a sexual liaison between two people, usually of a duration longer than one night.
In its ideal form, a relationship became a long-term, committed partnership, or marriage, that lasted until death did the couple part. At its worst, a relationship was either a short-term, misguided disaster, or a long-term, dysfunctional, waking nightmare. Neither of these worst-case scenarios appealed to me. But for a long time, as a child, I wasn't thinking about that. What was I thinking about?
I was thinking about my mother. I was thinking about being a bird in the sky. I was thinking about my father, my grandma, my baby brother. I was playing in the sandbox. "I wish I were a bird," I would tell my mother. And then: "When I grow up, we'll get married, right?"
I had no idea what that meant, but I did know the feeling of relationship. It was what made me want to play. It was family, it was home, it was friends. It was exploring in the backyard, in the neighborhood, in the woods, at the lake. It was sledding in the snow and splashing in the water. It was looking at the moon and imagining going there, as those astronauts did. Eventually, it was tossing around a baseball, basketball, or frisbee, or kicking a big crabsoccer ball. It was learning magic tricks, drawing pictures, building an art-easel robot that squirted baby powder out of its belly button. It was walking to school, learning to ride a bike, swinging on the swingset during recess. It was avoiding the cootie mats just inside the school building entrances, and not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk that could also give you cooties. It was pollywogs, soap bubbles, a friend's cat, and dragonflies. It was everything.
I liked someone in my class especially well. I'll call her Anna. Anna and I were good friends in first grade. Once Anna asked me to marry her--but two other rival girls were asking the same thing at the same time. Feeling put upon, I said, "I'm not going to marry any of you"--but with Anna, I didn't mean it. I secretly believed that Anna and I were destined for each other--it was only a matter of time. We just couldn't be married yet, being barely seven years old.
Over time, Anna became my imaginary, platonic soul mate. (The two of us never talked after first grade--I was too intimidated by Anna's perfection, and just waiting for the right moment, probably when we were both grown up, to raise the question of marriage again). Starting in fourth grade and continuing through high school, my friends pursued other potential mates, but I was loyal to Anna--to that feeling I got when I thought about her. Funnily enough, that feeling was not unlike the feeling I had as a young child when everything was right with the world. It was an elevated state of aliveness. It made me feel good. It was all I ever wanted in a relationship. It connected me with everything.
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The tale of my romantic adventures over the succeeding years might bore the average reader to tears, so sparse would be the juicy bits (no, I never did hook up with Anna). I did develop a real, platonic relationship (this one involving extensive conversation, instead of none) before I left high school--but after my "new Anna" had several college-induced mental breakdowns and became less available as a friend, I learned that I needed to fend for myself again.
In retrospect, the most difficult ending of a relationship I ever experienced occurred when, propelled by my educational course, I had to leave my home and my family. No romantic disappointment ever compared to the distress--almost unidentifiable at the time, because I'd never experienced it before--of that separation from my familiar environment, from everyone and just about everything with which I'd developed relationship for my first eighteen years, and which I'd come to take for granted.
Difficult as it was, that divorce proved essential to my growth into adulthood. Rebuilding a sense of self adequately supported by my surroundings took years, and engaged me consciously in that process of developing relationships that had occurred only unconsciously before. But romantic relationships played a very small part in that rebuilding.
Far more important was just about everything else with which I might have a relationship.
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I never have married. I'm not sure how I feel about relationship, in the usual sense. But if asked what relationships have made my life richer, I have no trouble jotting down a long list of "significant others":
land
work
garden
plants
parents
grandparents
community
self
rocks
music
words
sun
rain
water
birds
perfection
imperfection
food
the living earth
solitude
crowds
insects
slugs
clothes
bicycles
books
density
time
the future
body
air
sky
...
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If I have ever been married, it has been to my natural surroundings, the people in my life, my vocation, and a certain feeling of goodness and peace (both inner and outer) not easily captured on the evening news (at least I don't think it's found there--I haven't watched television in many years). I have a special fondness for communication, physical activity, and being outside for at least part of every day. "World, how do I love you?" In fact, there are many ways...
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Having mated myself (for shorter or longer periods) to my place in the world, to a larger network of friends, and eventually to intentional community as a way of life, I have nevertheless felt the pull of intimate relationships more than once. But after traveling to the East Coast to return a visit from a romantic partner, I discovered that although the grass had momentarily appeared greener there, it wasn't actually. Here's what I wrote to my home community at Lost Valley, half-way into a three-week adventure that eventually led to my return to unfettered bachelorhood:
Hi everyone,
I'm writing this from an adult singing camp that Tina and I are attending.
I've thought of you all often. Being with Tina here is very different from being with her there. I am trying to be present and appreciate what each day brings here, but I miss being there. I write this as I gaze out over the Green Mountains from a grassy knoll--I should count my blessings, and I'm trying to. I'm enjoying getting to know a few participants in the singing camp a little, and I also like Tina's children and some other people I've met, but I feel the lack of my "family" (Eugene area and Lost Valley) very keenly. I do feel that an intimate relationship bears too heavy a burden when it is not part of a larger community in which intimacy takes many different forms, especially emotional.
