.
A culture without boundaries — a society without grown-ups and a middle class without guidelines — can be a dangerous place to live. The shocking and tragic story of a young woman named Lyric Benson, a newly minted Yale graduate who was gunned down before her mother’s eyes by her spurned lover, Robert Ambrosino, offers a particularly searing and unforgettable illustration why [38].
She was nineteen when they met after her sophomore year; he was a New Haven “townie” pushing thirty and rough around the edges — that is, worldy-wise and real to an impressionable theater major. According to newspaper accounts, they moved in together, sharing a group house with other Yale students. They became engaged during her senior year, at which point, Ambrosino, according to The New York Times, “flew her mother and stepfather” to town from their home in North Carolina to celebrate. After graduation, with Lyric knocking on the door of the New York acting world, they continued to live together.
The rest of the terrible story practically writes itself. What seemed cozy in college was constricting in the real world. Lyric moved out. Ambrosino harassed her, stalked her. And then, one night in Manhattan, outside her apartment building, with her mother looking on, he shot her in the lovely face and turned the gun on himself, committing suicide.
It’s a wrenching story of violence, pain, and waste. But how does this crime relate to broken barriers on artistic expression and social conventions? Maybe the best way to answer is to harken back to the past: In a culture with boundaries, in a society with grown-ups, in a judgmental, conventional, straitlaced world of reflexive manners and bourgeois mores, this tragedy might never have happened — and not just the murder and suicide, but also the relationship itself.
In our day, such a relationship, which seems to mismatch not just age and experience but also aptitude and opportunity, is quite unremarkable — and maybe therein lies the rub. No one dares to find, or even thinks to find, such a live-in arrangement in any way remarkable — as in worthy of remark, caustic or cautionary. Nonjudgmentally, society allows, and even enables, such a young woman to pass effortlessly into such a love affair with more emotional and sexual and professional baggage than she is equipped to handle. Our young women deserve more protection. Judgmentally, society should make it more costly, or at least a little more uncomfortable, for such a pair to perpetuate a relationship.
How? By throwing up the same old trip wires and obstacles that have blocked, or at least, slowed lovers through the ages: punitive parents, outraged “dowagers” (that imposing term for old ladies), incredulous peers, college rules, moral codes, social stigmas — all the “artificial,” “narrow-minded,” “pointless” constraints society once mustered to try to quash what was once rather poetically known as “free love.” … Facing down family, answering to a college dean, even winning over suspicious friends provide critical tests of any affair, reaffirming a couple’s desire to be together… or not. Maybe as reflected in the gimlet of a disapproving community, an unemployed barfly wouldn’t look so great to a Yale undergrad. Maybe a few nasty stigmas in the mix would convince an older man that living with an inexperienced student isn’t really worth all the trouble.
But no such disapproval, no such trouble, no such boundaries, no such grown-ups, exist any longer. Sadly, neither does Lyric. Society failed to mount a rigid defense of the young woman: instead, it provided the warm, slightly moist embrace of nonjudgmentalism that created a cocoon of unreality for the doomed affair. Society failed, period. As barriers and boundaries disappear, so too, do our signposts, markers, and guides. We gain mobility, free rein, and latitude, but we don’t know where we are.
More dangerous still: We don’t know who we are.
[38] Shaila K. Dewan, “One Verging on Stardom, One Left Back, with a Gun,” New York Times, May 4, 2003.
Diana West
“6. Boundaries”
The Death of the Grown-Up
