Oddly enough, I got three e-mail on Friday about my blog, none of them on the same subject.
One that caught my eye (and which I was going to blog about all weekend, but didn’t get around to it until now) pointed me at this article, which both slams the Lileks critique of Rev. Gene Robinson and cites a lot more into about Robinson’s background, his marriage, and divorce, than I’d run across in my cursory examination. The letter-writer complemented me on my own observations on Lileks’ comments, and suggested I might find the further information interesting.
Reading through the material, I have a great deal of sympathy for Robinson in the pain he’s gone through in his life, related to his sexual orientation and his internal conflicts over the same. And he and his wife, in divorcing, did about as good and non-disruptive (to the children) job of it as one could imagine.
But I still think he and his wife exercised poor judgment in marrying and in having kids, given their preexisting knowledge of Gene’s conflicts with his sexuality. That is, perhaps, a contemporary perspective (1972 was a whole ‘nother world, so far as that was concerned), but there it is.
And while the article goes to great lengths to indicate how supportive both his ex-wife and at least one of his daughters (the one who was 4 at the time) are today of his decisions and life path (though I wonder how the other daughter feels about it), I’m still not comfortable with giving him (or his wife) a pass on divorcing with a 4- and 8-year-old in the house. Sure, he moved just a few miles away, and had frequent visitation, and was there for all the school plays and the like. It is not, though the same thing as being there, 24/7.
In the end, once you peel away the histrionics and inapt, offensive metaphors, Lileks’ case against Robinson really boils down to one sentence: after the separation, Robinson did not “live with [his daughters], get up at night when they’re sick, [or] kiss them in the morning when they wake.” Well, the newly single Gene Robinson did not move back home to Kentucky, either, or even to a locale that would be far more hospitable to a newly available gay man than rural New Hampshire. Instead, he moved five miles away and shared joint custody of his daughters. If one accepts that this divorce was unavoidable and for the best (as I do, and Lileks does not), then there’s nothing more that could be asked of him.
I think that misses the point, as is spelled out in the next paragraph.
Of course, even Lileks admits that divorces “ofttimes” happen for “valid reasons, sad and inescapable.” So Lileks isn’t entirely a Dr. Laura, screeching that marriage is forever, no matter what. No, Lileks just doesn’t view a gay man’s midlife coming to terms with his sexuality, and hoping for the possibility that both “he and his wife could find deeper love with other people,” as good enough. Lileks would prefer that Gene and Boo Robinson had simply trudged along through a passionless marriage, each pretending that they did not yearn for the joy of a true partnership (such as, for example, Lileks so obviously feels that he has with his wife, or that both Gene and Boo now have with their partners), on the dubious theory that this bargain would have been better for their daughters. Nothing “sad or inescapable” about that scenario, nosirree.
From all accounts (including this one), it sounds like Gene and Boo Robinson had a strong, positive, constructive partnership of a marriage — far better than many other marriages that somehow trudge along out there. Sexual passion was, clearly, not part of that equation. Is that, then, the be-all and end-all of what makes a successful marriage, or life?
Not to put down or minimize sex, but it seems to be me far too easy, as a generalization, to say that it is the sine qua non of married life.
But even if we accept that Gene and Boo could, in fact, “find deeper love with other people,” I don’t accept that tips the balance toward making their divorce the best case scenario for their children. Even if we posited that all that was possible between Gene and Boo was a “sad and inescapable” “trudging along” (something I think far from proven), I think it is far to easy to say that a deep and meaningful talk with the kids, followed by visitation rights, is as good or acceptable or as nurturing as “living with [his daughters], getting up at night when they’re sick, kissing them in the morning when they wake up.”
Lileks may have been flip in equating Robinson’s divorce with waking up one morning and jetting off to Rio with a trophy girlfriend, but making one’s self-actualization the deciding factor in whether to put kids through a divorce is not necessarily any less facile. Saying that Gene and Boo had no choice but to break up their family so that they could find their true loves is, as a principle, so open to abuse that it’s impossible to say where individual cases cross the line between justified and unjustified.
It also assumes that their lives were at an end, and that another fifteen years — get the kids raised and out of the house — would be a death sentence for both of them. I don’t buy that.
I think part of it comes down to a question of Quality vs Quantity Time. Quality Time theory says that’s what’s important for a kid is the big events, the major items — being there for the school play, being there for vacations, being there for milestones. Quantity Time theory says raising children is, in fact, a 24/7 proposition, and that how you serve up breakfast every morning has just as much impact as whether you were there to cheer Junior on at the Little League Finals.
Quality Time has become really popular, for reasons both good and bad. But I think the “drudgery” of Quantity Time, while far less romantic, gets short shrift. And that’s where, no matter the joint custody arrangements or understanding talks or how few miles apart Gene and Boo lived, I think they did a net disservice to their daughters. And that, I think, is ultimately where Lileks is coming from.
I’ll add (one more time) that this has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s orientation (hell, I wish he’d been raised to be able to accept it, had found another nice gay man, and gotten married to him). Nor do I think this was sufficient cause to bar him from the episcopacy, if the people of New Hampshire voted to accept him.
But neither do I think that it’s trivial, nor that it’s something that should be seen in a positive light, either. It was, it seems to me, a bad decision on the Robinsons’ part, though that they managed the consequences of that decision so well is to their mitigating credit.
