As a result of research he conducted on IBM employees in Europe in the late 1960's and early 1907's, Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofestede developed his Cultural Dimension Theory. Initially composed of four factors that he felt defined the differences between societies, he eventually expanded it to six:
- Power Distance – the degree to which a society places value on hierarchy and obedience to authority
- Individualism vs Collectivism – how individually vs communally oriented a society is
- Uncertainty Avoidance – a society's tolerance for ambiguity
- Masculinity vs Femininity (which today might not fly as a set of labels) – achievement, materials success and assertiveness vs caring and quality of life
- Long-Term vs Short Term Orientation – or future vs past orientation, forward-looking vs traditional
- Indulgence vs Restraint – the degree to which a society the freedom to gratify human desires (which can be defined in many ways)
I remember studying this in an Organization and Environment class in the business school at the University of Washington. While like most academic paradigms it's a somewhat blunt tool for classifying things, it offers a framework for common definitions and discussion of culture and policy. For me, it did what education should do – it gave me a new way of looking at the world to understand without necessarily judging. When you look at the world this way, it becomes obvious why Japan and Germany would make good allies and why America is so rights oriented. We can talk about why and how Indian society is so different from Europe in meaningful instead of anecdotal or culturally chauvinistic ways. We can understand the value of a culture's reasons for what it does and relate to it – even when it differs from our own and may never be what we would choose.
For Americans in my socio-economic bracket, Individualism vs Collectivism is often a topic. Not that anyone labels it that way. But living in the most individualistic society on Earth comes with benefits, offset by many hidden costs. Humans need community and without it experience emotional and psychological distress. As animals go, we have more capacity to live individually or in small groups, but we're also not cheetahs or giant pandas. We need each other and unlike the two examples I just gave are not endangered (leaving the potential that we destroy ourselves aside).
As middle class and above Americans couple up and even more so as they have children, they often struggle with finding community. College is often the peak social experience of our lives – community is everywhere and the opportunity to find others, form friendships and try on different styles of community is abundant, especially at a large school. Making meaningful friends in your 30's and 40's becomes much harder. Finding a social scene that meets your values and personality can also be challenging.
My friend Alex is passionate about community planning and has been involved in several development projects that center around it. He has often pointed out to me that the very design of suburban America leans toward individual security and not collectivist harmony. For example, we live in single family dwellings that are fenced-off and walled-off from our neighbors – and sometimes gated too. Streets on which traffic passes create as much a psychological as a physical barrier from knowing one another. Cars keep us going places separately even if we're all headed to the same place like school, gym/yoga, a place of worship. We run errands getting in and out of the car and if we pass one another, waving is about the most we can do to connect. We live in beautiful communities that are not so communal.
So where do suburban or even urban couples, parents, adults find their connections? In settings that are more hit and miss than college. Other parents at your kids' school. Congregants at your place of worship if you have one. Athletic activities like the gym and yoga. Other team parents of your kids' athletic activities. Activity groups like bike riding or book clubs. Joining a country club if you're in the financial position and so inclined.
Finding friends and community can happen – but it takes a lot more work in your 30's and 40's.
In my experience, the quality of friendships also changes considerably. Parents of your kids friends are often in a similar life position, but not necessarily similar as people. Statistically, they tend to make better companions than deep friends. And even when you find someone who might connect with more deeply, it requires two parties to find the time to invest and a spot in their schedules. This is not an easy thing for married professionals with children to do under the best of circumstances, with the most flexible schedules possible. In my experience, the deepest friendships require some degree of shared outlook, personal openness, the willingness to invest time – AND shared experiences. Friendships that revolve around "catching up" over coffee or lunch rarely run quite as deep as the ones that can also reminisce over "that time when…." But what happens when time is scarce?
I've found one significant bypass to this problem is entertaining. Inviting people into your home has a powerful effect. Sharing meals, – offering and enjoying one another's hospitality - can become a form of shared experience. With the right people who you can truly connect with, expressions of warmth and hospitality go a long way to deepening a connection. However, when you're coupled, it tends to create strong couples friendships and less often personal ones. Not that couple friends aren't important – they are. But we also need personal friends. I have a few examples of couple friends that as much as I like the guy, for a variety of reasons, we never seem to find our own outside thing. Although I have a few examples where it has gone that way – which are great, just less common.
Westlake Village was designed in 1967 to be a beautiful suburb with a high quality of living for middle to upper-middle-class hetero-normative caucasian nuclear families. Today, the only hard requirement is being upper-middle class or above – but most people still meet the developer's original vision. You can be of another ethnicity, sexual orientation, single or divorced – but you'll be outside the norm. And a little less strictly, the same goes for the other Conejo Valley communities of Agoura, Thousand Oaks, Oak Park, Newbury Park and Calabasas.
