Story: Uxory and Society

But you were too tired to rub my back last night – it would have just been doting laced with complaint, which you know I can’t stand.
~My Wife

Mostly this blog is about interior experience and intimate relationships and as a rule I do not comment here about society as a whole or even very much in part. Today I have something different, though not too different since my purpose in opining a little on society is to ultimately inform a fairly new symbol (my symbol) to this outlet, that of ‘a good story’. To do this I begin in a well explicated spot for I’ve been talking endlessly about the inadequacy of some typically used symbols to describe the great thing my wife and I have. And while I do believe I have finally figured I may not need more adequacy (right now) than “Doting is to Octopus Heart and the Love-of-his-life“, the point of this assay is not to differentially search for such a label again, but rather to trace a path untraced here before, or at least the first part of that path, about passion, society and towards ‘a good story’.

I’ve already talked a great deal about passion; I am in fact an advocate for passion and am ‘passion positive‘ because passion is where we get meaning and motivation, piece by piece. I firmly believe passion is a good thing:

and we both, like we all, are ensorcelled
and enlivened by passion’s power; ’tis
a destination, a motivation,
a dedication and a devotion:
to the beauty of passion that fires our soul.

Yet there are also ‘passion negative’ things – such as the definition of uxorious:

- having or showing an excessive or submissive fondness for one’s wife
   (OxfordDictionaries.com)

Excessive, not ‘more than normal’ or ‘above average’, but ‘excessive’. Implied is fondness beyond standard, necessary, or prudent passes into the realm of ‘submissive’, and ‘submissive’ (for a man) is ‘excessive’. This is one of the nicer standard definitions; other definitions are clearer about submissiveness. (I won’t even get into the obvious misogynistic nature of a society and language where there isn’t an opposite of uxorious, a woman who loves her husband greatly, because no one thought to label “the ordinary way things ought to be”. Indeed the only word that comes close is ‘wifely’.) Some of those definitions with less than pleasant connotations:

- excessively attached to or dependent on one’s wife
   (Collins English Dictionary)

- foolishly fond of or submissive to your wife
   (TheFreeDictionary.com)

- greatly or excessively fond of one’s wife, doting
   (The New Short Oxford English Dictionary)

- dotingly or irrationally fond of or submissive to one’s wife
   (Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third Edition)

Ignoring the obvious stereotype violation that a woman’s supposed to be dependent on her man, not vice versa, (a stereotype finally seeing its comeuppance incidentally), together these definitions seem to say ‘greatly loving’ someone is ‘excessive’, is too ‘irrational’, and that ‘greatly loving’ someone means the same thing as to “yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of” the one you love.

And while I ultimately disagree with the connotation here, I readily admit that in a very real sense it is true; any time anyone loves or cares for another, they are possibility subjecting themselves to the vicissitudes of rejection, spurning and loss. What if your beloved bikes in front of truck? Or witness Romeo and Juliet, the infamous cautionary tale of impassioned ‘star-crossed lovers’, who each kill themselves at the thought that their beloved is already dead. Their sheer grief of love’s loss, the overwhelming pain of beloved’s absence, seem to say they were truly destined for tragedy because they loved so greatly and so passionately and shouldn’t have; and the story merely came to an end deserved for the foolishness of excessive fondness.

Yet I say no, tragedy is not the height of passion’s embrace, but rather fear is the depth of tragedy’s embrace. We fear of falling out of love, our partner falling out of love, perhaps not divorce so much anymore but we certainly fear the ‘I told you so’s’ and the ‘sour grapes’ of buyer’s remorse over a passion that for whatever reason didn’t last, and that now we therefore must believe couldn’t have lasted because it couldn’t have been true.

~

Which brings me to my minor point about postmodern society: we may put the skeptical, cynical, knowledgeable face on postmodern dispassion and disinterest, but (as I can’t resist reference to a book I love) I agree with Wendy Steiner’s suggestion postmoderns don’t enjoy good things ‘too much’ when they have them because to do implies they have bought the falsity and trickery of mere relative assigned value.Of course, her book Venus in Exile is about twentieth century society’s rejection of beauty in art and literature.

Yet in my experience, we are individuals who know beauty –and passion– by direct experience, not by indirect analytic interior construct. Quite aside from the dissonance of having any interior construct deny one’s immediate experience, the reversal in relationship between experience and interior construct is at the heart of what is true for any person. For philosophy, ‘truth-loving’, is having your immediate experience form your interior constructs, and adjusting your interior constructs to adequately express and explain your experience. And if having your interior constructs filter your immediate experience is unavoidable to some degree, intentionally forming one’s experiences to fit their interior constructs, intentionally truncating and curtailing experiences to fit, is the Procrustean essence of ideology.

And if we live openly and truthfully to our experiences, including experiences of beauty and passion, yes, we invite the inevitability of ‘bad’ experiences – such as grief. And I have known grief and the terrible wasting depression that comes with it, and honestly I’m more than sympathetic to it. Yet if in the face of fear I said (uxorious) passion was for those already standing on their own two feet, so also I believe passion is for those able to face their own fear and life’s differences and changes with courage and a positive attitude. Living in the openness of reality may be a difficult thing to do because there are realities we don’t want to see, but it does not mean doing so isn’t of worth, value or true.

And so despite the word ‘uxorious’ giving me the impression that in the collective unconscious of contemporary postmodern society to ‘greatly love’ someone is necessarily synonymous with the irrational stupidity of willfully entering into a bondage of the mind and with a foolish and silly enslavement to passion, what I really sense is the pervasive individual’s fear of meaningful immediate experience.

~

The last two definitions of uxorious above are included in Kate Moses’ enjoyably literate and intelligent essay about the word. Moses clearly thinks uxory isn’t for everyone, but everyone would agree with her on this point: different people different passions. Yet she also suggests “it may be something wasted on the young” and (if you can) you should “take your uxory where you can find it” (i.e. while you still can) because someday its passion going to end up ‘a broken ring in your jewelry box in need of repair’. And this where I part company – with Moses and with society’s collective unconscious if I must – because for me this essentially negative attitude towards immediate experience, this skeptical, cynical, postmodern opinion of passion, is not only detrimental to the individual (in dissonance), but is problematic for attaining a balanced mode of meaning that leads to a positive perspective, one oriented on growth, happiness, well being, that is open to experience and treats experiences as real and valid.

When I saw my first definition of uxorious, “foolishly fond”, I didn’t see it as a bad thing at all (perhaps I couldn’t have seen it as a bad thing); I thought it was great that human experience required the English language to have such a word. But now I realize that for the most part other people look somewhat askance on long-term romantic ‘passion sensibility’ as a rather childish, immature, puppy-love-ish Romanticism, something that is at best ‘quaint’ or ‘old-fashioned’ in today’s times, despite the fact that many of those same people want more meaning, romance and passion in their lives.

Which brings me to point of communicating such manner of meaningful immediate experience as passion, without falling afoul of prevailing sentiment towards irrationality, without burying the meaningful experiential content in analytic differentiating dissection. Which brings me to the idea of ‘a good story’ (poetry, movies, television, any format or media) as a ‘sideways symbol’, as an indirect expression able to sidestep the ‘direct’ explication of experience through interior or social constructs and communicate with an individual’s interior sensorium of immediate experience – and speak its native language.

~

N.B. Incidentally, my favorite standard definition of uxorious still does not escape ‘unusual’ or ‘excessive’ is ”characterized by doting and unusual excessive fondness for and often submission to a wife” and my favorite related nonstandard definition of ‘uxory’ is (1.) passionate attachment to a spouse (2.) perfect blend of love and lust.