The Cocktail Party Contrarian: After a Certain Point, It’s Just Whining

A few weeks ago, I met an old high school friend for a drink. We hadn’t really spent any time together since 1989. It was nostalgic and fun to talk to someone who knew me, and liked me, back when I had a perm and wore leg warmers.One thing I learned was that high school friendships that don’t continue after graduation apparently freeze in place and pick up again exactly where they left off, no matter how many decades have passed. As if we weren’t actual strangers, my friend spoke to me personally about his family like we were sitting in the school’s sixth-floor lounge, swapping teenage angst stories. His mother had passed away years ago and his 93-year-old father still lived in the same apartment in Westchester I remembered visiting in the 12th grade.“You know,” my friend began in a more serious tone than before, “I still have a lot to work out with him.” I didn’t know, actually, as I hadn’t been privy to the last three decades of their relationship. I nodded and let him continue. “He just never understood me, really.”I wasn’t entirely sure what the correct response was, but I am sure I chose the wrong one. “Well,” I answered with a smirk, “you were always impossible to understand so I am sure the problem is you, not him.” This was the point in the conversation where we were supposed to chuckle and move on to politics, right? “No, seriously,” he said, very seriously. “I want to really sit down with him and make him understand. There are things I need him to hear.” I straightened up, considering that perhaps in the intervening years I had missed some major relationship trauma in his family or overlooked some form of abuse. I felt immediately repentant for my tone.Over the course of the next few minutes, though, it became clear that there was no major father-son event to which my friend was referring. His father didn’t beat him or demean him as a child. He didn’t abandon the family, or drink too much. He just didn’t fully “understand” his son or communicate with him in a way that felt satisfying, and this 52-year-old man sitting in front of me was determined to get his aged father to do so.“Come on,” I said with a laugh, back to lightening the mood, “leave the poor old guy alone. He doesn’t need to spend the last years of his life listening to you list all the subtle ways in which he didn’t meet your expectations, does he?” I joked that this bordered on elder abuse. Anyone who lives into his 90s deserves some peace at the end. I chuckled but wasn’t joined by my friend, who looked startled by my lack of compassion for him. What he couldn’t see was that I did have compassion — for his father.“I am totally serious,” he insisted. Realizing I was now deep into a therapy session I wasn’t getting paid for, I lost all sense of restraint. He was totally serious, and that was exactly the problem.“Good God,” I said, trying to jolt him with common sense, “get over it. You are a middle-aged man.” I pointed out that there is a statute of limitations on complaining about parents and he had way exceeded his deadline. Unless the man had done something to him that would appear as a storyline on an after-school special, he should do what many a well-paid psychoanalyst would prescribe: man up and move on.This wasn’t received well, I could tell, but I was undeterred, seeing in front of me not just my old high school friend but so many grownups who think that whining about emotional wounds inflicted by their parents is okay. It is the opposite of okay: It is a particular kind of madness that has taken root in contemporary American culture that celebrates victimization performance and unrestrained narcissistic emotionalism. I blame Oprah Winfrey for getting the ball rolling decades ago, and scores of others in her wake who grabbed the flag and kept running with it.My old friend mistakenly assumed that “sharing” his emotions with me was appropriate. How he feels about his father should have been kept to himself because privacy is still a thing, or it should be. He probably never considered this, but his complicated relationship with his father is none of my business.That there is no emotional line between people anymore is one of the terrible consequences of an era obsessed with feelings and saturated in a million forms of media that promote every single one of them. It confuses people into thinking that every feeling they have matters such that they should share each one with anyone they can get to meet them for a drink or look at their Twitter feed. Wrong. We should all be carefully sorting through our thoughts before sharing them and limiting our audiences to a handful of family and close friends.Worse still is the thought of that poor 93-year-old sitting slumped over in his chair as his young, healthy son berates him for not saying “well done” with enough convincing gusto when he brought home the A on his English final more than 30 years ago. Not even your parents need to hear your every emotion. I thought people over the age of 21 knew this already.Literally everyone on planet earth has emotional holes that their parents helped open. If those holes remain unfilled in adulthood, though, that is not mommy and daddy’s fault. Adults still griping about their parents’ deficiencies only expose their own.

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: After a Certain Point, It’s Just Whining

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: After a Certain Point, It’s Just Whining

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