IV Secular Gender

Yoko Ono has become a living metaphor for the girl who destroys a male friendship. A large portion of Beatles fans almost form a political faction in this view on her effect on the breakup of the super-group. Did she put a spell on John Lennon that drew him away from the intimate artistic relationship he had with George, Ringo, and especially Paul? Or was it simply a perfect segue for him out of an already dying partnership? Is there such a thing as cheating on a platonic friend?

In novelist Michael Chabon's first non-fiction collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, he asks these questions in the chapter "The Ghost of Irene Adler." It begins with an encounter he once had with a woman who had read one of his short stories, called "Millionaires." The main theme was of two young, successful men who could share everything except for a female friend (Irene). As he explains, his intended moral was that love is not something which can be contained, owned, or valued in the same way as every other product of financial success. Just like an identity or life, love cannot be put into concrete terms, neither created nor preserved. But "Alexis from Texas," the reader, managed throw the author off balance in concluding, "Everybody knows guys like that. Of course, it's all abut them really being in love with eachother." Could the real moral of his story actually be that jealousy is a sign of love? Chabon launches into self-dialogue, analyzing the meaning of a story he wrote about a situation he experienced himself, one of which he thought he had already extracted of all its meaning. He eventually brings it around to the fact that much or all the problems of understanding in the world are a result of lacking imagination.

When the Woman enters the life of the Holmes to whom you have always served as Watson, and vice versa, it's not simply that you can't or won't imagine what he sees in her. It's that you aren't meant to understand...That's what gives the process of losing a friendship over a woman such a lasting sense of distress and confusion: The loss obliges you to confront the fundamental mystery of another man, one whom you believed you knew as well a you knew yourself. But there is something in the guy, something crucial and irreducible, that you do not understand at all, and She is the proof...in turn, this leads you to question everything you ever thought you knew, not only about him but about the man you thought you knew as well as you knew your best friend—yourself (p109).

And here was the ghost of this feeling coming back through a simple comment from a reader with only a different perspective. He ends the chapter in saying:

What became of that friendship is what became of your heart in love: You lost it...That's what makes her the Woman; that's what makes the keeping of an old friend through all the vicissitudes of love and fortune such a rare and wonderful or an empty and terrible thing. Either you and your old friend encountered the black box at each other's core, with its scatter of mystery particles on which the invisible forces of love and fate operate, and by some miraculous luck, you imagined or muddled your way past, beyond, or around that mystery; or, tragically, you were never obliged to encounter it at all.

His revisited moral here being that a friendship is true for the same reasons romantic love can be. It is an intimate, shared subjectivity that can only be shared with both eyes on the same horizon. Without it being tested, the two can never be fully assured or move any deeper in sharing that vision. And when one changes direction and the other fails to follow, the love that was there is left to tragic mystery whether one of them has poor taste or imagination.

I was once in this situation with my best friends, who didn't approve of me having a relationship with a girl I met online. Looking back, I think Chabon was right. I never fully agreed with their gut reactions, even after the puppy love was gone, and since then my trajectory has strayed in a similar direction. Whatever you call it, the feelings were mine; they were honest even if naive. But is any relationship ever a clearly rational decision, whether in person or online? I still defend the concept of web dating, even though I haven't pursued it since then. Sure, you can't physically communicate (in whatever ways) with them, or know they are truly like in person until a meeting is set up, but I still cherish the idea of people having a chance to delve into intimate aspects of each other that otherwise may have never surfaced. Think of the boost to the imagination, the expansion of the heart that would take place when a young man would be sent off to war. He and his sweetheart he left behind would be forced to write letters to each other, pouring out their affections and daily thoughts through a new medium, ending up in a pile of memories for both so long as he survives. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I would say it also deepens the extent one can imagine loving anything.

The point I am trying to make relates to my primary focus of study, religion. It doesn’t have to be a girl or boy that comes between friends; it can be any number of factors in taste. The phenomenon of estrangement takes many forms, sometimes even when a friend develops either stronger religiosity than his friends or cancels his subscription a belief system they have. Regardless of established religions, I see anything from being a Star “Trekkie” to a homophobe as a symptom of the same phenomena of controversy over values relating back to the self. What are we to do when our identity is threatened by opposing views we are not ready to face? Are there many paths up the mountain, or is pluralism a luxury society may never be able to afford?

