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“I wish I knew some young men!” the writer Eliza Orne White declared in The Atlantic’s July 1888 issue.
Psychologists occasionally talk about the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: Over time, romantic partners start to slowly change each other, like sculptors chipping away at blocks of marble. Could I help you find a therapist? one might ask their beloved. What if we started jogging together? Hmm, wearing the fedora again? Eventually—the hope goes—they’ll have chiseled a masterpiece of a companion. The result isn’t always a perfect David, but the point is that relationships mold people.
There are just some things you don’t do without preparation. You’re not meant to drive a car without taking lessons and passing a test. You aren’t supposed to scuba dive without certification. You can’t teach—or practice law, or therapy, or cosmetology—without first proving your knowledge. But you can become a parent without any training at all—and that’s a pretty high-stakes position.
Parents today arguably face steeper expectations than ever before.
Growing up in Maryland, Radha Patel didn’t see anyone in her area using a matchmaker. But she was aware that in India, where her parents had emigrated from, plenty of couples were fixed up—by relatives, respected elders, women in the community trusted to intuit good pairs. For some reason, the idea of it stuck in the back of her mind. It was still lingering there in 2018, when friends, frustrated with dating apps, started asking for help finding love.
The panic set in at the same point every semester: Whenever Ximena Arriaga, a psychology professor at Purdue University, got to attachment theory in her course on close relationships, the classroom grew tense. When she described how people who are anxiously attached can sometimes be demanding and vigilant—and that can drive their partners away—certain students looked disturbed. “I could just see in their face: I’m so screwed,” Arriaga told me.
A cancer diagnosis is a shocking blow for anyone. But you might imagine that someone like Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian minister who has spent years talking with people about mortality, would be well prepared to deal with that kind of news. Keller has sat at people’s bedsides as they died, and he’s written a book called On Death. Perhaps most crucially, he believes in God and an afterlife. And yet, when Keller received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he was terrified.
The journalist and political satirist P. J. O’Rourke, who died today, had a knack for making serious subjects funny. In 11 years of writing for The Atlantic, he covered bleakness—Enron, war memorials—with skepticism and a dash of absurdity. (Explaining his wariness of lawmakers, he wrote: “A chilling characteristic of politicians is that they’re not in it for the money.