A Bittersweet Confession

It is my misfortune to be the type of person who too often sees the dark cloud behind the silver lining,

who frowns at the half-empty glass, and who broods on the rising ocean rather than enjoying the waves. That said, there is a major part of my life which  I have been blessed to enjoy for over seventeen years, and that is my marriage to a wonderful partner.

Not everyone is so fortunate. The parting of ways between lovers is so common-place that many regard the institution of marriage, or at least that part of it that insists on “till death do us part,” as an anachronism, something we’ve carried in our social baggage since the days of a religion-dominated culture.

When two people realize that there has been a tectonic shift in their relationship, either through growth or infidelity or the strain of economic hardship, we call the marriage a failure. When honesty, compassion, devotion, shared goals and love are dulled by mistrust, selfishness and greed, the lawyers get involved, and things get messy fast.

So went Philip Lee’s first marriage, as he describes in Bittersweet: confessions of a twice-married man. The marriage lasted long enough: as he and his wife separate, they have three children, two girls aged 14 and12, and a boy, 9.

Lee’s brother Walter is also suddenly a new bachelor, and the two decide to move into a weatherbeaten house, once the family home, overlooking the Atlantic. It is only an approximation of a home: a hand pump and woodstove in the kitchen, and an outhouse in the backyard. They are both too shell-shocked to do much to improve it; as winter approaches they find themselves scrambling to get firewood.

“The ancient Greeks understood that most of us are walking around blind through the confusion of apparently random events in our lives,” Lee writes. “However, they believed that events are not random but connected to an unchanging divine order.”

Lee attempts to situate his failed marriage, and his new relationship with a woman he works alongside at a newspaper, into a similar philosophical framework. For him, marriage, as defined by our society, places unreasonable demands on a couple, which we are hard-pressed to meet and sustain. These include the various aspects of love.

“Love is a verb,” his girlfriend tells him. It isn’t the end state, or even a stable state of being, but an action, continually renewed and renegotiated. Love between equals, he writes, is possible only within a relationship of reciprocity.

What has happened over the centuries since the invention of romantic love is that the word has come to carry too many meanings, from the Greek eros, or sensual, erotic love, to philia, friendship, and agora, which is that deep sense of common humanity. In the 20^th century, we freighted LOVE with commercial implications. We now expect to receive and are expected to give erotic friendship within a cultural and legal binding of life-long marital and economic partnership.

Bittersweet is much more than its subtitle suggests: while the confessions are there, in sometimes raw and personal detail, it is also a compendium of one man’s advice, based on readings as diverse as Homer, Sappho, Scott Peck, Bertrand Russell, Robert Persig and Homer…and the sage advice of his new girlfriend and his children.

Philip and his new love suffer many trials. They eventually marry, not for parental approval, but to accommodate the adoption bureacracy in China, where they are matched with an orphaned girl, a new sister to Philip’s three grown children.

I was initially sceptical about a book of “confessions,” but Bittersweet is so much more than a description of a marriage gone wrong and the building of a new relationship. This book gives a valuable insight into what goes into making a relationship work. It ought to be required reading for any man—or woman, for that matter—entering these rough but beautiful waters.

Tags: Review