I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, [Gabriel] Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they are. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Giden, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. he was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café
Gabriel Marcel [1889–1973] was a French and Christian philosopher as well as a playwright and music critic. Often considered the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from Sartre and others by defining his own approach as neo-Socrateanism or a philosophy of existence.
His “ontological mystery” is the idea that existence is not a solvable problem but a fundamental mystery that an individual faces. To Marcel, a mystery is a deep, personal experience that cannot be separated from the person experiencing them.
When people treat existential mysteries as problems to be solved using technology and functional thinking, Marcel believed this leads to a state of emotional and mental hardening, crispation. They become closed off and trapped by habits and routines.
Midlife is a natural time for crispation, for treating every challenge in life as a problem to be solved with systems and habits and technology rather than as a mystery to confront and change you. And in many cases, that’s exactly the way you should treat your challenges. Not everything needs to be turned into a mystical experience of life’s deepest mysteries. Many situations do respond to problem-solving, improved routines, and the application of technology.
The midlife dater, especially, wants to approach dating and finding romance with tools and systems. You can see this in the questions and advice that come up again and again in r/datingoverfifty: Which is the best OLD (online dating) app for people our age? How do I find someone who has the same lifestyle that I have? What do I do when my new partner doesn’t communicate in exactly the way I expect him or her to?
The midlifer dater will often declare what he or she won’t do: I will never marry again. I won’t date anyone with children (or without them, for some daters who think those without children are likely to be selfish and not understanding of someone with them). I only want a living-apart-together relationship.
That is crispation — assuming that the way to get the romance and relationship you want is by specifying up front exactly the form it will take, usually a form that requires no change or growth on your own part.
And this can work. Crispy dating can work. But when it doesn’t you have to instead try recklessness… or, what Marcel called availability: openness, receptivity, a willingness to be affected, spaciousness toward the other, a relaxation of defensive posture, and showing up without pre-scripted control.