Feelings that I would be able to clear up in a matter of minutes there can sometimes affect me for hours here, and there is a general sense of unease that I have sometimes had that I know would be taken away by getting my hands in the soil there with a group of people, or having a good personal conversation with someone other than Tina, or being able to get work accomplished more easily, or being in a well-being meeting. And yet, though there are times now when I feel very connected with Tina, and other times when I'm feeling distant, I know I will miss our connection when I am back there and she is not. So it looks as if I have some things to work through no matter where I am.
I'm sure I will look back and see this as a necessary step toward whatever comes next in my personal development. But Lost Valley and Oregon definitely seem like home, and this definitely seems like an adventure, one that is probably necessary, one that I am growing from, but one I need to return from as well. What the next stage will be, I don't know--when Tina and family visit next month, hopefully more will become clear. And we'll be talking about this all during the next week-and-a-half too.
So please keep me in your good thoughts, as you are in mine. There's a lot that I appreciate when I'm there, and almost take for granted--especially the constant availability of emotional support and feedback, as well as easy access to endless worthwhile work--that does not automatically exist elsewhere. People out here (read: the USA) can get locked in to inexpression and hardness pretty easily, and most spend more time in their cars than in their gardens or walking on the ground. Vermont is nice, but (like Oregon) it's a place where it still takes work to find community and connection to the land. Anyway, I'm having a good time, but it's not utopia or ecotopia, even on a small scale, out here--that would take a long time to establish.
I may see my brother in the coming week or so--am looking forward to that.
Well, take care, and I'll see you all in ten days or so,
Love, Chris
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I am an incurable romantic, but I keep it under control. I know that things are not always what they seem, and that every sperm does not need a first name or even the chance of getting one. In the broadest sense, everything is sexual (something I learned, in part, through sex). But my closest connections have not been literally sexual.
My limited experience of physical sex has been best when it has led me to spiritual insights and true connection (as in my first experience, when I saw that everything in the beautiful landscape around me was expressing its sexual nature); otherwise, I've gotten bored. For me, having "sex" is not what is most important. Unless it connects me to the heart of the universe, it's definitely less desirable than a walk in the woods, a good conversation, a simple smile--any of which can connect me in that way.
I am in some senses an oddball, but I know it and like it. And I'm not absolutely closed to breaking my usual de facto celibacy (in case you were wondering--er, I mean, in case you, not you, were wondering). I prefer long life and delayed gratification to premature sexual exhaustion. If something is right, it will happen. But ultimately, "having sex" appeals to me only as part of a process, not as a goal.
There's no accounting for taste.
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I have never written this letter, but I could have (with only minor variations) several times:
Dear Emily,
As you know, I have loved your music [writing, intelligence, way of being ...] ever since we first met. Thinking about you makes me glad to be alive. When you talk to me, when we interact in any way--even when you are just you, not even thinking about me at all--I am happy. You didn't volunteer to be a messenger from the Great Cosmic Mother, the Universe, or the Spirit which Moves in All Things. You are just being you. I like living in the same world as you. If you leave before I do, I will cry many tears.
I project onto you everything I love about life; I forgive your failings; I see and appreciate the things that you do not see or appreciate in yourself. I am the voice of your best self-image, your wholeness, crying out to be recognized. And, by a strange circular process, you are that for me, too. I put you on a pedestal because I need to love myself, but cannot bring myself to. I can wax poetic about you, but not about me; feel warm, loving, and awed by infinity and mystery when I contemplate you, but judge my own self with coldness, criticism, and jaded prejudice.
Deep down, I know it's my own wholeness you're invoking. I know that if you read this, you'll know that I know (that you know that I know) that this is not about you, and it's not about me...
...except for the fact that we're all infinite beings, enveloped in mystery and love, with certain flaws and limitations that can prevent us from seeing how amazing the world is--how amazing we each are, as part of it. We're not separate.
Relationship? That's what it all is. It takes as many different forms as there are moments in a day. It's all one, and it's always changing, but what doesn't change is the universal energy that holds us and expresses itself through you, me, and every being and thing we know and don't know.
By the way, please don't be freaked out by this letter. I'm not interested in romance unless it involves all of creation.
Love, Chris
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Ultimately, no relationship really ends. Nothing, living or dead, is not in relationship. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about death, but when I do, death does not seem like an ending or a severance to me.
When I die, and become a composting contributor to the web of life, I want to be buried in soil, not in an impenetrable casket. Just a teaspoon of healthy soil contains 600 million to 1 billion beneficial bacteria. Especially on those slow, rainy days, they'll provide plenty of company as I rot. If I have any regrets about how celibate I was when alive, I expect they'll even nibble away at those too. If I usually don't need sex to make me feel not-separate in life, I certainly won't in death.
By the time I'm decomposed, I hope, our society will recognize "relationship" for what it truly is: something much more than a one-life stand.
Chris Roth edits Talking Leaves, coordinates the organic gardening program at Lost Valley Educational Center, enjoys contra-dancing, loves to run or bicycle in the woods, and is not interested in romance unless it involves all of creation (or at least one other person besides himself). He welcomes critical comments on this story, including alternative interpretations of what is really going on with its protagonist. Contact him at [email protected]
©2000* Talking Leaves
Winter 2001
Volume 10, Number 3
Relationship