Tag Archives: Friendship

Catching up with Bethany Patchin

Posted on by

Saturday’s “Beliefs” section in the New York Times features a story on Bethany Patchin, a wonderful friend of mine from Nashville.

As the Times story relates, Bethany began her writing career as a fierce but winsome teenage advocate for conservative Christian sexual values. Her first piece (at Boundless, the youth website for Focus on the Family), was a proud promise that she intended to save her virgin lips for her wedding day. One young man was so impressed with that article he started writing to her — and in time, became both the fortunate recipient of her first kiss and, not at all coincidentally, her husband.

Bethany and Sam Torode had four children and a book: Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception. Young, attractive, articulate and counter-cultural, the Torodes found themselves darlings of the religious right, which is how I first heard about them. Their book came out when I was in the brief throes of a flirtation with evangelicalism, and my rave review of Open Embrace represents a set of views that I’ve long since repudiated. (The internet preserves our intellectual embarrassments forever. It’s much worse than a topless picture in a bathroom mirror.)

After I checked out Open Embrace, I started reading her earlier work, and was so impressed (but not entirely convinced) by Bethany’s writing that I started assigning some of her Boundless pieces in my women’s studies class. Her work was grist for some tremendous discussions and debates.

Bethany and I started corresponding in late 2002. Though she’s fourteen years my junior, she was one of inspirations to start blogging, and the first person to whom I sent a draft of an article for a pre-pitch review. We stayed in touch for the next several years, even as we each started taking separate paths away from evangelical positions on faith and sexuality. We wrote more frequently as her marriage to Sam came to an end. Where she had once given me advice about books and articles, I was able to return the kindness about divorce and related topics.

I count Bethany as one of my favorite people in the whole world whom I’ve never met in real life. The same web that archives our indiscretions for posterity gives us the opportunity to make and sustain true friendship across vast distances. That’s a happy thing.

She’s got a powerful story to tell. (Agents and editors, take note.) And do check out the Times piece.

When Harry Was Wrong: Desire and Non-Sexual Friendship

Posted on by
4

We’re home from a brief trip up to Northern California for the Fourth of July festivities with family. A happy time for all, including for Heloise, who has decided she loves the family’s “safe and sane” fireworks.

My Tuesday column at Good Men Project went up this morning. It riffs on the famed exchange in When Harry Met Sally about the possibilities of male-female nonsexual friendship: Harry Was Wrong: Lust Doesn’t Have to Ruin a Platonic Friendship. Excerpt:

We assume that male sexual desire is so powerful that it overrides everything else, including friendship. One of our great myths about men is that lust invariably cancels out empathy. Call it the sexual equivalent of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time: Harry, Sally, and too many of the rest of us were raised to believe that men can’t experience lust and practice non-sexual friendship simultaneously.

The truth is that men and women alike are capable of being platonic friends with someone to whom they are powerfully attracted. That’s true regardless of the reasons why someone can’t act on his or her desires. Perhaps it’s because the attraction is one-sided, or perhaps it’s because one or both of the friends are in monogamous relationships with other people. Sometimes the attraction is openly acknowledged, more often it’s something of which both are aware but about which there isn’t necessarily much need to speak.

There are a couple of keys to making a platonic friendship work despite the presence of sexual attraction. First off, it helps to demythologize sexual desire. Too many of us speak about attraction as if it were an irresistible and destructive force, like a tornado or a tsunami. If you’ve genuinely fallen in love with a buddy who considers you “just” a friend, that’s one thing. But if all that’s happened is that you find yourself sexually attracted to someone who isn’t attracted to you (or isn’t your significant other), it’s worth saying so what? We’re hardwired to be sexual creatures. But we’re also equipped with the ability to “override” those desires for a host of other reasons—including preserving friendship.

Read the whole thing.

If you like you can also read it at The Frisky.

Elsewhere, I’m interviewed — along with my old friend and foil Glenn Sacks — in this piece for Good Magazine on the marketing of a male contraceptive.

My Other Brother

Posted on by

My weekly column at the Good Men Project came as the site focuses on gay men (in honor of Pride month.) My piece, Our Other Brothers: Gay and Straight Men as Friends, focuses on male friendship across the boundaries of sexual identity. Excerpt:

There seem to be two predictable obstacles to friendship between gay and straight men. First, of course, is the “sex thing.” Many straight guys worry that their gay friends are or might be sexually attracted to them. My friend Cole is straight, and often played basketball with a group of buddies, of whom two were gay. They changed and showered in the same locker room after their games. Cole often wondered how his gay buddies handled seeing so many naked men. “I know if I were in the women’s locker, seeing a lot of good-looking women naked, I’d be turned on. I figured it had to the same for gay guys, and the thought creeped me out.”

