ask E JEAN
Tormented? Driven witless? Fear not, help is just a short letter away
MORE THAN A BOYFRIEND
DEAR E JEAN, I want to get married. My boyfriend is against marriage. (Not that he doesn’t want to marry me – he doesn’t want to marry anyone. He doesn’t believe in marriage.) We have trust, loyalty, love and happiness. Neither of us wants kids, so there’s no concern there. We’ve promised to spend our lives together, we share a bank account and all our decisions are made together. His family considers me part of their family, and my family considers him part of ours. So after four years, and feeling more in love than ever, is it any wonder I want to be his wife?
Am I making a mistake by staying with him? I don’t want to wake up at 40 still calling him my “boyfriend”. Or is marriage something that’s thrust on my imagination by societal norms? – Committed, Not Married MISS NOT, YOU GOOSE Bah! Don’t talk to me about “norms”. Half the “norms” foisted on you by society are hogwash, though most of us aren’t brave enough to say they’re hogwash, so everybody just continues on with the hog washing. But not your boyfriend. He’s a chap who maintains his rebel a itude.
So it looks like you’ll have to sacrifice, Miss Not, and endure all that deplorable “trust, loyalty, love and happiness”. Whatever you need to do, whatever suffering it requires – sharing bank accounts, adoring each other’s families, living like the most awesome lovers in history – somebody has to do it, even if he loves you, like, forever.
PS: Weddings are nice and husbands are fine things to have, but I see you’re too young (I looked you up!) to comprehend the wacky bliss of even waking up at 40, let alone the pure, crazy joy of waking up at 40 next to someone you can call a “boyfriend”.
LEADER OF YOUR PACK
DEAR E JEAN, I’ve just turned 30, and I have the horrible suspicion I’m behind the pack. I’ve worked as a reporter, I’ve done undergrad, postgrad, post-postgrad courses (you name it, I did them), I’ve freelanced as a writer and now I’m doing art projects – more and more sporadically, mind you. It feels like I’ve spent years passionately driving towards nebulous career goals, only to subsist on a meagre income. All enthusiasm for my work life has burned out. How do I rekindle my career fire? How do I keep up with the pack? – Adrift And Apathetic ADRIFT, DARLING Keep up with the pack? Nobody keeps up with the pack. Hell, the pack can’t keep up with the pack. Even Kylie Jenner (with her more than 58 million – repeat, million – Instagram followers) says she wakes up “every morning with the worst anxiety”.
Your primate brain – and its precuneus, focused on consciousness and reflections upon self, and its temporoparietal junction, where thought processing and perception networks lie – centres your a ention on people above you in the pecking order. So you always feel behind. Weirdly, you don’t even register the 97 per cent of the world trying to keep up with you and your razzle-dazzle education and art projects.
I was recently glued to an article in The Wall Street Journal by primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (I had no choice – I’m so behind this guy in the pecking order that I’m an amoeba on the backside of a flea on the bu ocks of one of his baboons) called “Brain Reflexes That Monitor The Pecking Order”. Read it and you’ll never fret about the pack again.
As for your waning “enthusiasm” for work life, why should you be wild about working? Many jobs are dull, dull, dull. If you want to spark your desire, the thing to do is to, excuse me – yes, there is a more precise word for it, but Auntie E can’t run around advising correspondents to try fucking off, so let’s just say, if you want to spark your desire, try goofing off. Goofing off frees you. Goofing off lets you try new things. Goofing off leads to rediscovering childhood jubilation. Einstein goofed off at his job at the Bern patent office and dreamed up E = mc². Hedy Lamarr goofed off during her glamorous-leading-lady acting jobs in Hollywood and invented a technology that became the backbone for today’s wi-fi and bluetooth technologies. The deepest fun and the greatest achievements of humankind come when people aren’t working. So, please, darling, start goofing off. When you find something you like, you’ll ignite like a bonfire. Good luck!
SOME THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T SHARE
DEAR E JEAN, An a ractive 20-year-old girl asked my husband to father a child for her. She’s the girlfriend of my husband’s 51-year-old brother, who’s unable to have children. I’ve always wanted children. My husband has consistently refused, saying he doesn’t want the responsibility. But now he’s hit midlife, he’s decided he wants progeny.
Of course, as I’ve already entered menopause, I can no longer change my mind. I told him if he went ahead with