to the marriage of true minds admit imediments

I'm not in a relationship. I'm not.

I don't want to jinx anything, or jump the gun, but let's just say that interactions with a certain young man have got me thinking a lot recently about relationships and what they might be like. As a member of that rare group of men in their mid-twenties who has never once been anybody's boyfriend (not in high school, not in college), I think I'm uniquely qualified to offer up a few thoughts about the phenomenon as I approach the edge of the precipice.

First: the grass is always greener. When you've never gone steady with anybody, being tied down to some particular someone seems like the fucking greatest thing in the world. You have no sympathy for friends who complain about problems in their years-long relationships. All you can think of is how great it would be to have someone who was committed to you -- just you -- and you think it will totally validate your worth as a person.

I used to always think, "All I really want is to know that there's someone out there who's always gonna be thinking of me as much as I'm thinking of them." When you're in college and you see people who are in relationships, you marvel how they both know the other's class schedule and how they plan their lives around it. It's not so much about the easy access to sex or even affection -- it's really more about the confirmation that you are someone else's top priority, that there's never an instant of the day when someone is not caring about you and wishing you were with them.

And, of course, all of those desires are pretty egocentric. They're more about charting your position on some system of existential coordinates. They're about stating, "I exist, I matter" and needing someone else's confirmation of those statements.

People do have relationships like the one I describe above (especially when they're in college) but are those actually healthy at all? The answer is a resounding no.

I used to go around thinking (and sometimes saying), "How come everyone I know is in a relationship and I never have been? I have SO MUCH love to give. I would be the best, most selfless, most generous boyfriend ever. I would totally never be petty or annoyed. I would just be so appreciative, unlike those ungrateful motherfuckers who take relationships for granted, as if you can just pick them up at the local mini-mart! I am so ready for commitment."

That was then.

Recently, I did some self-assessment and I started to wonder whether, when I die, the deepest, most profound, and most satisfying relationships in my life won't indeed turn out to have been my (numerous) friendships. I've got a lot of really satisfying friendships that I put a lot of effort into and that I get a lot out of. These aren't just people I hang out with, they're people I share my deepest desires and fears with. I'm a pretty committed friend.

I had sort of come around to accepting that reality about myself when it started to seem like maybe actually I might end up having a boyfriend after all. And I started thinking, "Whoa! How is this going to affect my friendships? How is everyone going to cope with me having someone in my life who is suddenly more important than everyone else?"

But that's bullshit.

We're taught -- by movies, reality TV, Victorian novels and Shakespearean plays (basically by works of fiction) -- to prioritize romantic relationships above all others, but not really for any good reason. In modern day America it's assumed that everyone is seeking a life partner, gunning for that marriage announcement in the New York Times (same-sex couples now included!) accompanied by a photo with just two heads in it. You and me against the world, baby. Just the two of us. When you get married, that takes precedence over all the ties that have come before. Just ask Terry Schiavo...

But isn't it possible that someone could be closer to their mother, or their brother, or their housemates or their co-workers or their artistic collaborators than the person they happen to be sleeping or even living with? There are all kinds of ways to piece together a life and all kinds of things that are important. This logic seems kind of weird; it's countercultural. It goes against the cult of Valentine's Day, for sure, and and indeed the cult of marriage as the primary social unit.

Certain pop-cultural products seem to argue implicitly for this position. I'm thinking primarily of certain types of chick flicks (like Beaches) that boil down to, "Boys may come and boys may go, but your girlfriends are what really matter!" The final episode of Sex and the City (I'm told) could be summarized in pretty much this same way, couldn't it?

But that position basically seems to me like a sort of compensation for people who are dissatisfied with failed romance. After all, when's the best time to watch a chick flick? When you've just brken up with your boyfriend!

The position I'm advancing is somewhat more radical, especially in this day and age when the term "sanctity of marriage" gets tossed around as if it were an undeniable truth. What the hell is marriage anyway? In a certain sense, it's not even very Christian. Why should I say I love this person and am committed to him or her more than to anyone else? Wouldn't it be more Christian to live with a whole bunch of people, a community, and to devote the same care and attention to all of them?

In certain other cultures (I understand) the marriage of two people is not the primary defining societal unit. Married couples get absorbed into larger extended family or even village units. The idea of marriage as the fundamental building block of siciety is a symptom of modernity. Some people would probably trace it back to the Renaissance innovation of "marriage-for-love" (perhaps best enumerated by John Milton). In other words, it needn't be so. Society would not dissove if we re-considered the ways in which we pair off.

There's something nice about the idea of having a romantic relationship -- sharing things that are not just sexual with someone, but that are emotionally intimate as well -- but not building it up and saying "This thing must by virtue of being a romantic relationship therefore be the most important thing in my life." Why can't your relationship with your boyfriend be one of many important and un-ranked attachments that you have in your life? Certainly if there weren't so many expectations and significances piled onto our relationships, more of them might work out better or last longer.

I say all this because I'm thinking about this guy and thinking that we may indeed end up saying something to the effect of "I'm going to commit to you exclusively. I'm going to pledge not to have sex with anyone else. I'm going to see you quite a bit." But that doesn't have to mean that I'm going to say, "You're the most important person in my life to the exclusion of all others" or "I'm going to share more with you than with anyone else." Maybe I will come around to saying that eventually, but if I don't there's nothing wrong with that.

We're all hindered, I think, by the idea that our lives have to fit into some kind of acceptable, easily identifiable model. That's one of the problematic side effects of our hetero-normative binary culture. One of the most beneficial aspects of the "queering" of American life has been the small but persistent challenge to the perceived inevitability of pairing off. That's why I am totally in favor of same-sex couples having the right to marry and yet still ambivalent as to whether it's a good thing to promote marriage as the ideal one-size-fits-all social unit. My aunt (a former nun, now basically a celibate sextagenarian) is not married and has never had a romantic partner, yet she's managed to forge some of the most durable, meaningful bonds with other people that I have ever seen.

We lead lives of many different shapes and our connections with others extend outward in many different ways. Haven't we advanced far enough as a species that we can embrace that multiplicity?