But as Cole found out when he finally asked, most gay men in our culture grow up surrounded by naked male bodies. They tend to learn to separate nudity from sexuality in a way that straight men don’t. (Ask anyone who grew up in a nudist family, and they’ll tell you the same thing.) Though some gay men are attracted to their straight friends, many aren’t. And those that are are usually very good at keeping that attraction boxed away so that it cannot hurt the friendship.

Gay men have their own fears about straight men. Boys who come out as gay—or are suspected of being gay—are often mercilessly tormented, with the worst of the abuse coming from heterosexual guys. Because American culture sets up masculinity and homosexuality as polar opposites, boys who want to prove their manhood must reject the “faggot” label and all that comes with it. That rejection often shows up in verbal and physical violence against anyone suspected of being gay.

Read the whole thing.

The witness v. the rescuer

Posted on by

One of the questions I get frequently from young people who have started to think differently about their bodies and their lives is “How can I help my friend (sibling, parent, lover, etc.) who is still really hurting?” High school and college-aged students all have friends who are in unhealthy relationships, struggling with depression or addictions, fighting a dreadful eating disorder. When these young people get inspired by a class or a book, when they begin their own journey of transformation, they want to be evangelicals for the cause. Many have missionary hearts, longing to spread the good news of self-acceptance and empowerment far and wide. I encourage this in my classes, often using the term “Great Commission” to refer not to winning the world for Christ, but to living out one’s egalitarian and inclusive values in a way that inspires others.

But as we all find sooner or later (usually sooner), there are friends and loved ones who don’t want to hear what we have to say. Or perhaps they do want to hear it, but they lack the courage (or more likely, the resources) to extricate themselves from the painful circumstances that they’re in. Preaching at someone who’s “stuck” doesn’t do a lot of good — indeed, it tends to be counterproductive. Rather, we help best through two things: being a role model for the kind of change we want to see, and by accepting a role as a witness rather than a rescuer. The first of these is fairly universal advice, though it bears repeating. The second point is equally important, however.

Most of us have a hard time figuring out who we are and who we aren’t capable of helping. We raise our daughters to be veritable Florence Nightingales, caring for their dollies and, later, their pets. Less overtly, we raise many of our sons to be “knights in shining armor” who can rescue damsels in distress. This has some stereotypical manifestations: the fourteen year-old girl who becomes involved in the animal rights movement and her twin brother who plays “Call of Duty” all day long are both following a very old and gendered script that plays on this tremendous desire to rescue, to save, to be a hero. (I can’t get over the title “Call of Duty” for a video game. Don’t video games call people away from their duties? Isn’t it delightful to have recreation recast as responsibility?)

It’s true that the animals of the world need our help, as do many others. But when faced with the sheer overwhelm of seemingly intractable social problems, a lot of young people — especially but not exclusively women — start to shift that desire to rescue towards something, or someone, more immediate. Trying to change a friend or a boyfriend seems to have a greater chance of success, they imagine. (The reverse is actually true. It’s easier to get legislation passed than it is to solve another adult’s problems for them.) This isn’t just the root of the “bad boy” or “manic pixie girl” syndromes so well known in our culture — it’s the source of tremendous frustration and pain in a wide variety of relationships.

You can’t be an advocate for real change if you have a messiah complex. Too often, the rescuer rescues less out of altruism and more out of a frantic desire to feel worthy. The person you’re trying to save almost always catches on to this, and becomes resentful. The rescuer then charges ingratitude, and either moves on to a more promising target or chooses to suffer in wasted and tiresome martyrdom. This is not activism — this is parasitism masquerading as love.

The alternative, of course, is to embrace the role of the witness. The witness gives information; the witness offers support, but the witness doesn’t try to do for another what that other must do for herself or himself. The witness doesn’t lead the proverbial horse to water, but notes that if the horse is feeling thirsty, a nearby trough is available. The witness may even amble over to the trough alongside the horse, but won’t beg the horse to dip its head into the water. A witness owns his or her own decision to stay and participate in another person’s life. A witness doesn’t buy the flattering line that he or she is all that stands between a loved one and oblivion. But he or she is there, watching, ready to talk — or to point the way when asked.

I challenge my students to ask themselves: am I a rescuer or a witness? Am I modeling in my own life what I want for others, or am I distracting myself from my own pain by focusing on someone who seems even worse off than me? To be part of the solution, rather than just a different manifestation of the problem, requires that we ask and answer these questions.

Losing Cyril: politics, abortion, Dr. Tiller, and saying goodbye to a friend

Posted on by

My friend “Cyril” and I are no longer speaking. After more than a decade of friendship, we stopped talking recently. We didn’t get too busy for each other; we didn’t have a misunderstanding. We stopped talking because of abortion and sexual ethics.

