Sometimes, in a moment of self-indulgence, I think about paradise. It is a beautiful concept, and a welcome distraction for those of us stuck in those hellish middle years of life between childhood and old age, which are chiefly defined by suffering and labor, in which Americans take a sort of perverse pride despite their limited understanding of both.
Paradise could be a beach with white sands bordering azure seas in the milder months of the year, when the sun’s warmth and light are welcome accompaniments to the sea breeze. Ionic columns stand in relief on the hills, the sand is soft and pleasant beneath one’s feet, and the scents of the earth and grasses are rich and fragrant. Or it could be an alpine meadow sloping up from a clear lake, cut with cool streams and flecked with the bright colors of wildflowers. Deer emerge from the woods at dusk, and music floats across the lake as the sun sets and the moon paints its surface a silvery white.
I don’t know whether other men share such fancies; these are things men do not often speak of amongst each other. If a man were to admit to any expectation of such a reward, others would likely laugh, and even those that held their tongues would smile inside at such a naïve and childish fantasy.
Yet as quick as men are to dismiss notions of paradise or some mystical Avalon of endless joy and happiness, they readily accept the idea of the perfect wife and the happily-ever-after fantasy so often attached to fairy-tale notions of marriage. In a strange reversal that sets our own time so clearly apart from the ancient ages, we apply fictions and fanciful illusions to grim reality, creating myths that embellish the course of life on this earth. Where the popular medieval tale of Tristan and Iseult portrays romantic love as a tragic, doomed affair, we are now regularly treated to fictions of endless, undying love, and too often arrange our lives as though this is a reality, rather than the cruel illusion youthful love so often turns out to be.
I believe this explains a great deal of the tragedy and disappointment that hovers over the decaying hulk of marriage like so much foul air. There is something truly odd about our civilization in how it has seized the ideal from the realm of myth and transposed it upon the temporal world, effectively mythologizing reality and creating a living world of fantasy in which anything is supposedly possible, and all desires may be fulfilled on this earth. There is nothing that characterizes Americans so much as this marriage of myth and reality; of ideals and practice.
And so it is that we men continue to act on faith, betting our lives on a secular fantasy that is not only as unproven as the concept of paradise, but is demonstrably wrong in the temporal world that unfolds before our mortal eyes. This is why I can never take atheists seriously: life requires its own irrational justification, and people will find their faith somewhere or other, empiricism be damned, and there they will hole up and stake their claim, clinging to it as their only refuge in an otherwise incomprehensible universe.
Unfortunately, placing one’s faith in a vanishing myth such as the American Dream leads to disappointment and disillusionment in most cases. It is virtually guaranteed to disappoint men, but still they are moved to acts of martyrdom, only to have their faith shattered before their eyes, and their beliefs exposed as a hoax that has targeted them as the dupe. Is it any wonder that divorce can break a man?
It would be far better for a man to believe in worlds of angels and demons, or even fairies and trolls, than to buy into the fiction of the perfect wife and marriage. A belief in heaven in the afterlife is far more reasonable than the expectation of happily ever after in this life; the heaven on earth that men look forward to can easily become a living hell in comparison to their expectations.
To restore some sanity to domestic relations in America, perhaps we need to once again put myth and fantasy in its proper place: in the uncertain world of the afterlife, the unseen, unknown parts of the universe, the distant past and future, and the realm of imagination; it does not belong in our notions of the family, which is the most palpable, real social construct on earth.
I, for one, count the man who believes in the American fairy tale of the happily ever after marriage as the greater fool than the much ridiculed Muslim who expects 72 virgins in the afterlife, the fundamentalist Christian who expects the rapture, or the devout Hindu who looks forward to reincarnation.
