Fear and Loving at Harvard

Are male undergraduates at Harvard afraid of love? Caroline W. Bynum, associate professor of Church History at the Divinity School, thinks they are and suggested why in a recent article in the Radcliffe Quarterly. Torn between a broad cultural pattern that prescribes male dominance and a subculture that idealizes equality, men in universities today shy away from love relationships, says Bynum. At the same time, new demands for honesty and openness conflict with the traditional image of the strong, silent type. These problems are exacerbated by increasing insecurity about the future and a prolonged adolescence.

But if this motive to avoid love is a serious and real problem, Bynum says, it is one that can only be solved by men; and it is important to recognize that the male psyche is not the norm of health in our society.

In an interview last month with Crimson editor Jenny Netzer, Bynum discussed her Quarterly article and the general subject of interpersonal relationships at Harvard.

Q: How did you happen to write the article? Was it just through contact with undergraduates?

A: Yes, it really was. I had several different reasons for writing it, which is not quite the answer to the question, "How did I listen to undergraduates that way?" One of my reasons for writing it was a certain dissatisfaction with the basic tone the Quarterly takes, not that I don't think the Quarterly doesn't do some very good things, because it clearly does.

But at the end of the summer, I realized that this sort of pounding home that the Quarterly does about the "special needs of women" and the special position of Radcliffe is in some ways debilitating. It's really counterproductive in very very basic ways for older women to read only about the problems of younger women in college and the younger women in college to read only about their "special problems." Women do have special problems that come from being a minority, but women do not have special problems that come from being weak, debilitated creatures and those things are easily confused. I really felt that the tone of the Quarterly and some of the tone of propaganda coming out of Radcliffe about the merger contributes to that. So one of the things I wanted to do originally when I thought about it was almost a tongue in cheek kind of parody of the sort of thing that people write about women, about men, to make that point. Now that's not how it came out, but that was one of the purposes.

Another one of the purposes which didn't come out as being a primary one either but which is in there is when I talk about the necessity for men to talk to each other about these problems. That again was a point that was directed at women in a curious sort of way because I'm bothered by the tendency in my female students, in my female colleagues and, to be honest, in myself, to spend too much time listening to male problems and trying to sort them out. That's bad for men, that's also profoundly bad for women.

So one of the points was to say to women, stop trying to solve the whole world's problems, you've got enough of your own. Men are going to have to solve certain problems that have to do with them, and women should back off, leave them alone. Women are not weak, debilitated creatures with special needs; men have problems too. Women are not cosmic mothers with an obligation to solve the world's problems.

And then the third thing, where it came from very directly, was what you were asking me about, conversation with male and female undergraduates, about these particular problems, where the same things were just said over and over and over again, sometimes in situations that were accompanied by tears, in a great deal of pain. And when you hear such common themes, you really begin to wonder. Something that I had thought in part as doing as a sort of tongue in cheek parody became, as I thought more about it, a grappling with things that I think hurt people very much, became a very different sort of thing.

Q: Have you talked to any psychologists or psychiatrists about the article? What have they thought about it?

A: Obviously the people that one talks to are the people that share some of one's own concerns. I have no idea what your average professional psychologist would think. But the people that I've talked to, which includes at least one woman psychiatrist and several males, all thought it talked to something they had all tremendously much observed, although maybe not put their finger on quite in that form, because each person's observations are all obviously a little bit different.

The general things that I've read and the general conversations that I've had with people who are counselors or psychologists or whatever had struck me as being too general. There's a great deal of talk about the problem of intimacy. There are always certain jazzy current problems that are around--intimacy and death and dying seem to be the big ones this year. Everybody's aware of problems of intimacy, how to have relationships. Everybody's aware of the difficulty men have dealing with feelings in comparison with women. Everybody talks about this, and one of the things that bothered me about it was that it wasn't specific enough. The thing that I was puzzled about was why people in a certain age group, in a certain sort of social situation, have a certain, more particular version of that kind of problem. Even a lot of the psychologists that I've talked to just wanted to put what I was talking about generally into the bag of alienated youth, or generally into the bag of America's problem being intimacy.

I just think that what I was listening to students talking to me about was something more specific than that, just as I think "the motive to avoid success" is not an appropriate analysis of working-class women in modern-day America. They don't have those kinds of conflicting pressures on them. It's basically a problem of more privileged women who're getting conflicting signals.

My feeling was that the particular feeling that men seem to be talking about had to do with people in a privileged situation with a great many expectations for themselves and expectations that other people had for them, and people in a certain age bracket. Maybe there are problems of intimacy for men of 45, but they don't react the same way.

Q: Do you notice any differences in this area between grad students and undergraduates, since you're teaching primarily grad students?

A: I've talked to a lot of Divinity School students about the problem this fall, and it's not that the problem is non-existent over there, but I have a feeling that oddly enough people in the Divinity School setting, male people, may be a little more realistic about their expectation for themselves. They don't have as many options and they often don't come from quite as privileged backgrounds.

