appreciative for the confirmed bachelors who by their isolation never inflict those marital aggravations on women.

Me, I much prefer the pure ether of romantic idealism. I’m still blindsided that it came to me when I least expected it. To suddenly hear it in the river of a voice keened all my senses. The late storms of life dampened any expectations, but flowers grow at the discretion of rain, and suddenly I was seeing it in her bright eyes and feeling its caress like the charged air that follows lightning. A sea of sultry wind radiated over me each time we met, awakening everything foundational I had buried in cynicism. Surprises me when I see glimpses of that hopeful longing in others. Perhaps it is that we all hide those imprinted fantasies where they can be summoned forth from time to time, lived in exquisite bursts of joy and trust. In the practical world, I believe in balance, in parity, in quid pro quo, in the Golden Rule and the Golden Mean, but beware the double standard, the false comparison, the fake equivalence. Nature chooses which of its trees yield apples and which yield oranges. You have to be tending the same orchard or standing in the same grove when you draw parallels. If you’re thriving on apple sauce, fresh-squeezed orange juice doesn’t threaten your harvest. It’s only competition when you inject competition. In the end, love is self-proving. What’s the saying? “You are what you eat.” LOL…well, you are what you do, anyway. Stick to your prescribed diet but dream of dessert.

Video below blew my Speedo off. Couple California friends -- my former webmaster and a swim-mate who took these films almost 60 years ago --transferred the footage to digital and sent me a flash drive. I got it down to a little over a minute for Sullygram readers. Captures a slice of atmosphere at America’s Brennan Pools Olympic Trials facility in Rouge Park, Detroit, including some reckless tower diving and kibutzing around with a water polo ball. And, yeah, that sinister guy in and out of the water is moi. The Chinese hat clips crack me up. I was born in a hospital lobby with a sunny disposition, but the incubator was next to the microwave, and the nurse was near-sighted. ‘Splains why I never learned to smile for the camera.  

NOTE: if the video cannot be seen here on my Author’s page, you should be able to see it at this public link, even if you’re not on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.sullivan.395/videos/849822040401003

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan