Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes….

These last couple of posts have generated a lot of great comments that have stimulated my thoughts about the issue of connection or a lack thereof when someone leaves the church. Kaarina commented on this topic on the "Essay on Losing my Religion" post.

Kaarina, I think you hit the nail on the head. The awkwardness stems from our suspicion that someone else thinks that we're a fool for staying faithful or for capriciously giving up our eternal blessings. I haven't had anyone actually verbalize those kinds of thoughts to me, although I'm sure a few people have thought them. I did have one friend who pretty much terminated our friendship when she called to tell me that she didn't want to come to a party at my house with her non-member boyfriend because we had a co-ed living situation that might "send the message to him that that's okay." I didn't argue the point with her and I haven't heard from her since. In all fairness, I haven't made any attempt to contact her either. I have a few family members that questioned my decision but they didn't say too much. We've mostly avoided the topic.

I'm sure there are some who have made a judgment about me and have avoided me or talk about me behind my back; I expect that. I've been a part of those conversations before. They went something like this, "Did you hear that so-and-so is like, totally inactive now?" "Yeah, I heard that he drinks and has a non-member girlfriend." "I heard that he read some anti-Mormon books and lost his testimony." "That's so sad; he was such a nice guy. He had so much potential." "Well, someday he'll come back. You know what they say, 'the man may leave the Church but the Church never leaves the man." Yeah, yuck. On the other side, I've heard people say terrible things about the faithful being ignorant, blind, naïve, etc. They can be vicious too. I think comments like any of the above are disrespectful, condescending, and unproductive. I hope that my comments have not come across in a condescending manner. My journey is different than anyone else's and I did what I had to do because of the unique way that my mind works. I would never wish my journey on anyone that's happy where they are.

To be plain about how I feel; the people that I love the most in this world, with a couple of exceptions are Mormon or LDS apostates. I will always be connected to the Church. There are experiences that involve the Church that I will always hold sacred. The Church catalyzed my friendship to many of you and I will always be grateful for finding an organization that brings so many good people together.

I don't think less of anyone that keeps their faith. I believe that we are drawn to what is useful to us and I was eventually drawn to something that created less cognitive dissonance for me.

Tamara, I totally respect your agency and I get that the Church works for you. I rejoice in your happiness and growth. Thanks for your support in my journey.

Gage, I've never connected the word ignorant to you in any way. I also "understand people best by their actions in the context of relationships." My experience of you in a few different settings has consistently been impressive. I'll never forget the humor, patience, and kindness that you always showed to the difficult boys that we worked with. I'll never forget how listened to I felt in our little chats in the car on the way to work.

Kaarina, I do love you. You are a fine person, full of intelligence, love, and creativity. You are a spiritual person and your faith undoubtedly feeds a very important part of you. I can and do trust that your hopes for me are born out of love. I have never felt anything but love from you or for you. The hope that I hold out for you is that you continue to live your life powerfully, finding satisfaction in what you do and how you live right up to the end of your life.

I want to end this post with a quote from William James' thought provoking essay titled The Will to Believe. James' argument is that if we live by objective evidence alone we will never be duped, but we may never find the truth because it doesn't fit into our concept of what truth is. He posits that since no one can prove that they are right, "No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, ….then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things."

This is how he ends the essay, "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes….If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

I couldn't have said it better.

An Apostate’s Hopeful Existence

This post was catalyzed by Audrey, Lumina, and Skye's comments on my last post.

In my last post I shared an essay about my experience of apostasy from the Mormon Church. My only objective in sharing it was to let the readers of this blog, who are my close friends and family members, know what I experienced as I went through the psychological, spiritual, emotional, and finally physical process of leaving.

Talking about why I'm no longer a participating member to an active member can feel awkward and embarrassing for both parties. I think that the reason that it's so difficult to talk about is that it's complicated. It's different than asking someone why they quit their bowling league or why they decided to choose a Prius instead of a Hybrid Civic. I can't explain it to someone in a nutshell. It took me at least a couple of years to go from full activity to totally inactive and it has been over a year since I realized that I was not going back. There was a lot that happened and I haven't figured out how to say it in a few words or sentences. The following is my attempt at telling the why; because inquiring minds want to know.

