For regular readers of The Useless Tree, let me apologize for missing my usual Sunday blogging of the NYT’s "Modern Love" column last week.  Work just swamps me sometimes and I am behind in some grading (which is the thing teachers like least about their jobs).  But I think I can squeeze it in today.

    I felt let down, and a bit angry, with this week’s piece by Robin Hemley.  He weaves together two stories: his divorce and an unrelated incident he has with a student who is stalking him.  The effect conjures up an image of our lives as things beyond our control.  The student comes into his life mysteriously and unexpectedly.  His marriage similarly seems to be driven by forces outside of himself:

 It’s often said that when you face death, your life flashes before you.
When your marriage dies, scenes both happy and sad play themselves out
at odd moments.

     But as I read on, I came to a different understanding (and this is drawn just from this piece; reality may be more complex, but with this one story to go on, this is the conclusion I came to): his marriage did not passively die, he killed it.

    About half way through we discover that he had fallen in love with another women; his wife had discovered their amorous emails and that had sparked their separation.  Toward the end we learn that he has two daughters, 7 and 9, who will now have to face the stresses and strains that divorce can bring.  That is where I lost all sympathy for him.

     Inevitably, over the course of a marriage, feelings change.  Love is no longer that swirl of emotion it was in younger years.  We may sometimes feel that old warmth and excitement in the presence of someone else but marriage, and especially raising children, means that we cannot simply follow our raw emotions anymore.  When I hear of middle-aged fathers "falling in love" with someone else, it strikes me as the height of immaturity and irresponsibility.  Can’t he see that love means something different now, or it should for him at his stage of life?  His love (and here is where I will go Confucian) should be found in his daily performance of his familial duties.  His love is not simply a selfish fulfillment of some new infatuation.  His love is now embedded in a web of social relationships.

    But he has ripped all of that apart in the interest of chasing his feelings for his new love.  Old love is more important than new love, however, and he should know that.

     I get a bit angry over this kind of thing because divorces (and I will say that I am not inveighing against all divorces; some may be necessary; this one seems unnecessary) can hurt children more often than we realize.  Even "friendly" divorces put children is difficult circumstances, as this research suggests.

     So, in the end, Hemley is giving us an old story.  There is nothing new here: man meets (probably younger) woman, falls in "love," leaves family, and, basically, abdicates his fatherly responsibilities.  All of the other stuff, the story about the student stalker, is diversion.  He is a good writer, indeed the director of the prestigious non-fiction writing program at the University of Iowa, but all of his skills cannot hide the fact that he has failed in his family duties.  He has not found love, he has denied it.