Emile Durkheim is credited with first theorizing about social construction, but Peter Berger perhaps articulates it best in his work. In The Sacred Canopy, he discusses the origins of religion as a reaction to what he calls anomy, a personal crisis both felt by the individual and society collectively in the absence of a domesticated environment. Due to the fact that our adaptations have not dictated a specific role for us to play in the world (i.e. the lack of free will and subsequent responsibility a shark has), we must invent society and our roles in it so that we might have meaning and a direction for our efforts. Once we have objectified these roles and some ground rules (or “values”), that is theoretically labeled nomos. I see this concept as extending into all aspects of human life—that it even comes down to relationships. Little assurances (“Tell me you love me”) are legitimations of that nomos, our sense of order, of our sense of reality as the dreams we hope and strive to objectify and experience viscerally.

After internet dating (we did talk on the phone too!), my first real girlfriend forced me to face that gap between individual nomoi to such an extent that I credit it as the reason I chose to study religion in college. She didn’t force or expect me to do anything, but the relationship faced me with so much contrast to the previous that I had to figure things out for my own sake. In fact, the lack of expectations, the relative detachment is why it caused so much trouble for me. That aura of “puppy love,” (as those reinforcing their identity as mature adults like to patronizingly say) dissipated, the bubble never felt fully formed to even have the potential of bursting. One night, halfway through our year-long relationship, she casually told me she considered herself bisexual. It probably would not have bothered me very much if this had been a planned admission between the two of us, but it was thrown at me out of the blue, off the cuff, after a long night of drinking, without eye contact, in separate rows of car seating, while my other friend was driving us home. There was no remorse, no cheating to admit of, but also no reason I could see for her to have hidden this about herself until now, in this way.

We are still close, if not best friends to this day, and I never imagined love could take the complex form it has for me in this friendship. Both of us know on some level that the feeling is mutual, but the way it is mutual continues to baffle me. We argued about things like puppy love and detached/mature love in everything from taste in music to the friends we surround ourselves with. Mainly the disagreements were about things like either plunging deep into the rabbit hole of a favorite band/friendship, or priding oneself on having an eclectic taste. In a way that seems to both contradict and verify Chabon’s point, I feel like our friendship has grown stronger by trying to bridge that gap of understanding or sharing each other’s experiences, yet we still have not reconciled or made sense of the other’s taste and identity. It’s almost as if that crisis of separation, the ghost of Irene Adler which came between us, stirred sympathy on both sides so that our failure to solve that test of our commonality only strengthened some sort of intangible bond.

Each encounter we have with something that is foreign to our world is an implied challenge to the validity of that world. We may choose to “live and let live,” but I see relativism as something that cannot be taken as an end in itself. The fact that time, beauty, beliefs, and moral proscriptions are relative to the context or person does not necessitate that it be turned into a social creed. Similarly, we all know that death is an inevitable fact of life, but that does not mean we might as well commit suicide once we discover this. We are here and lucky to be here, to be alive, to have briefly stumbled into existence for a short while. It’s as if each of us is a mistake, a whim similar to “puppy love” that nature gets over with sooner or later. Secularism and relativism are branches of the same sense of objective detachment required to safely regulate the paths of different identities or beliefs. But to take on relativism as a motto is to fail in acknowledging what it is that is relative in the first place, to forget that we have checks and balances in society to ensure that someone’s bubble isn’t popping someone else’s—not to eliminate the natural tendency for people to believe in something.

The bit of meaning I am trying to squeeze out here is that our identities apply to everything we do. Even if we take on the task of telling homophobes they are wrong to judge, we are also taking on the act of judging. The shift into postmodernism has, I think in many minds, created a climate of paranoid aversion to any situation that might lead to someone giving them a Nuremburg trial. Nobody wants to be pointed out as being or supporting “the Man.” Don’t worry, I have homosexual friends, and I won’t even attempt to delve into interpreting or pinning down a label on my own sexuality for you right now, but I see the differences that surround us as part of such a vast mosaic that it is better to feel our way through, instead of separating and inventing justifications for the way other people feel. I don’t know how the reader feels, but can only express my feelings as they are informed by how other people express theirs to me. We can only truly celebrate diversity by being our diverse selves, not by fetishizing other cultures or ways of being and renouncing our own. To love everyone, as they say, is to love no one in any true sense of the word, but we can still choose to include the rest of the world in the background of the picture, so to speak. This is a lesson in accepting diversity without getting lost in it. We do not have to give equal devotion of energies and affection to everyone we encounter, but we can still respect them and keep in mind that they are someone else’s son, daughter, or lover—that our identity is indeed a choice as everyone else’s is, and if someone has chosen a certain path, they have their own reasons just as you do. And you can show your love by trying to meet them in the middle, and/or respecting their choices as if they were an alternate incarnation of yourself.