The final decision to leave was not made for arbitrary reasons. I did my homework. I had to, because I didn't want to leave. It wasn't because someone offended me; no one did. It wasn't because the anti-mormons got a hold of me; I have never bothered with anti-mormon literature because it is intrinsically flawed in its motivation to destroy other's beliefs. The books that I read were written by scholars that provided evidence in an objective manner that is consistent with research on any valid topic, not axe-grinders or polemicists. It wasn't because I wanted to drink, smoke, fornicate, or (insert sin here). I am guilty of doing all of those things at different times of my life as an active and inactive Mormon. I currently do none of those things because I'm following a diet that doesn't allow alcohol, otherwise I might have an occasional beer. I'm also a State Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor and I follow a professional code of ethics that prohibits me from abusing substances. I work in a rehabilitation center for substance abusing adolescents and I take that Code very seriously. I'm not saying that I'm perfect, but I give my best every day to honor my principles and to be worthy of the people that I care for.

My decision to leave was based on what I found when I started looking into things deeply. Part of it was a cognitive dissonance I was experiencing about the Church's stance on certain issues that were incongruent with my observations of the world. I don't want to get into specifics here, but suffice it to say that my intellectual exploration led me to a conclusion that I could no longer believe in the validity of the claims of the LDS church.

Skye, your sadness at the hopeless place that I'm in is unfounded. (You knew I had to respond to that!) I have never felt as purposeful as I currently do, and I am full of hope for what the future holds. I'm living my dream right now. In my personal life I have found my soul mate, in my professional life I have found the path to my dream career, in my intellectual life I have found a boundless new frontier that is rapidly filling with new discoveries.

In my personal life, I am full of hope.

Professionally, I'm engaged in the work of helping the broken become whole every day. I'm learning to perfect that art, and that process fills my heart daily. It is the work that has fascinated me since I was a little boy and I get paid to do it! My hope for the future is centered on creating a program designed to help teens with substance abuse/mental health problems and their families return to functionality. I want to be an expert in my field and revolutionize the treatment modality for that population. I hope to write books, direct my own program, train others to do this work, and to have the opportunity to look into the eyes of people that are getting better every day.

Intellectually, I have been exposed to so much new information over the last couple of years that have realized that I know nothing. I know it's a cliché, but it's true. My attempt at enlightenment has led to an endlessly long Amazon wish list for all the books I want to read. My hope in this area of life is that I will learn as much as I possibly can about the things that are important to me, and that I'll be able to make a contribution of my own either in my career field or one of the areas I'm interested in. My main pursuits right now are the understanding of consciousness, gaining a better grasp of evolution, the psychology/belief in the paranormal including religion, meditation and hypnosis, and a little bit of politics too. In school right now I'm studying the philosophy of religion, behavior analysis, and writing. I'm also constantly studying addiction and all aspects of the substance abuse recovery process.

I live my life with only this life as my motivation. If there is something after this, I have no knowledge of it and I will live accordingly, learning and pushing myself to my limits as long as I live. I have lost my "eternal perspective" in a personal sense, but I have gained a perspective that I want to make a difference in people's lives that will live on. Each client that I help move towards functionality is another person that could spend their life doing something great instead of wasting away in an institution somewhere.

These are the hopes that I live for. I hope I live long enough to fulfill them. I have to admit that they're not as grand as ideas of eternal salvation, degrees of glory, and becoming a God. I'm okay with that. My hopes are not based on the evidence of things hoped for but not seen. My hopes are based on the evidence of things that I work for and discover through my own observations and the documented replicable observations of those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.

Thank you Skye for giving me a reason to write all of my hopes out! It isn't the first time you've inspired me to think more deeply about something. Thanks for your integrity to the code that you live by. I respect you as an intellectual and as a rare person with a truly open mind. You are one of the most complete people that I have ever known.

