ENJOYING SOLITUDE AND OTHER PEOPLE ■ 1 77attachment to family members, the cultural context will have a great deal
to do with the strength and direction of that attachment.
Because the family is our first and in many ways our most impor
tant social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how
well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives
enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture have
forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety
in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and
supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the
self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably
boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members
than among unrelated people. Child abuse and incestuous sexual moles
tation, once thought to be rare deviations from the norm, apparently
occur much more often than anyone had previously suspected. In John
Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” It
is clear that the family can make one very happy, or be an unbearable
burden. Which one it will be depends, to a great extent, on how much
psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and
especially in each other’s goals.
Every relationship requires a reorienting of attention, a reposi
tioning of goals. When two people begin to go out together, they must
accept certain constraints that each person alone did not have:
schedules have to be coordinated, plans modified. Even something as
simple as a dinner date imposes compromises as to time, place, type of
food, and so on. To some degree the couple will have to respond with
similar emotions to the stimuli they encounter—the relationship will
probably not last long if the man loves a movie that the woman hates,
and vice versa. When two people choose to focus their attention on each
other, both will have to change their habits; as a result, the pattern of
their consciousness will also have to change. Getting married requires
a radical and permanent reorientation of attentional habits. When a
child is added to the pair, both parents have to readapt again to accom
modate the needs of the infant: their sleep cycle must change, they will
go out less often, the wife may give up her job, they may have to start
saving for the child’s education.
All this can be very hard work, and it can also be very frustrating.
If a person is unwilling to adjust personal goals when starting a relation
ship, then a lot of what subsequently happens in that relationship will
produce disorder in the person’s consciousness, because novel patterns
of interaction will conflict with old patterns of expectation. A bachelor
may have, on his list of priorities, to drive a sleek sports car and to spend