But I think I see the problem existing more in the graduate school and the undergraduate school than in the professional schools, and I think it really does have something to do with the combination of the very high expectations on those people for job performance, the relatively large amount of leisure, or at least the amount of time that they have free to direct for themselves, which means a requirement for incredible internal motivation and definition, and a fairly isolated existence in some ways. Many of them just have a very hard time as a result of all that dealing with relationships.

Many of the women just know far more about it, have far more experience, because it's probably been far more important to them as they've gone along. What I'm saying at the moment is not at all profound, it's just basically common sense.

All I'm saying is that women at a certain age are more mature than men, which is something people have always said. I do think that there are ways in which American society expects women to be more mature. It's even a complicated thing what we mean by mature, except that I would say that it's a positive characteristic, in the sense of being able to have long-term intense relationships--society expects women to learn the skills that go with that, ranging all the way from compromise on the one hand, to ability to make a man feel at ease, ability to perceive, ability to listen, all that kind of stuff. I don't think there's any intrinsic reason why women should do that more than men, but it's a fact that women are trained to do so, in incredibly subtle ways. None of this is at all original.

Q: Do you think this is a particularly intense problem at Harvard, as opposed to other places?

A: Obviously, that's what I'm talking about. I was trying to be descriptive about a certain sort of environment, because I did find myself thinking, as I wrote, about my brother-in-law, who teaches at a small state school in Pennsylvania. I thought to myself as I was writing it, now, he wouldn't know what I'm talking about, partly because his relationship with his students would be different from my relationship with my students and partly because his students would be different from my students.

Male undergraduates these days expect of themselves a level of ability in relationships that I don't think any man ten years ago in his early 20s expected of himself. Then he was just supposed to be dominant and masculine and kind of tough and not show his feelings much and dictate what he wanted and that was what women wanted. That's a stereotype, but there's a lot of truth in it.

I do think that both for graduate students and undergraduates this is a tremendously isolating place and I think that that also contributes to the problems that people have with both friendships and sexual relationships. For reasons that I don't even fully understand, this is an environment in which many, many people are very very lonely. I think it has a lot to do with competitiveness. It has something to do with age structure around here too.

Q: Don't you think that the increased pressures might make people look harder for satisfaction in personal relationships?

A: That's one thing that's very curious of course, because I think that what happens with many males is that yes, the competitiveness and the loneliness do lead them to look very hard for some kind of intimate relationship. It's exactly because then too much in a way is loaded onto the relationship in terms of expectations, expectation of the relationship solving old problems, many of which are job-related and couldn't possibly be solved by a relationship. Men have much too high an expectation of themselves. Often they've never tried before, and they expect to succeed fantastically. Indeed, I think the increased expectations, both of themselves in terms of the ability to achieve intimacy and also of the relationship as being able to solve all their problems is one of the main reasons why you have people almost as soon as they get involved in something backing out in absolute panic--this feeling of, my goodness, I almost had a relationship with somebody, what was I getting myself into? And that of course is the pattern that everybody recognizes, the fear, the lashing out, the saying, you were too dependent on me, you were making too many demands on me.

It's mostly just a matter of a person who expected a great deal--the business of destroying what you want is a pretty common thing to do, and you're more apt to do it if you have unreasonable expectations of the thing that you want.

Q: Why do you think that some men here find it easier to settle into the dominant roles that their fathers occupied than others?

A: I don't know ...I'm inclined to think that there are certain people who because of aspects of their family and the way they were brought up, and the part of America that they've grown up in, and this kind of thing, are sort of quite closed to emotional responses and go through fine, and never really get thrown by things, and go right on back into the pattern that was expected of them by their families. I would think, oddly enough, that it might be the sort of people who came from slightly more emotionally open families and maybe even slightly more privileged family situations who in a way might end up having more trouble, because of daring to open themselves up to these sort of questions.

But it also has to do with all the things that people say about American child-rearing patterns, and parents not having any self-definition themselves in many cases. How many people really grow up in families where there is both open warmth and sexuality and also really mutual respect and equality between the parents? It's just not around, and many of the two-career families that one sees are families where the other dimension is just not apparent in the relationship between the couple. There can be something about career pressures that can kill the possibility of a complicated emotional life between two people. If that's what you expect, that's a really hard thing to achieve. And part of what's happening is that people are saying: if I can't have that, then forget it. That means that an awful lot of people are saying forget it.

Q: How do you see this phenomenon working itself out in other kinds of situations, in classrooms and dining rooms, for example?

A: I think there has been a tendency in the past few years for coed friendship groups to form, in which occasionally there will be sexual contact between some of the members--often there'll be one or two people in the group who make a habit of picking up the others in sexual encounters--but where it's totally superficial if it happens at all that way.

In these friendship groups, although people will be together a very great deal, there will be a kind of superficiality about the contact, a kind of tendency to achieve the lowest common denominator, a kind of talking about food, or talking about where you might go to get something to eat, or a grinding of a private joke down into nothingness, or little comments on little personality characteristics or verbal quirks or whatever of somebody in the group that can go on to the point where you feel that the whole group is working to protect anybody in the group from having any kind of intense contact with anybody else. These groups will sometimes last two years. You have a feeling that by the time people are ready to graduate that they have been kind of held back from the kind of growth and friendship that they might have had.