Lumina, thanks for relating your experiences and for being honest about feeling 50% bamboozled. I do feel your love and I love you right back. I have always respected you for your honesty. I've told you this before, but I have to say it again; I'm so happy that you're a teacher. Your openness to different ways of being and a multiplicity of truths allows you the perfect perspective to teach from.

Audrey, thanks for validating my story. I would apply what I said to Lumina about teaching to you except that you have the added benefit of Mr. T motivational skills, sucka. I love you.

Thanks to all the rest of you that come here. I appreciate your acceptance and respect. I hope you keep coming back; you're always welcome here.

An Essay on Losing My Religion

This is a slightly censored version of a "definition essay" that I recently wrote for my critical writing class. I have some misgivings about posting this, but I think I know who reads this blog and I think you may be interested in this part of my journey. I was defining the word apostate but I was really attempting to convey the feelings of insanity that I endured as I went through my apostasy. This process started about three years ago and the time that I'm specifically writing about is two years ago when I was living with Audrey, James, Kristin, and Pete.

I was trying to plug the leaks with the company of diverting friends, long hours of work, and consuming movies. These things helped but I just couldn't control my thoughts. When I directly thought about what was happening to me the doors flew open. A boundless emptiness shrieked with a shrill whistle through my mind and dizziness would overcome me. I had to slam the heavy doors shut and try to plug the leaks again. Anything but that netherworld where I was spinning with intense vertigo, nauseously hopping from one disintegrating chunk of reality to the next as everything that I had previously believed to be true dissolved beneath me.

When I became convinced that the foundations of my religion were fallacious, things began to destabilize. There was always this little nagging suspicion but I'm very adept at pushing things away when I need to. Eventually the questions started getting louder and becoming more personal and I read the books I had been avoiding for the last ten or fifteen years. These books exposed the founder of the church as, at best, a well-intentioned charlatan. I had relied on my faith like the leaders told me to, and never read anything that was "anti literature" as they called it. In part, I guess I can blame the higher education system for the controlled demolition that occurred after I read those books. Maybe it was the Human Sexuality class, or the class in Paranormal Psychology that forced me to ask the right (or wrong, depending on where you stand) questions. Line upon line, precept upon precept was obliterated as I read those books. I knew it was over; I had to abandon my religion.

The last vestiges of my testimony came down with a mighty crash leaving me standing forlorn at ground zero. I lost my religion, most of my social life, and my credibility with many of my friends and family members. In the eyes of the Church, when someone leaves there is never a valid reason. The apostasy of a Church member is either explained as seditious; a lack of commitment, a desire to partake of the carnal pleasures of the world, or as confused; trapped in the snare of the devil, confounded by the philosophies of man. Many say that it is a difficult life to be a Mormon and some people just aren't God's elect; "it's such a pity, poor Paul, he was doing so well," they said. The irony is that it would have been far easier for me to avoid the subsequent trauma caused by my departure than if I had just stayed in and not asked the questions. It irked me that I lost my credibility because I had the integrity to ask the difficult questions and to act on the answers that I found. I stood alone, covered in dust, in the epicenter of the collapse of my beliefs, an apostate.

There was a time when I was so perfectly insulated against such a catastrophe that it would have been unthinkable. I had the proper training as a young man, the Sunday church meetings, early morning seminary, youth groups, summer camps, family prayers, the two year missionary stint, the indoctrination, the family legends, the traditions, expectations, and guilt trips. I must have received a thousand lessons on faith and I probably taught a hundred. I was converted for heaven's sake. How could this happen to me? I had a vision of an encounter with my younger self. He condescendingly inquired how I could give up eternal life for a life of mere temporal possibility. He scorningly said that I took the easy way. He reviled me, called me a reprobate, a fool, and whispered "apostate" as he walked away. My decision haunted me but I had already crossed a kind of intellectual Rubicon and there was no going back. The ashes of my life as a Mormon streamed down my smudged face and I knew that it was time to move on.

