we were talking until 2:45 AM last night. we've agreed that people often succumb to the pressure put on people to get married and start a family, when they are not ready. i love the story of the feminist leader who refused to get married, then found the love of her life at 83 and could not help but get married. it was on her terms. i want to have that kind of strength. the same goes with my career and self-confidence in my decisions. the asian-american family pressure is all about guilt. "why do you make your family sad?" because you're refusing to go to medical school or not married to a rich husband yet. let's deconstruct that. is it really sadness? and is it really the WHOLE family? please. don't exaggerate. and why must it be about ME changing? the fact is (and how often our emotions ignore facts) -- it's the FAMILY that needs to change and get over it.
American families are happy with their kid getting a BA and a masters, why is it never enough for Asian families?
for me it's, "you're the smartest kid in the family, you went to columbia and harvard, why won't you go to medical school?" as a little kid i dreamed of helping people as a doctor. i was always good at math and science. but my aunt's continuing pressure for me to "make money," telling me i need at least "6 figures" to live -- turned me off to the whole career because now, in my mind, it's just about money. i have never been the kind of person to care about that -- no, i've been the type who hates money because of the obsessiveness, the superficiality of people who are consumed by making it.
i remember growing up in this incredibly wealthy area and being so lonely and yearning for something "more." my journey to understand the spiritual plane of life, which is so unexamined in our society, has been intense and frustrated alternately throughout my life. j and i had a great discussion on spiritual things and certain truths because of the things he's been reading. it made me realize that seeing others, and my own, lack of a spiritual perspective has a lot to do with my anxiety about my career path, anger at the church and its corruption, anger the war and the American government's obsession to dominate the world. these things will never lead to happiness. and finally the paradigm shift -- my own impatience and cynicism must meet god's surgical knife too (i don't believe in christianity on its own, but the analogy serves my point well, i think).
mono(tonous)gamy? and the urban tribe
back to my conversation with bobby: another thing we talked about is how hard long-term relationships are, and monogamy. after six months many people will ask themselves, is this the person i want to be with for the "REST" of my life? but why do we always have to project into the future? we could die tomorrow. even if not, it's working now so why freak out about the future? it will become obvious in time anyway, unless you are crazy or in denial or whatever.
bobby and i always have the same things going on in our relationships at the same time. i asked him last night, "i wonder what we're going to go through together in our next life!" joking - but he is my soulmate. it's great to have a soulmate who's not your lover, but best friend. big brother. confidante. i am so lucky to have him in my life. especially with that big confident self-esteem of his - i've learned so much from his confidence and maturity. thank you god for bobby.
mom is not going to Manila
...because of SARS. thank god for this too. i really hope i don't get SARS and die. i guess, though, you cannot escape fate. nyc has 7 "possible" cases. then there's my co-worker who was quarantined, but didn't have it. the incubation period is 3-7 days.
c'est la vie!
appendix: the urban tribe
"In My Tribe"
By ETHAN WATTERS
New York Times Sunday Magazine -- October 14, 2001
You may be like me: between the ages of 25 and 39, single, a college-educated city dweller. If so, you may have also had the unpleasant experience of discovering that you have been identified (by the U.S. Census Bureau, no less) as one of the fastest-growing groups in America -- the "never marrieds".
In less than 30 years, the number of never-marrieds has more than doubled, apparently pushing back the median age of marriage to the oldest it has been in our country's history -- about 25 years for women and 27 for men.
As if the connotation of "never married" weren't negative enough, the vilification of our group has been swift and shrill. These statistics prove a "titanic loss of family values," according to The Washington Times. An article in Time magazine asked whether "picky" women were "denying themselves and society the benefits of marriage" and in the process kicking off "an outbreak of 'Sex and the City' promiscuity." In a study on marriage conducted at Rutgers University, researchers say the "social glue" of the family is at stake, adding ominously that "crime rates....are highly correlated with a large percentage of unmarried young males."
Although I never planned it, I can tell you how I became a never-married. Thirteen years ago, I moved to San Francisco for what I assumed was a brief transition period between college and marriage. The problem was, I wasn't just looking for an appropriate spouse. To use the language of the Rutgers researchers, I was "soul-mate searching." Like 94 percent of never-marrieds from 20 to 29, I, too, agree with the statement "When you marry, you want your spouse to be your soul mate first and foremost." This über-romantic view is something new. In a 1965 survey, fully three out of four college women said they'd marry a man they didn't love if he fit their criteria in every other way. I discovered along with my friends that finding that soul mate wasn't easy. Girlfriends came and went, as did jobs and apartments. The constant in my life -- by default, not by plan --became a loose group of friends. After a few years, that group's membership and routines began to solidify. We met weekly for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. We traveled together, moved one another's furniture, painted one another's apartments, cheered one another on at
sporting events and open-mike nights.
One day I discovered that the transition period I thought I was living wasn't a transition period at all. Something real and important had grown there. I belonged to an urban tribe. I use the word "tribe" quite literally here: this is a tight group, with unspoken roles and hierarchies, whose members think of each other as "us" and the rest of the world as "them." This bond is clearest in times of trouble. After earthquakes (or the recent terrorist strikes), my instinct to huddle with and protect my group is no different from what I'd feel for my family.
Once I identified this in my own life, I began to see tribes everywhere I looked: a house of ex-sorority women in Philadelphia, a team of ultimate-frisbee players in Boston and groups of musicians in Austin, Tex. Cities, I've come to believe, aren't emotional wastelands where fragile individuals with arrested development mope around self-indulgently searching for true love. There are rich landscapes filled with urban tribes.
So what does it mean that we've quietly added the tribe years as a developmental stage to adulthood? Because our friends in the tribe hold us responsible for our actions, I doubt it will mean a wild swing toward promiscuity or crime. Tribal behavior does not prove a loss of "family values." It is a fresh statement of them.
It is true, though, that marriage and the tribe are at odds. As many ex-girlfriends will ruefully tell you, loyalty to the tribe can wreak havoc on romantic relationships. Not surprisingly, marriage usually signals the beginning of the end of tribal membership. From inside the group, marriage can seem like a risky gambit. When members of our tribe choose to get married, the rest of us talk about them with grave concern, as if they've joined a religion that requires them to live in a guarded compound.
But we also know that the urban tribe can't exist forever. Those of us who have entered our mid-30's find ourselves feeling vaguely as if we're living in the latter episodes of "Seinfeld" or "Friends," as if the plot lines of our lives have begun to wear thin.
So, although tribe membership may delay marriage, that is where most of us are still heading. And it turns out there may be some good news when we get there. Divorce rates have leveled off. Tim Heaton, a sociologist at Brigham Young University, says he believes he knows why. In a paper to be published next year, he argues that it is because people are getting married later.
Could it be that we who have been biding our time in happy tribes are now actually grown up enough to understand what we need in a mate? What a fantastic twist -- we "never marrieds" may end up revitalizing the very institution we've supposedly been undermining.
And there's another dynamic worth considering. Those of us who find it so hard to leave our tribes will not choose marriage blithely, as if it is the inevitable next step in our lives, the way middle-class high-school kids choose college. When we go to the altar, we will be sacrificing something precious. In that sacrifice, we may begin to learn to treat our marriages with the reverence they need to survive.
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