Remember in Kindergarten when we used to make valentines for everyone in the class? How did we grow out of that to giving our candy-chalk hearts away to one and only one truly?
Everywhere people are walking around with strings attached to their significant other and their significant children-- often the only people whose needs to which they’re able to attend. And we “single,” unpaired folk are entangled within layers and layers of other couple’s tyings. We are left feeling like the only way to survive is to find someone to whom to tie ourselves-- to join the coordinated points of society connecting a dot to a dot. The tighter the connection to just one, the more knots are made. The coupled are stuck in their weaving, and strangling the ones without a string.
For years I have been cutting all the strings around me trying to stay alive in a world not made for me. I nourish and maintain lots and lots of emotionally intimate relationships with fellow musicians, artistic collaborators, 5 awesome roommates, my sister, my family, my piano students and their parents. Having a community gives me the strength to swim against the current of the mainstream.
Even still, some of my close friends have become close to me only after breaking up with their partner. and sometimes I will lose friends’ attention when they fall in love and suddenly have different priorities.
So, to survive I have lots of friends: best friends, almost-best friends, good friends, new friends...because, for some reason friends won’t always commit to eachother in the way romantic partners will. This is my deepest sadness in life. I am not sad because I’m pining for a romantic partner, but I get depressed that the world is set up in a way where most people want to prioritize their romantic ideal over their friends. So I just get used to different friends coming in and out of my life. Usually it’s the time that they are un-partnered that they suddenly become available. I find myself running around from just-singled to other just-singled friends to assuage my need for emotional intimacy.
This is maddening and depressing.
Why can’t friends commit to eachother?
Why can’t a community get married?
A good friend recently told me that I can’t expect her to act like she’s my life partner, that my expectations are too high.
I came away from that conversation with a stinging feeling of being too needy, too much of a burden on my friends, demanding too much.
If I had a romantic partner then I wouldn’t need so much from my friends.
But I don’t want to have to have a romantic partner in order to be prioritized.
I want to create a different world.
I am tired of my friends having a kid and then losing touch with everyone else.
Why have we learned to live inside such an insular and exclusive love?
Why can’t love open us to expanding our attention to the world around?
I want to knock down the fences between each nuclear family until everyone’s yards become one giant communal yard. We’ll turn it into a farm where we’ll all work and live together, honoring the reality of our interconnected lives.
What would a community in love look like?
What if we kept expanding our community so that even if we created our “own” children we could still feel a connection to the Palestinian children whose lives are lost to Israeli terrorism.
What if we made space to mourn the loss of the trans women that were murdered this year.
The choices we make everyday affect the people facing different forms of oppression.
What each of us pay attention to affects everyone not just our own life.
I would like to notice more, to prioritize a community, a movement--
a new world we can create together where every life is a significant other...
where Black lives matter--
hey new world,
let’s get married!
The wedding will be huge and spread over the earth.
Everyone will fall to their knees and say to another:
Everyone will fall to their knees and say to another:
you too
and you too
and you too
and you too….
until we have sworn our love
into every face in the world.
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