I eventually got used to the idea that there could be another source of meaning that could replace Mormonism. I had been bamboozled and the resulting shame that I felt extinguished my desire to be a part of any organized religion. I thought that perhaps I could be "spiritual but not religious." I had heard the phrase often and I thought maybe I could fit into that category. I began exploring various spiritual practices on my own and with a fellow apostate through a spiritual discussion group. After coping with my decision for a few months I expected that I would adjust and that things would get better; instead they got much worse.

I was like the kid that found out that Santa Claus is really his Mom and Dad and suddenly the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny seemed pretty dubious too. All of the different spiritual practices that I was exploring seemed like different forms of the same bunk I had fallen for before. I began to feverishly read psychology and science books in an attempt to find the truth about belief in the unknown.

I read a book about the hypnotic trance state, its presence in almost every religious and spiritual practice, and how it can be easily triggered using very simple stimuli. I learned about death anxiety and the paranormal belief imperative. These psychological hypotheses suggest that humans need to create supernatural explanations to create meaning out the chaos of their lives to assuage the constant fear of death. I discovered that certain parts of the brain can be physically manipulated to create a spiritual experience of God. I studied how other parts of the brain can be manipulated to cause out-of-body and near death experiences under controlled conditions. These books seemed to expose more than the particulars of a certain religion, they exposed belief in the paranormal in general.

I realized with panic that I was apostatizing from more than Mormonism, I was losing all the meaning that religion gave me. I was losing life after death and the idea that I was fore ordained to serve some purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. I was losing the comfort of God. I realized that being an apostate meant more than just walking away from my religion, it meant that everything I had ever believed in was subject to scrutiny. This realization brought on a wave of nausea that left me in a ball on the floor trying to be so, so still.

I read in spurts until I became paralyzed by what I was reading. I couldn't write anything for school, I was failing all of my classes, and I could barely function at all through the shroud of terror that was suffocating me. I read a passage from Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day that described the state that I found myself in when I thought too much about the pressing questions,

You are having the dream of universal nothingness. You walk down, down, into valleys of nothing, of chalk. You stare into pits where all is cold. You wake up cold. You think you will never be warm again. And there is nothing – and this nothing laughs, like teeth striking together. You open the door of a cupboard, of a room, and there is nothing there but this laughing. The floor is not a floor. The walls are not walls. You wake up and you cannot stop your trembling. Life has no sense. Life is an idiot laughing. Why did you lie to me?

I reeled with each discovery, feeling more and more lost in my bleak new reality. Ernest Becker's words from The Denial of Death "a full apprehension of man's condition would drive him insane" both terrified and electrified me. I wanted the truth so badly at that point that I was regularly staying up all night reading and writing like a bi-polar manic on a meth binge. I couldn't get enough and I needed to stop at the same time. I was beginning to subscribe to the sentiment of Niko Kazantzakis's that "hope is a rotten-thighed whore," and getting pretty grim about everything when I was inspired by another quote from Becker. "If we have a passion for the truth, we shall encounter a temporary period of forlornness." He added that "joy awaits us on the other side of this forlornness" and that "disillusionment must come before wisdom." I was encouraged, and although I felt at times as though I was mentally unraveling I continued my pursuit of reality.

I continued reading but shifted my focus to having a greater understanding of the way the world works. I read books about evolution and the cosmos and I began to understand that there doesn't need to be a God. These books seemed to give me something solid to stand on. I didn't have to have faith to believe these things; they were supported by empirical evidence. They palliated that unwieldy feeling of spinning that kept creeping back into my head but they forced me to deal directly with the question of whether there is a God. For a short time I surmised that I could be an agnostic since I didn't really know that there was no God. This was a comforting temporary position but then I read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Dawkins' argument that "What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable" persuaded me to rethink the idea of agnosticism. I determined that based on all the evidence I could find, it was much more improbable that there is a God than not. My apostasy was about more than just a particular religion, I was an apostate from God.

