IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

By ROBERT WRIGHT

Peter Kramer has a gift for timing. His last book, Listening to Prozac, came out as Prozac was reaching best-seller status, and soon joined it. His new book--a guide for people thinking about leaving their spouse or significant other--hits the bookstores as divorce is becoming an ever more contentious political issue.

The very title of Kramer's book--Should You Leave?--is likely to antagonize the growing legion of antidivorce activists. It seems to validate the anguished self-absorption that has made baby boomers so good at generating revenue for psychiatrists and so bad at staying married. A half-century ago, people didn't sit around wondering whether their spouse was maximizing their self-actualization. In fact, thanks to the lingering Victorian moral climate, most didn't even consider divorce a live option. (What a time saver!) Nowadays, as Kramer himself suggests, it is almost normal for married people to be quietly dogged by "the constant sense of having chosen poorly." Well who can blame them, with the question "Should You Leave?" blaring at them from bookstore windows?

Already the book has drawn Kramer into an exchange with an outraged moral conservative in the pages of the New York Times. But for antidivorce activists to make Kramer an icon for modern self-indulgence would be to miss the mark. Beneath the book's air of moral relativism lies a low-key celebration of austerity, even a quiet, almost covert conservatism. The closest thing to a central message is the advice Kramer gives during one of the book's fictional case studies: "The problem is not your choice; the problem is how you live with that choice."

So how do you live with your choice? Kramer's approach draws heavily on the notion of "differentiation of self," developed by the late family therapist Murray Bowen. A person with high differentiation of self is secure--not desperate for signals of approval and affection from others, and thus not easily swayed by social pressure. Bowen considered such autonomy healthy and encouraged people to carry it into their family lives. He wanted them to weaken their emotional ties to kin, including spouses and children.

Weaken family ties? But aren't they the glory of our daily existence, one of life's great spiritual rewards? Guess again. In Bowen's view, the emotions that govern family life are often tools of self-interest. Sometimes this is obvious--for example, in an outburst of anger or a fit of jealousy. But even such "good" emotions as affection can be instruments of control wielded out of insecurity. (Ever notice how your social failures outside the home can make your mate suddenly more endearing?) And the moral indignation hurled at a spouse--over his or her coldness, rudeness, sloppiness, whatever--may feel high-minded but is often crassly self-serving. The emotional world of the family, Bowen believed, can be a jungle of realpolitik and a source of endless turbulence.

Hence Bowen's prescription of cerebral detachment. Far from trying to restore "passion" to a faltering marriage, he would urge you to be dispassionate--not dogmatically judgmental, not desperate for love, not obsessed with your place in the family hierarchy. In theory, such detachment, if achieved by one spouse, can prove contagious, leading to a family full of happily autonomous people.

It was Kramer's championing of autonomy in an op-ed piece pegged to his book that got him attacked in the New York Times by antidivorce activist David Blankenhorn, who accused him of espousing "me-first" values. But autonomy, as laid out by Bowen, is far from selfish.

In fact, the serene detachment he espouses sounds in many ways like the Nirvana pursued by Buddhists--and they profess the negation of self. Bowen didn't want people to abandon all familial affection and withdraw into a shell, but rather to cultivate a genuine, unpossessing affection. Like the Buddhists, he sought a detachment that is benign, a love that is selfless.

Kind of a tall order. Buddhists have been known to spend years in monastic discipline just to get within shouting distance of Nirvana. Then again, who ever said that long-term monogamy, given human nature, was going to be easy?

Certainly not Kramer. Advising a fictional client to stay with a woman he finds ever more boring and annoying, Kramer urges the man to try even harder than before to view her uncritically. "Here is my rule: Think how much you must change. More than you think."

But look at the upside: If marriage is this hard, then marital discord is more than an occasion for self-help. It is an occasion for out-and-out spiritual evolution--a chance, in Kramer's words, to "re-enter the marriage" at a higher level of consciousness. Paraphrasing Bowen, Kramer writes, "The solution is not to leave the other nor to strive to change the other. The solution is to grow."

Or, as they used to say in Middle America, adversity builds character. Indeed, the whole notion of self-differentiation is, in a sense, a traditional American value. In the famous 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman argued that the small-town commitment to virtue was crumbling amid modernization. Americans, Riesman said, had typically been "inner directed"--guided less by social pressure than by core values, usually ingrained by parents. But increasingly young people were "other directed"--intent on popularity, whatever reshuffling of values that entailed. When conservatives lament this shift--from the era of character to the era of personality--they are calling, in essence, for more differentiation of self.

They may be on to something. Certainly the modern, other-directed world--a world of networking and dinner parties, of countless superficial friendships--places burdens on marriage. How does your spouse "show"? Is he or she clever and attractive? Surely not as clever and attractive as some other people you saw at yesterday's cocktail party!

One virtue of true self-differentiation is disregard for questions such as these. The autonomous adult doesn't need a trophy spouse. That's one difference between autonomy a la Bowen and garden-variety egotism.

Peter Kramer is no William Bennett. No sermons about the sanctity of marriage vows, about personal responsibility. Kramer does think some of his fictional clients should bolt--such as the wife of a philandering, psychologically abusive husband. But (conveniently) none of these clients have children living at home. Indeed, says Kramer, given recent evidence about the toll divorce takes on offspring, his general skepticism about breaking up grows only when children are involved. "I tend to worry that divorce and remarriage will provide a child with four underdeveloped parents instead of two."

Should you leave? At the risk of oversimplifying a nuanced book, no. That answer, coming from a no-value-judgments East Coast academic like Kramer, may be a sign that antidivorce activists are having more effect than they realize.