Author: Christopher Schroeder
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More Connected and More Humane
Psychologist, and psychology professor, James Cordova discussed his relationship research in a two-part segment of a new Hidden Brain series that aired on a local radio station over the past two weekends.
Hidden Brain, which started as an NPR Morning Edition segment about social science and human behavior, is a series for “curious listeners” who want to become “tourists in their own lives,” and is hosted by Shankar Vedantam. It recently started a new series, which it calls Love 2.0, on long-term relationship challenges.
Cordova and Vedantam discussed ways of mending marriages, and presumably other long-term relationships across two episodes. The first, which aired two Sundays ago, focused on ways that couples can become more concerned with changing their partners, and the second, which was broadcast this past Sunday, explored the thinking behind such concerns and the benefits of a more accepting approach.
Both seem informed by Cordova’s research, which he has detailed in a new book called The Mindful Path to Intimacy for a general audience. In it, he describes the ways that awareness can help couples move beyond comfortable to close, or greater intimacy.
Cordova’s insights are intriguing. For example, he suggests that partners who replace changing with accepting can paradoxically produce the change they are otherwise seeking. Such an approach generally seems kinder, and more connected, which alone justify it even without this paradox.
Cordova at least in these interviews seems to misrepresent the problem. For example, he suggests that partners generally want to blame and change each other, and seems to ignore other possibilities, such as assessing the effects of choices upon their relationships and their lives.
Such assumptions needn’t negate his solution although these might make some question his credibility, especially when he advocates understanding more than being understood. How could he have anything good to offer, some might think, when he misunderstands their motivation, or doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of other explanations?
Regardless, his approach seems to have greater benefits than the change paradox he cites. Others for example have cited an increased pressure upon marriages over time to encompass a wider range of functions, which is actually the focus of the next Hidden Brain episode. Those who can rise to such challenges can be quite satisfied (see Finkel 2017, e.g.), but even these relationships, and the individuals in them, can’t perfect all the time.
A more accepting approach, such as the one Cordova recommends, could allow these and them to be imperfect, and to have limitations, failures, and mistakes, without resorting to designations as flawed or dysfunctional. As such, it neutralizes a need for perfection, and prevents it from being the enemy of the good, or good enough.
Good enough relationships aren’t ones that have settled for second-best as much as are ones that recognize the realities of human existence, or at the very least offer additional options to participants. These are also more humane ways of understanding the sources of much meaning in our days and lives.
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Nothing Smashing
Many credible critics liked The Smashing Machine, which I liked more than I expected yet couldn’t recommend.
This sports biography focuses on several years (1997-2000) in the life of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr as he confronts professional and personal challenges. These moments were also featured in a 2002 documentary, which seems to have been widely admired.
I’m a fan of neither sports biographies nor Dwayne Johnson, who nonetheless attempts to go places in his Kerr performance that I’ve not seem him acknowledge in other roles. Johnson claims that this movie, which also changed his life, isn’t a “fight” film but a “life” movie perhaps in part because its subject is still alive, and even makes a cameo appearance in a grocery store at its end.
Neither Johnson nor his co-start Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, succeeds for similar and different reasons. For Blunt, the issue is less her ability — she makes the most of her role, and attempts to add dimensions but runs out of room in this script. Regardless, the effect limits the appeal of this movie.
The bigger problem is the lack of a clear purpose. For example, I was curious why Kerr, whom I’d watched struggle with losing, could laugh after having done so in the shower while his friend, and manager / trainer Mark Coleman went on to win the “life-changing amount” of money. Both had mused about the possibility of fighting each other one day, which until this loss seemed inevitable in this tournament.
The explanation suggested by this movie has something to do with Kerr’s newfound sobriety, including its effects upon his romantic relationship. His addiction had previously forced him to withdraw from a tournament, for which he had apologized, so his sobriety could be both why he can fight again and why he cannot maintain the ferocious professional reputation. Perhaps that also accounts for why he was showering while Coleman was fighting.
Or maybe the purpose is more recognition for Kerr, who was a MMA pioneer but remained relatively unknown even after the 2002 documentary. The scrolling epilogue informs audiences that Kerr and Staples marry soon thereafter and later have a son — becoming parents is a conflict between them earlier in the movie — and that they were together for fifteen years, which seems life-changing enough.
I’d guess if pressed that the writer and director Benny Safdie wanted to highlight a forgotten figure whom others could admire. Such a possibility, and parts of the plot, are easier to understand after reading about the previous documentary on which this version is based. Regardless, I think Safide gets bogged down in doing so as a box-office success, and cannot find the proper perspective to do both.
Perhaps both are ultimately impossible, or at least seem so in this version of a biography of someone who might be admirable nonetheless. By its end, I had no greater interest in this sport, and didn’t learn anything about being human, even as I had been more entertained for a couple of hours than I expected, which at that point seemed enough.