The last year and a half I have become comfortable in my beliefs. The vertigo and nausea subsided long ago and I see the word apostate differently than I used to. The word that I used to wear as a mark of shame has transformed into a badge of distinction. It is a scar of a hard fought battle that almost cost me my sanity. I now think of an apostate as someone who summons the courage to go to that sickening scary place in their mind where they let go of the protective cloak of the beliefs they were raised with, and stand naked shuddering in the icy wind of empirical reality. I'm not sure that I've found the joy that Becker promised but I do hear more than the idiot laughing now.

Stroking Sticks and Out of Body Experiences

I’ve been promising some book reviews and I just read an article in the New York Times (see below) which got me thinking about one of my favorite topics so I decided to start here.

I am fascinated with the illusion of our mental connection to our physical body. I have often wondered what an out of body experience really is and what this means to the commonly held belief that we are both temporal and spiritual beings.

I have read a few books about this concept. If you're interested in learning more I highly recommend "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran and "Dying to Live" by Susan Blackmore.

Ramachandran is a neuroscientist that sees himself as the Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience, looking for mysteries to solve about the way our brain and body interact. Fascinating book and very readable; the stories he comes up with are so bizarre and compelling that he calls them the “X-Files of neuroscience”!

My favorite chapter of the book is called “God and the Limbic System”, and describes the way that different parts of our brain function when we have spiritual experiences. He describes an experiment where a helmet that can stimulate specific areas of the brain with magnets stimulates the temporal lobe causing the subject to “experience God.” Upon hearing about the experiment Ramachandran responds “Hmmmm, I wonder what would happen if you tried stimulating an atheist’s brain? Would he experience God? Hey, maybe we should try the device on Francis Crick.”

Susan Blackmore is a parapsychologist turned skeptic who has done extensive research on near death experiences (NDE) and out of body experiences (OBE). In “Dying to Live” she does a meta-analysis of many international studies on these phenomena trying to discern whether they involve a paranormal (something that is unaccounted for and/or immeasurable scientifically) element or whether the experiences are created through a series of neurological events as the body’s systems shut down.

If you are interested in NDE’s this is a must read book. She brings together all the different theories and analyzes them side by side so you can decide which you think is right.

The article that brought all this up for me (and inspired the title of this post) is here, check it out and let me know what you think:

August 23, 2007
Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.


When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.
The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.


Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.


The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.
The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.


The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.
In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.


When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.
The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.
The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.
In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.
Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body.


When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.
In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.
A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.


Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”


To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.


Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.
Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.
Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.


They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.
People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.


The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

***Clarification***

My last post has been updated to clarify a gap I left in what I wrote.

What is Spirituality?

One of the biggest challenges I face with the drug addicted teens I work with is helping them to find a sense of their own worth and meaning as a person.


Spirituality often helps to fill the void that their addiction leaves when they stop using. It can help people find meaning and give them some ways to cope with the trials of life as a recovering addict. The problem is that many people equate spirituality with religion and that is a huge turn-off to many of these kids. I don’t believe that religion and spirituality are mutually exclusive. I also don’t believe that they are synonymous. I believe that spirituality and religion can be complementary but that they exist in many forms independent of each other too. In a recent poll 1 out of 5 American classify them selves as “spiritual but not religious”.

If spirituality doesn’t mean being religious, what does it mean?

What’s your definition of spirituality? What are the qualities of a spiritual person?

Too Close For Comfort

I found this article interesting - I wonder if I shouldn't spend more time building and maintaining relationships with friends... it's just so hard. Between school, work, and the time I set aside for Dani, it seems like there just isn't any time left over for much more than a quick e-mail or phone call.

Anyone have thoughts on this???

November 7, 2006
Too Close for Comfort
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.

EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”

I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.

A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.

In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.

St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”

From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.

The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.

By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.

The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”

And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.

Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.

As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.

Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.

Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”