My kids send their friends funny TikTok videos. When I was a teen, we gathered at each other’s houses to watch an hour or two of music videos. Nearly 40 years ago, one of those videos started my first real quarrel with my first real girlfriend.
Spring 1985. “April” and I have been dating for about four months. In a few weeks, I will get her pregnant, and we will face an immense challenge. For now, we are still uncomplicatedly smitten. Or so I imagine.
On this foggy Sunday morning, my first love and I sit on her couch in Monterey, watching music videos. Suddenly, my girlfriend points at the TV. “This is the video you need to watch! This is the one I said was about us!”
Til’ Tuesday – Aimee Mann’s New Wave band before she became an alternative icon on her own – has just released the video for the first single from its upcoming record. As good as the song is, the video will be better -- “Voices Carry” will be one of the best-remembered of the MTV era. It features Mann (and her famous “rat tail”), and actor Cully Holland as her abusive boyfriend. At the end of the song, Mann and Holland sit in formal wear in the audience at Carnegie Hall; as the music rises, Mann rises from her seat and begins to shout out the final lyrics, mocking her boyfriend’s increasingly frantic attempts to shush her:
’Hush hush, keep it down now/Voices carry’
I am aghast. Cully Holland is handsome, but he plays a controlling jerk. At one point in the video, he forces himself on Mann’s character. I am gentle and self-deprecating. What on earth could possibly remind April of us?
April tells me that I’m always soothing and shushing her. She reminds me of a moment we had at the mall the previous weekend. She’d called her mom on a payphone, and the conversation had turned heated. April had shouted into the receiver. People had turned to stare. I’d put my hand on my girlfriend’s shoulder. It was an unmistakable sign of my own mortification at the scene she was making, even if I tried to disguise it as a gesture of comfort and solidarity. April had shaken off my hand, and I had walked away to study a shop window.
“There’s a difference between asking you nicely not to make a scene and… and being an asshole,” I protest. Even as I say these words, I realize – for the first but not the last time in my relationship history – how the women I love will perceive my allergy to public displays of strong emotion. I feel equal parts ashamed and defensive.
Our fight over the video circles back to how our mothers handle our sex lives. Neither my mother nor April’s objects to our sexual relationship. When I stay over at April’s, I am permitted to spend the night in her bed. When April came to visit my family ranch, however, she and I were put in separate rooms. My grandmother’s edict was clear: “Suitcases need to sleep separately. Discreet nocturnal traffic will be ignored.” As I’ve explained to April many times, Our Kind of People care about how things look on the outside. I declare that’s a way of making everyone comfortable. April thinks it’s rank hypocrisy.
It was one thing when it was about where our luggage spent the night. It’s different when it comes to trying to subdue public displays of anger. As we argue, I realize just how deeply I value not causing scenes. I can handle a raised voice – barely– in private. To yell in public is tantamount to dropping one’s pants and defecating on a table in the mall food court. It is a violation of one’s moral obligations. It is to tear up the social contract. To put it mildly, April does not see it that way.
My girlfriend suggests that it’s also unreasonable to expect passion in private and propriety in public. She accuses me of asking her to be a light switch, able to turn on and off in a split second. I reply that I can do that, that I do it all the time, and – very stupidly – I declare that’s what it means to be civilized.
April throws me out. I walk to where I’ll catch the bus for home, tears flowing down my face. I love this girl so very much. I already dread leaving her behind when I go off to college in a few short months. But even at 17, I know. I know that this urge to soothe another’s seething isn’t just a coping mechanism, but a core part of my identity. It will be one of the reasons why April and I do eventually break up, though we will remain dear friends down to the present day.
I do not yet know it will be one key reason I will divorce five times. And I do not yet know how much I will, for decades to come, shiver uncomfortably whenever I hear Amy Mann’s voice.
Yeah, that IS, in fact, what it means to be civilized. April should spend some time in the UK. See how her friends & partner there would react when she throws a tantrum in public. Sorry, Hugo, from where I'm sitting she's 100% wrong and you were being a supportive, dignified parter. She should've considered herself lucky to have a mate who so kindly and gently tried to encourage her to learn some basic coping skills.
"When April came to visit my family ranch, however, she and I were put in separate rooms. My grandmother’s edict was clear: “Suitcases need to sleep separately. Discreet nocturnal traffic will be ignored.” As I’ve explained to April many times, Our Kind of People care about how things look on the outside. I declare that’s a way of making everyone comfortable. April thinks it’s rank hypocrisy."
I understand why some people might consider that hypocritical in some way or another, but I don't see it that way. While I don't share your extreme aversion to anger, I do actually think that such public outbursts by people who should "know better" (that is to say, I understand toddlers and people with various disabilities cannot always control these things and I am not judging these people for their behavior) are, in fact, pretty "uncivilized." I just find it so rude to disrupt the collective peace like that. It feels very selfish. The way things look on the outside is how we maintain social order in many ways. Challenging it sometimes is necessary, I think, but overall I think it's an important part of keeping us tied together and I see the decline of that as a bad omen in a way.