The Other Significant Others
tldr: We can organize our lives for co-evolution through friendship.
Also! Join me for an hour to *practice empathy on Friday and you can still sign up for Six Weeks of Meditation.
The Other Significant Others
Ok. Honestly. How many of you thought I was going to write about polyamory? It seems to be quite a thing these days!
But that’s not what I’m writing about.
I know a good number of people who are committed to polyamory. Are experimenting with polyamory or with other forms of open relationships. Some are very successful. Most are not. A topic for another day. Maybe.
Today I’m writing about friendship.
And about ways to grow our imagination beyond our atomized, hyper-individual selves. And beyond our narrow take of how a nuclear family should live.
I often say that one day I want to start a congregation. You know, like a church, mosque, synagogue or temple. I’m not talking about a building. But about a community. Families and friends that gather. Recurringly, consistently, week after week.
To nurture a relationship with the Ineffable Great Mystery.
To sing songs together and reflect on ancient stories.
To observe the cycles of the moon, the sun and the stars.
To connect with our ancestors so that we can be better for our descendants.
Not something that pretends to be totally new. But something that is steeped in tradition. In the wisdom of the ages. In the meaning of the songs that hold the human story together. The songs and stories that hold true through the millennia. Words from a time long before writing existed. Long before printing and the press could even be an idea.
In my dreams, I call it the “Congregation of Co-Evolution Through Friendship.” Because that is what is at the heart of this dream. A way to nurture our togetherness. A way to co-create a space of mutual aid and support in matters that are both spiritual and material.
There are other ways of being together
Ezra Klein interviewed Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others. I have not read the book. But I was struck by this podcast episode. Cohen illuminates all sorts of non-traditional friendships, living arrangements and family structures. And she shows us how the limits of our laws, of our civic imagination, actually hinder the possibility of people sorting ourselves into broader, more creative structures.
I want to be very careful here. After all, I tried to catch your attention by talking about polyamory. But that really isn’t what Cohen is talking about. Personally, I have a house that I own with my wife (who I’m absolutely crazy about). And this house is walking distance from the house I used to own with my ex-wife, now my co-parent.
Downstairs from us, we rent a 2nd unit to a large extended family of refugees from Afghanistan. They live with many more people, in the same amount of space as us. They are closer to humanity’s communal roots.
I devote my life to building community. Not just for me. But for others. I work to serve the emergence of true and lasting friendship among people. Friendships that will support their professional, personal and spiritual work. This is a most blessed vocation. And I will share some about how I came to it.
Our way is unusual. And it makes us lonely.
But first I want to remind us that ours is a strange society. A very rare culture. One in which the individual has been so terribly isolated that we now suffer a crisis of loneliness. We are richer. But we are sadder. More anxious and more depressed.
We are the logical conclusion to what Professor john powell calls: “the European enlight project of the isolated self.”
Esther Perel says that we are the first people to expect our life partner to fulfill the needs that a village used to fulfill. Is it a wonder that so many marriages cannot work? It is a task that could never be met!
The nuclear family as it is currently structured - isolated from community, and away from extended members of the clan - is a very recent phenomenon.
And it is produced by an economic system that wants to make sure everyone has their own car, their own washing machine and their own refrigerator. Shit. It wants us to “need” storage units. It is an economy that leads all the way to today. A day when each member of the family actually has their own individual screen. We don’t even watch tv together! We have our own customized experience of a decidedly digital world.
We are produced to be entities that consume. We are not grown to be humans who quest for meaning, nurture belonging and live authentic connection.
How I came to this obsession with friendship
I grew up in an intentional community. I always feel the need to clarify that this was not a commune. We did not all live together in the same place. We were not led by a cult leader.
It was a community of poor and working class Puerto Ricans across three contiguous cities. Held together by a shared religious ideal. By a covenant that was renewed year after year.
A covenant that said: this is what we believe. This is how we choose to live. We agree to be this way with each other. And we are going to bring up our kids this way.
I know community well. I experienced all the ways in which it can be a total mess. The shadow of fundamentalism. Life with the threat of exile. I am not pretending that the thing worked. And I am rabidly protective of my independence. I have no desire to re-experience what too often felt like bondage, instead of authentic belonging.
But I also experienced the good fruits of communal togetherness. I know what it was like to truly grow up with my peers. To have many elders care for our well being. To be part of something real, where we experienced ritual and connection. The ecstasy of collective effervescence. And aspired to meaning together.
Whatever the mistakes of “El Camino.” Yes. Our community was called: THE Way. It allowed me to come to know something that is both precious and ancient.
Which brings me back to my obsession with friendship
I was uprooted from my idyllic childhood in Puerto Rico when I was about to turn 12. I loved my island and I loved my life. I DID NOT want to leave. We left in order to be part of this religious experiment in community. On my last day at school, all the kids in my grade sang a friendship song as we all sobbed because I was leaving.
The song is still etched in my heart.
It was at church, while I was still grieving, that I saw biblical quote from the book of Sirach 6:14 -
Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter:
whoever finds one has found a treasure.
Faithful friends are beyond price;
no amount can balance their worth.
Faithful friends are life-saving medicine…
And I knew it to be true. I knew in my bones that friendship is at the very heart of the path of love.
We don’t live in a social structure that facilitates meaningful friendship. Our economic system depends on our separation. On each one of us buying our own thing. Not on sharing. But on accumulating.
Rhaina Cohen has done a beautiful job of shining a light on those of us who are trying something different. She quotes someone who tells her they are well aware of the headaches of community and living together. They are just making the conscious choice to deal with the headaches of community, instead of the heart aches of living alone.
Guess which of the choices is more likely to kill you? The data on loneliness is in. And it’s worse for you than smoking.
So I wanted to highlight the episode. Invite you to listen to it. And help us grow our imaginations about how to live our lives with others.
I also want to stress that the best way to grow and learn, the best way to become better humans, is by doing it together. In the beauty and messiness of real relationship.
We are meant to have teachers and elders. We are supposed to have peers who are learning the way with us. And we should have mentees, people who want to learn what we are learning. A 4th grader can teach a 2nd grader. These three-way connections provide the optimal conditions for our growth.
It is our time to conspire. To create the best conditions for co-evolution through friendship. So that we can grow. And so that we can take care of each other as the going continues to get rough.
I’ve kept collecting your names as you write me back and say, “me! Gibrán, I too want to be a part of something like this”. Don’t stop. Write me now. Write me again. Give me some ideas for our coming together, and experimenting with better ways of being-with.
If I had the wealth, I would drop half of my work, gather you, and together build this dream that our hearts are longing for. That our ancestors teach us should be so.
*I found this quote relevant to the empathy practice we are doing on Friday, emphasis added:
“My work concerned the back story of the 2003 invasion, largely from the Iraqi leader’s perspective. Yet I could not help reflecting on how U.S. decision makers might have done better and what lessons their failures might hold today.
Mr. Hussein was not the first mass killer I had written about in depth, but I was reminded about how difficult and uncomfortable it can be to fully empathize with someone who acts and thinks in ways you find appalling.
Yet it is all but impossible to understand or influence other people without suspending judgment and seeking to see the world from behind their eyes. As a writer, I had the means to humanize Mr. Hussein without sanitizing him. I could also discern how hard it would be for an elected American president to attempt this.”
-Steve Coll, author of “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” writing in the New York Times