One Utah

I’m thinking about matters of sexuality this week.  Yesterday I pondered American attitudes about nudity, today, connected to that, I’m thinking about intimacy, and of course, family.

For obvious reasons, most people think sexual intercourse should include emotional intimacy (at least they seem to).  Objections to one night stands as often as not rests on the lack of a relationship context for the sex, rather than the sex itself.  In this moral construct, the relationship legitimizes sexual intimacy.  The idea of waiting until marriage to have sex rests on the notion that sexual intimacy is the highest form of intimacy and should be preserved for committed, heterosexual, two person, monogamous relationships.  But, that assumptions begs the question of what constitutes a family and why exactly does marriage legitimize sexual intimacy?

Polyamorous families challenge the core notion that sexual intimacy can and should be preserved for two person relationships.  I don’t understand the inner workings of poly families, but the organizing ideas make sense to me -  healthy relationships can include more than two persons and sexual exclusivity within the relationship is important - whether that be three people or seven - and, most importantly, honesty is a must for relationships.  Years ago, gay writers talked about the banyan tree model of relationships - many people, connected in a variety of ways in which a close, even family relationship, is not limited to two sexually intimate partners.  A household might include two men in a relationship, former partner(s) of one or both men and those persons current partners, creating an interlocking, interwoven set of connections within which intimacy, caring and nurturing are expressed separately from sexual intimacy.  The model, it seems to me, is more consistent with the traditional family living arrangement of an extended family under one roof than the nuclear family isolated in its suburban McMansion.

Another model of relationship is the Friends model - in which one’s extended family of choice may include current lovers or spouses, but which also includes close friends with whom one’s relationship is consistent with the core values of a family - that is caring for, nurturing, and loving one another.  In this model, intimacy crosses relationship boundaries - to continue the example, in Friends, it was always clear that the various characters interacted with one another within the context of the relationship between the six of them.  Unlike the nuclear family, this family of six adults are available for one another and for their children, rather than support and love being available only from one’s spouse.

Another cogent example of a pop culture family is the foursome from I Love Lucy - Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel were by almost any standard a family.  The friendship, within the confines of the social conventions of the 50s, was largely confined to gender lines - Ricky and Fred, Lucy and Ethel, but the characters had a level of intimacy built through shared experiences that can, to my mind, only be understood as a family connection.

Before any one says it - yes, these are pop culture examples but I’ve chosen them for the simple reason that many people I know thrive within similar families.  I know single parents, gay men and lesbian women whose circle of friends nurtures them, accepts them, supports them - functions like a family - far more than their biological families.  This circle of friends is their family - they are the people with whom they socialize, celebrate birthdays and holidays, share vacations and to whom they turn in bad times.  How can anyone say that is not the experience of family?

Within many communities in the US, extended family is considered the norm, the nuclear family isolated in its home an aberration.  When the cliche “It’s a take a village” is uttered, it means literally that successful families include more than mom, dad, kids and dog.  A successful family is one that functions - caring for its members, nurturing them, providing them with an emotionally and a safe space (physically and emotionally) in which to thrive - a space which may or may not shared living space.  The autobiographical book The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautziz begins with a description of her extended family’s living arrangement in their home in Vilna in 1939.  Her family implicitly included aunts, uncles, cousins, grand parents, great parents, great uncles and so on in a web of interdependence.  Such a family structure presumes that a person needs family other than parents to support, love and cherish them. 

Such long term sustaining and sustained families challenge the notion of the nuclear family as the ultimate expression of human relationship.  By defining family within the most limited biological terms - man, woman, offspring - our culture has unintentionally stunted the emotional possibilities of human relationships. 

So these types of ongoing relationships are places in which intimacy can be fully experienced - intimacy in some sense seems to me to be the experience of knowing and being known for who one honestly is, the experience of being vulnerable with others and having others be vulnerable with one’s self.  Of course, intimacy is not experienced solely within the context of family relationships.

Our Whole Lives, especially for adolescents, emphasizes the concept of levels of intimacy - the idea that intimate behaviors in which we engage occur along a continuum, and that intimacy is experienced in different ways with each behavior.  Going to a movie or going clothes shopping can be seen as behaviors which create intimacy between persons.  Our Whole Lives facilitators hope participants take away the lesson that intimacy is emotional and physical and spiritual and that physical intimacy does not require sexual intercourse - or even behaviors we typically consider sexual.  Exercising together, as a couple, can build physical and emotional intimacy.  Intimacy can involve sexual intercourse but does not need to.

Sexual intercourse can and frequently is shared between persons with no other relationship - one night stands and even anonymous sex can be experiences of profound intimacy.  It’s always dicey discussing such things, but one night stands do not of necessity include meeting someone in a bar, getting hammered and going home and having wild crazy sex, waking up in the a.m. and saying, “So, uh, what was your name?”  I think I’ve shared this story before, but years ago at the Gay Men’s Health Summit, a man told a story of an amazing one night stand in which he and the man he was with were able to be fully present to one another, to treat one another with respect and caring.  In other words, a mutually agreeable and agreeably mutual experience.  Intimacy does not occur solely within relationships, either, though I suspect experiencing intimacy outside of existing relationships is rare.

Within the nuclear family, husbands and wives are expected to receive their primary emotional connection from one another; children receive almost all their nurturing from the parents.  When the family is overextended, they must pay caregivers to step in and pick up the slack.  And nuclear families are grotesquely overextended.  Various models of living - for instance Wasatch Co-Housing - attempt to create extended family networks within communities.  Within extended families, caring and nurturing duties are shared more widely, allowing members to form strong relationships with more people.  In simple terms, the nuclear family model has too little space - if I have a fight with my spouse, I don’t have other people to whom I can turn, nor does my spouse.  As parents, we must be both caregivers and disciplinarians simultaneously, a balancing act that few people can truly sustain.  Extended families and supportive communities provide opportunities for intimacy and caring, with room to move within the community.

All of these ideas and experiences add up to a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts.  Human beings thrive when they live in settings in which they experience physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy.  Some individuals thrive within the confines of the nuclear family, I believe most people do better within an extended family - whether a biological family or a family of choice.  Having a history of shared experiences builds closeness between persons, which can be succesfully nurtured if we are willing, or ideally, not ideologically blinded to the idea that family can be more than the nuclear family and that sexuality need not be the sole determinant of intimacy.

crossposted at utahucc.org

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Sex, Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.