I married into my husbands family decades ago. We have one child together, whom I adore. The rest of the children are from his previous marriages. I get along superficially with all of them. I make conversation and act interested in what they have to say. I tell them I love them when they say it to me. Generally, they have treated me very well, and I think they actually do love me. But I do not have any real feelings for them. I have never wanted much contact with people. Having interactions with all of them over these years has been painful for me. I fantasize about severing contact with his family once my husband dies. Is my pretending to care about them unethical? Name Withheld
The Roman poet Martial wrote an epigram, absurdly simple and curiously haunting, in which he declared: I do not love you, Sabidius, nor can I say why./This much I can say: I do not love you.
Its not the most obvious candidate for immortality, but it persists because it speaks to the way that not loving someone, like loving someone, is seldom something you can explain. Sometimes affecting affection can, in time, make the affection real; sometimes, as youve discovered, going through the motions leaves the heart unmoved. But is the pretense itself wrong?
Its conventional to say, Very well, thank you, in response to How are you? on the phone, even when you have a cold. Thats not dishonest; its merely polite. Replying to family members who say they love you with I love you, too can be merely conventional in the same way. Isnt pretending to be fond of people you have to spend time with a better and more generous tack than being cold and distant? We know all too well the odious alibi invariably offered for some cruel remark: Im just being honest.
It sounds as if your real problem is that you arent naturally sociable, and so your involvement in family gatherings over the years has been more burden than pleasure. Given that youve pulled it off for decades, you evidently dont have an incapacitating social-anxiety disorder. And youre certainly not the only person who sometimes feels like running away from family gatherings and hiding out. Yet plainly its harder for you than for most: I was struck that you describe your interactions with the stepchildren not as tedious but as painful.
People will understand if you choose to spend more time on your own if you become a widow. But theres no point, at this stage, in telling everyone what your real feelings are in dropping truth bombs, to use the aptly military metaphor. Despite your lack of affection toward your stepchildren, you clearly have some measure of regard for their feelings, and youre right to. Another concern is that cutting yourself off from the world in widowhood (your adored child aside) can lead to depression. Your adjustment to life without your husband will probably go better if you dont lose touch entirely with family and friends. Even introverts, as a rule, benefit from some human connection. So perhaps you can find a way to reduce interactions you find unpleasant without ending them altogether. Create a life that suits you, but in doing so, try to minimize the injury you do to others.
I work in the music department at a large university. Im frequently sent job postings to distribute to the students. Yesterday, I received a posting from the director of a nearby community music school looking for female piano teachers and female voice teachers. I responded to the director indicating that it is illegal to post a job advertisement that includes a reference to gender, as gender is not a bona fide occupational qualification when it comes to teaching music. The director responded that a majority of the job listings are gender-neutral but that, in this case, he is hiring to replace a female teacher whose roster has requested a female instructor as the replacement.
The director offered to reword the posting and asked if I could distribute a description that included no reference to gender. While I would like to provide work opportunities for the students in my program, I feel that I might be ethically implicated in the directors problematic hiring practices, because he communicated his intentions to me, even if the female only distinction doesnt make it into the distributed job listing. What is my best course of action? Rob G.
Whether something counts as a bona fide occupational qualification (B.F.O.Q.) is a complicated question best left to the lawyers. I have no doubt theyd side with you, though. Few gender-based exemptions to Title VII have been granted, and they typically involve concerns about bodily privacy in prisons, hospitals and the like. You and the music-school director ought to comply with the law.
But putting aside the legalities for a moment, it can be challenging ethically to decide whether a preference in hiring is objectionable. Here, the decision was guided by the preferences of an existing roster of students, not by the directors own tastes. Courts have taken a dim view of arguments for gender discrimination based on customer preference, and the same may well apply here. And yet this preference strikes me as less troublesome than a preference for, say, a white woman, which would be difficult to view as having nothing to do with hostility to nonwhite people. In general, partiality for those of certain identities is morally less troublesome than hostility to people of other identities and yes, this is a coherent distinction. It matters, too, if there is a general background of unfair discrimination against people of one identity in finding jobs in a certain field, in which case favoring people of that kind can be a contribution to meeting an injustice. (Perhaps because my primary- and secondary-school piano teachers were both women, Id be surprised to learn that women face particular prejudice in this particular field.)
Being a woman could be morally, if not legally, a B.F.O.Q. if the students came from a religious tradition that prohibited them from spending time with men outside their own families and would simply cease coming if a man showed up. What would be the point in hiring a teacher whose students will simply disappear? Here, there would be a trade-off between accommodating an irrational injustice toward a qualified man and allowing these women the benefit of instruction.
But such circumstances surely dont apply in this case, so youd be justified in saying that youll run the ad only if the director undertakes to consider candidates of any gender. If a woman gets the job, you may feel that the men didnt get a fair shot. But you cant be sure of it. Having made the point, you can hope that the director will recognize that you were right and that what he ought to have done was to make the case to the students that their preference was unreasonable.
And now that youve been sensitized to the issue, you might consider trying to keep track of whether those using your services consistently favor one gender or other in their appointments. As you recognize, whats important in the field of justice in employment is what people do, not just what they say.
Read more from the original source:
Should I Pretend to Love My Stepchildren? - The New York Times