I don’t, as a rule, blog about personal relationships or intimate feelings. I do, however, care deeply about how we build community, and how we constitute family and social connection is at the heart of that. As since age and disability have brought me to a place where I understand what it is to be erased, to feel invisible, I think a great deal about how we set expectations and manage communications about intimacy and community.

I think we do a poor job of it. Or at least, I have observed many instances in which we — I — struggle to do it well. And I think this has larger implications, which is what makes it worth blogging about.

A Facebook friend shared a blog post by a couple named Josh and Lolly Weed that set me searching for language this particular morning. In the post, they explain their decision to end their marriage. They are devout Mormons who, despite their deep affection, children and generally happy home life, have decided that their marriage cannot accommodate Josh’s same-sex attraction. We are assured that there has been no infidelity, but that it’s not healthy for them to remain in a marriage where he can’t love her the way she deserves to be loved, and neither of them is free to find love with someone else. This paragraph from Josh, especially, sent me off on a reverie that had little to do with their revelation:

The love I felt [for Lolly and their children] was real, but something in me wanted to die.

 

It’s the thing that wants to die in all of us when we don’t have hope for attachment to a person we are oriented towards. It’s actually a standard part of human attachment: when we don’t have attachment—and have no hope of attachment–our brain tells us we need to die.

The post is worth reading  for its testimony about people of faith struggling to reconcile what their church teaches about homosexuality with their lived experience. I don’t intend to address that here. What I want to say about that paragraph is that it resonated deeply with lived and observed experience – a lifelong crisis that I once thought existential, only capable of being articulated in art, but increasingly, taking shape in public policy.

Too many of us don’t know how to create and sustain connection to other humans. Too many of us live outside of structures of extended family and community. Experts say the lack of connection is killing us. The UK now has a Minister of Loneliness. A former US Surgeon General took to the pages of the Harvard Business Review to declare loneliness a public health crisis and to call on employers to change their cultures. A 2010 AARP study found a strong correlation between loneliness and poor physical health.

Weed’s words triggered very specific memories.

When I was a child, far too young to know of romantic relationships, there were two songs that moved me to tears, that touched something that I knew deep inside from having been uprooted and displaced: Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” and Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” I never spoke of the way these songs made me feel. I suspect that Aretha’s song sounded like the pain of some of the adult women I saw in my neighborhood, or heard my aunts and uncles talking about in conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear: “Ain’t no way for me to love you/If you won’t let me…” But “This Bitter Earth” spoke to a fear I carried:

This bitter earth
Well, what a fruit it bears
What good is love
Mmh, that no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust
Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose
What good am I?
Heaven only knows

Oh, this bitter earth
Yes, can it be so cold?
Today you’re young
Too soon you’re old
But while a voice
Within me cries
I’m sure someone
May answer my call
And this bitter earth, ooh
May not, oh be so bitter after all

I was a lonely child, unsure where I belonged, how I fit in, and Dinah Washington spoke to that so powerfully that I resolved not to listen to that song, lest I give in to despair. At that age, it was a slew of things that loom large for a child, but less so for adults, such as being told by a relative, “You must be a genius, because you are weird.” Or being bullied in school. Or thinking Janis Ian’s ode to teenage angst, “At 17,” was written for me. I grew up, and have lived much of my life in the friend zone, hopelessly crushing on people who would confide their love for my best friends. Oh, well. l learned early on to be philosophical about this.There’s a reason my middle school classmates called me Spock.

Later, I would be told that I had been a rebel in college, not adhering to the expectations of how young women were supposed to behave, ignoring people who were attracted to me (or in the words of one friend, supposedly in love with me.)  The truth is that my parents pretty much raised me to read books, take care of home and family, and exercise. I was rarely allowed to date or have a job other than babysitting. This is how my parents hoped to keep me from being derailed before I got a chance to have a life.

I didn’t break the rules; for the most part, I never learned them.  So if you wanted to step to me, you had to make it plain.   Later, of course, I learned that most of us are misfits in our own way. Sometimes we find others who understand our nerdiness, and we can be misfits together. Sometimes that connection comes through a partnership called marriage that lasts for decades. And sometimes not.

Anyway, it’s with this understanding that I came to Josh Weed’s words. And then I thought about people I had met from other cultures, other stations in life.

I thought about the people I have met who come from cultures that consider “love marriages” inferior to arranged marriages. I know women in arranged marriages who are at peace with their lot, for whom intimacy is built on shared history, values, and priorities. I don’t know how they process the idea of the kind of passion of which Josh Weed speaks. And then I remember the young man I met in Biratnagar, Nepal, who told me how his wife’s family disowned her because she chose her husband. He was from a lower caste – which wasn’t supposed to matter, but it did. I remember having a conversation with another man, a student, who said he couldn’t possibly enter a love marriage, despite the fact that they are growing in popularity. It would be too devastating for his family; it would ruin his career; he would lose standing in his community.

These are the dilemmas of the search for intimacy: to conform to the expectations of one’s culture at the expense of the possibility of deep connection. To search for connection and fail, repeatedly, because you can’t measure up to set of rules you may or may not understand. To follow the rules as you understand them, only to realize that you don’t know what healthy connection looks like. To enter a marriage with hope, and to stay for decades out of a sense of soul-crushing duty. And, occasionally, to stare in wonder at that rare couple who has managed, against all odds to find a way to be together until, “the last of life for which the first was made.”

I have sat with older people, some close relatives, who no longer see a purpose or place for themselves. Spouses gone or dead, children grown, work life behind them. I remember some of them deciding they were done, and before long, they were. I remember a lively widowed friend in her late 70s who ached for a companion, and I hear there’s a bar in town that has become something of a pickup joint for seniors. Well, why not I say. Just be careful out there – STD rates are rising for older people.

I have participated in support groups and forums for other people with disabilities struggling with the pain and disappointment of losing lovers and marriages because their partners can’t understand or cope with the ways in which their bodies and lives are changing. I am also reminded of the happily coupled people I know who happen to use wheelchairs or have some other impairment, and what it’s like to deal with others’ assumptions that their dating and marriage options are limited.

I am living Josh Weed’s fear – “no attachment, no hope of attachment” – but I am determined not to die.I have resolved for myself to stay connected to life, through writing, through work, through church and community involvement, through friends.

I appreciate the connections I have to old classmates. Even if we weren’t intimates in youth, we are at an age where we share much that is meaningful that younger people wouldn’t understand. We don’t have to read a book to know what it felt like when the Kennedys and Dr. King were murdered, or why Vietnam was so divisive, or why wearing pants to school was a radical act. We’ve had chronic illnesses and scares and losses. We remember Carol Burnett and platform heels and Belmont Plateau and Summer Madness. We go out, share a meal, dance to old songs, sometimes accompanied by a man, sometimes not.  And then we laugh and tease about how we’ve still got it.