What happens when a couple divorces in such a community and they fall out of the status around which the community is designed? From what I've seen, it's not easy. Couple friends can struggle to remain friends with the members of a former couple. Sure, unless something terrible and morally offensive happens, everyone starts out saying they want to remain friends with both members of the former couple. That's a hard thing to do – and people generally either pick one, or in many cases neither because a single doesn't socially fit well in a world of couples. Having a dinner party with one other person – rather than a couple – isn't the same thing. Neither is having a couple and one divorced friend. The divorced friend is literally the fifth wheel. We would all like to think we can do better than that – but in reality, we often don't.
The few single dads I know in the area don't seem particularly fulfilled or happy. Mostly, they are waiting their turn for their time with their kids. And while they are greeted with warmth in public settings, how many people are having them into their homes or maintaining close friendships? Not that many.
My observations may be skewed, but from growing up in Westlake as well as living there as an adult, I've observed that single-moms tend to fare a bit better. Women seem to be better about including single-mom friends in their social circles and maintaining their one-on-one friendships. The fifth-wheel principle may still apply to dinner parties, but single moms are more likely to still be standing in the circle of moms chatting at drop-off and pickup from school or going to lunch with a friend. Right or wrong, these gender norms are a product of generations of habits and outlooks most of us barely think about.
So the place I fervently led my family to have the same great experience I knew growing up suddenly becomes far less of a community to me if divorced.
Still, it has some things still going. I believe community requires investment and giving. I have invested myself and my time in my synagogue. I co-chaired the search committee to find our current rabbi and am now Executive Vice President – in line to become Temple President in July. As a result of these roles, I have come to know many people I would never have otherwise met and enjoy cross-generational friendships in addition to same-generational ones – often of real substance. I enjoy my children seeing this example because it's important to not just be consumers within our communities. Real community requires giving of oneself. I want them to feel tapped into their Jewish community, to value it and feel pride and belonging.
My favorite yoga teacher recently put together a cool meditation and breathwork workshop I decided to attend. Surprisingly, the group really bonded – there was a profound sense of community that sparked among these people – which was made so much more interesting because it was a mix of members of the yoga studio and recovering addicts who either reside or formerly resided at the yoga teacher's sober living house. Even my yoga teacher himself and the breathwork instructor are recovering addicts. The interesting, deep and amazingly open conversations were unexpected as people began to see that the difference between an addict and anyone else is little more than how one deals with their pain.
In one of my favorite moments, a woman who was not an addict said that she felt out of place because she recently lost her twenty-something daughter and while she doesn't, she wishes she could just drink away or use drugs to escape the pain – which made it hard for her to share openly in a room full of recovering addicts. I thought she was seeing the whole thing wrong – she has the exact same problems they do. Just like an addict spends the rest of his or her life recovering, so will she. Her pain will always be there and just like an addict, there may be times or more or less intensity – but she will always be in recovery. Who could understand her struggle better than an addict? Her entire vibe changed completely after I said that and then the addicts did the rest by giving her incredible empathy. Now when I go to yoga – besides all the people I peripherally know from years of classes and chit-chat – there are always a few of the members of that very special group – including that woman – and the sense of community that goes with it.
Now, as I stare down the barrel of a possible and likely divorce, I find myself asking if all of this is enough? Is the community in which I have invested myself what can carry me through a new phase of life? Is it the community that sustains me during the 50 percent of the time I am not with my kids? Is it a community in which I can grow under changed circumstances? I'm very uncertain.
At 44, I don't know where the right place is to plug-in. One of the most conventional answers is to find a new relationship and in a sense, rebuild. If I met someone and our situations weren't too complicated, then we could buy a new house in the suburbs, reclaim the social trappings of couplehood and I could be okay where I am. Sure, there could be the awkwardness of how remarrying affects my kids, Emily and potentially my hypothetical wife's kids and ex if she comes from a similar situation. But there are books and even TV shows about this. It can be done.
But is that what I want? It doesn't sound good right now. I don't know that I need to repeat a life experience or rebuild to feel stable and fulfilled. If it's not going to be the marriage and family I have, do I want another? Or is that enough for a lifetime and it's time for something else, something new? Life is full of possibilities.
I'm quite sure I don't need to become the urban bachelor who finds dating and living the life of a 20-something the thing for me. Urban bachelor in America was never my favorite the first time around.
