The rules.
(As aired on All Things Considered, October 28, 2002)

I suppose it's worth saying that I'm not sure this essay successfully expresses my current thinking about these topics. Nor does its ending reflect my current view of how the US deals with rules. But for the sake of completeness, here it is anyway. --j

 

When I was seven years old, my parents, in one of their smarter moves, ignored my public school's advice to skip me a grade. Instead, they sent me to an experimental school. My mother tells me that there were plans and curricula, but I don't really remember anything like that. We just went to school and had fun. Recess was when we wanted to go outside. If I wanted to learn about whales, a teacher would teach me about whales.

The school was just starting when I joined the ranks. It started off without any rules. We just went at 8 and went home at 5. Most of us thought that eating lunch was so fun that we ate it around 8:30 or 9. By 5, our low blood sugar was making us crazy. Soon, we got our first rule: Only eat lunch between 11 and 2.

Actually, it was perfect. If I wanted to eat lunch with everyone else, I could go at 11:15 or so when a big crowd would go sit on the jungle gym and trade yogurt for ham sandwiches. If I was in some kind of conspiracy with my best friend, we could wait until 1 and sit by ourselves, eating our lunches at the top of the slide.

We got other rules, eventually. I had to learn to write in cursive even though I didn't like it. Now I write in cursive all the time. Who knew that skill was so useful?

When I grew up, I lived in San Francisco among a lot of people who had come to the city to live out some adult version of my second and third grades. They took an old American idea to its new extreme: overturning old rules and seeking ways of life that are invented rather than inherited.

To take one example, a lot of the gay men I know really want boyfriends. But once they get in relationships, they end up earnestly negotiating some plan to sleep with other people. They think anything can be reasoned out and discussed. "We're adults," they say. "What do we need with arbitrary rules?" they ask each other. But I think all too many of them end up like the kids who ate lunch at 8:30: temporarily pleased, unhappy in the long run.

I understand why they question monogamy. After all, to live in the gay world, you have to break one of the biggest rules of all just to join up. Even very little boys know that they're supposed to get married to a girl when they grow up. After realizing that doesn't apply to them, a lot of people start calling all the rules into question. Apparently, non-monogamy works for some couples, although honestly, I've never quite figured out how.

I know a couple of guys who are everyone's perfect couple. They're super sweet, they have the A-number-one nicest dog and now I hear they have a great kid, and they clearly just adore each other. When they celebrated one of their anniversaries, I asked one of them what their secret was. He answered, "We don't sleep with other people. Everyone we knew who did that, their relationship didn't last, so we decided not to." Simple enough.

Having to make your own rules about life is harder than just accepting the ones that got handed to you. Still, sometimes even people who have to invent their rules, like these two guys, end up coming back to some of the old ways of doing things just based on the evidence that some of the old ways work. In the end, lunch between 11 and 2 ensures you won't have a meltdown at 4:30.

I'm not a believer in having lots of rules, but that's because I so strongly value the few rules that I keep a hold of. Recently, I read an interview with an astronaut who was talking about the differences between the NASA astronauts and the European astronauts and cosmonauts they were working with. Here's what he said: "In Europe, they have literally more rules than any one person is ever going to be able to understand or know, and the general tendency is to ignore rules to the extent that you can get away with it. Whereas in the United States, we really don't have all that many rules, but we take them very seriously."

copyright 2002 joe wright
broadcast and transcript, copyright 2002 national public radio