My friend Chad currently lives in Thailand. I met Chad in Taiwan and we lived and worked together in Singapore and Bali. He met his Javanese wife Rina in Bali and they married, settled and had children there. After awhile, they wanted a change of pace and found Thailand to their liking. Their past few years has been living in what I call the in-between space – the room a society offers to foreigners who may want to nest there. Because Chad and Rina come with outside money, they can probably stay in Thailand for as long as they want.
Socially, Thai culture doesn't have the same kind of space for foreigners as Patmos does for me. I'm more culturally and visibly similar to a Greek – so while I'll never be Greek and I'll especially never be part of the even tighter circle of Patmians (even Greeks from other places who settle here or have seasonal businesses complain of being treated as outsiders), I can be part of the flow of things. Proverbially, I can come inside the living room, but may never get a tour of their entire home. But I don't have to stand outside the door.
From personal experience, I know that a caucasian foreigner is never allowed in the proverbial front door of Thai culture. Sure, there are very nice expatriate communities in Thailand, which is what Chad and Rina enjoy. Thais welcome you to enjoy expat communities and spend your money in Thailand. Maybe you can add to their economic talent pool as well. You are welcome to marry and increase the financial and social standing of a Thai national. But despite speaking Thai and/or having Thai children, you will never be a real part of the family – literally or figuratively.
Founding Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew asserted that one of America's greatest strengths is its unparalleled ability to assimilate immigrants – which when mixed with the country's economic success and opportunity has allowed America to attract some of the finest talent in the world for generations. In a sense, America leaves a very small in-between space because of the strong gravitational pull of assimilation. Coming from this, Americans often don't realize that while other countries have varying ranges of integrative spaces for foreigners, it's rare to actually live abroad as a full part of another society. Maybe one great exception is for Jews who make Aliyah to Israel.
However, that in-between space of living in a foreign country comes with a number of benefits. Finding a place with community but not strong obligations can be very pleasant. So long as you can afford to be there, many countries will allow you access to most of their delights without pulling you into their politics and challenges. An expat can – under the right circumstances – surf the society. Sure you get no say in what a country or community might do and even fewer legal protections – but in another sense, you can have the best of what that world offers and when it doesn't suit you, hang back or leave. It's Community Lite.
I have had several experiences with Community Lite – and it is seductive. Perhaps the biggest downside is having less likelihood of making deep and long-lasting friendships. But even that isn't an always. Certain communities like Ubud, Bali have a very special in-between space where some truly interesting people reside in a space of sharing and ongoing cross-cultural exchange. Meeting someone of depth and intelligence that could become a life-long connection is very possible there. It was one of the things I loved about life in Ubud.
Could I find friends and maybe even a romantic relationship in an in-between space? Would I be more likely to do so than at home? Could a future partner or wife be French living in Bali? Or American living in Greece? Or an Israeli I meet on the Cote d'Azure? It sounds attractive.
I keep playing with the idea of trying to have it all – or maybe more modestly, a balance. Arrange custody to be in large blocks. Spend three or six month chunks of time with my kids in Westlake 50 percent of the time and try out the in-between spaces of the world the other 50 percent.
But what of the community I have already developed? I can't be Temple President 50 percent of the time. And will those great intergenerational and same generational friendships weaken or fade if I only have 50 percent of the year to invest in them? Will the necessary doses of shared experience creation be all but wiped out because 50% of the year just isn't enough to schedule in what would matter? Does my portfolio of friendships stay static to what I have today (which honestly isn't doing badly – if this is all I ever have, I can lead a pretty happy life)? Would I deprive myself the riches of a new committed relationship at home, which is maybe where I really belong? Maybe the growth is staying, facing the hardships and turning something painful into something new and beautiful while standing in place?
Or perhaps most significantly, if I spent half the year abroad, would the world be my oyster, or really a very nicely packaged and rationalized escape?
I suppose that nothing is a terminal sentence. I don't have to decide what to do for all-time. I could try out life one way and then change if I don't like it. Several times I have considered that being away during my non-custodial time for at least the first year or two would help to solidify a new dynamic between me and Emily. As one friend put it, "You're her kind, sweet teddy bear who does whatever she wants. Sometimes she wants her teddy bear and sometimes she wants to put her teddy bear on the shelf. You can't live your life as her teddy bear!" She can't reach for her teddy bear when it's not on the shelf. Maybe once she's out of the habit of grabbing for her teddy bear, I could feel safe being closer.
I suppose that in order to solve my Individualism vs Collectivism dilemma, I may first have to consider my feelings around Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance. Oh, Geert – is there no conundrum you can't frame?