Cyril and I met at a time when I was first coming back to Christ at the very end of the 1990s. Infatuated with progressive evangelicalism, I found a natural ally in Cyril, who was slightly to my right but still deeply committed to social justice. For years, we met for breakfast to talk theology and politics — and to talk intimately about our personal lives. He was the first person I told when I started dating Eira. Cyril and I drove half-way across the country together many years ago — to his wedding. We ran together, lifted weights together. For the better part of a decade, Cyril was my best male friend.

In 2004, when I left the Mennonite Church, I also abandoned the “seamless garment” position on the life issues I had taken since my conversion. A staunch pro-choice advocate from the cradle, a fourth-generation Planned Parenthood supporter (my great-grandparents gave money to that fine organization back when it was still the Birth Control League), I briefly turned in my religious enthusiasm towards an anti-abortion position. It was always nuanced; I never favored making abortion illegal, but did regard the termination of pregnancy as deeply tragic and problematic. I soon came back to the more emphatically pro-choice position, and that caused tension with Cyril.

We agreed to disagree about abortion, about gay marriage (he favored civil unions only), and about pre-marital sex. We were so fond of each other, and found each other’s company so refreshing, that we made our friendship work despite those differences. As I moved back to the left and he skewed more and more to the right, we each remained the other’s loyal interlocutor, debating enthusiastically over vegetarian burritos and guacamole each week at our favorite hole-in-the-wall.

But then came my post on Dr. Tiller’s assassination last year: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”: of a doctor, an usher, and the answerer of a call. Writing in explicitly Christian language, I compared the martyred doctor to the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cyril and I had read Bonhoeffer together and discussed his influence. For a staunch pro-lifer like my friend, the post (every word of which I continue to stand behind) created deep cognitive dissonance. Cyril loved me, but couldn’t comprehend how I could speak of a man whom he saw as a murderer as a martyr. Though Cyril repudiated violence against those who perform abortions, he had grave doubts about the state of Dr. Tiller’s soul. I made it clear that I thought the doctor had been doing God’s work. And the gulf between us, Cyril realized, had now grown too vast for even a history of deep friendship to span.

We didn’t speak for several months. I had moved to West L.A. and was busy with my expanding family; Cyril and his wife had also just had a child. My calls weren’t returned, but I figured he was just incredibly busy. Finally, I sent him an email, and got a kind, serious, thoughtful reply. Cyril explained that he loved and respected me and was grateful for our years of mutual friendship. But, he said, ideas have consequences, a view he knew I shared. None of us agree with one another on everything, but there are certain core issues that are so central that the absence of a common view can strain even the best of friendships.

Cyril suggested, and I agreed, that to smooth over our differences over abortion for the sake of friendship would do violence to the seriousness with which we held our positions and to our long history of mutual respect. We would still be cordial when we happened to speak; we are both men for whom civility is an important value. But we are also people for whom there are higher values still. And because of those higher values, our friendship has ended.

(Parenthetically, we both agreed that this was where friendship and family relationships differed. Neither of us would ever abrogate a relationship with a relative over even this issue.)

I miss Cyril. But I honor both what we had and why it ended. Politics is not sports; it does have consequences. Our beliefs should never be so passionately held as to render us incapable of decency and empathy. But our core beliefs shouldn’t be worn so lightly that they can be tossed aside for the sake of amiability. I’ve lost friendships in the past because of my reckless behavior (sleeping with other people’s spouses, for example). If there is a good and honorable reason to lose a friendship, it’s the way Cyril and I lost ours. I love him and his family very much, and they remain in my heart. But my commitment to justice (as I prayerfully understand justice) trumps even friendship.

Feelings aren’t facts: on friendship, fidelity, and fleeting fancies

Posted on by

I’ve written before on male-female friendship, most notably here. The short answer to the old question “can men and women be friends?” is “yes”, and there’s a part of me that’s always astounded when I run into serious adults who say otherwise.

I was reminded of my old post and the larger debate when I saw this series appear at Slate over the past ten days: Strictly Platonic: Friendships Between Men and Women. Slate offers several articles dealing with a variety of issues that arise around male-female non-romantic friendship, and there are some well-written contributions from both halves of these pairings. I enjoyed reading all of the short essays, and recommend them. (Including a nice explanation of how Plato gets dragged into the whole thing.)

I especially appreciated this Juliet Lapidos post on sexual desire within friendship.

This past winter I asked Slate readers to fill out a survey on “platonic friendship.” I said I was looking for subjects with a “platonic friend,” so it’s unsurprising that more than half of the 549 respondents who answered all of the relevant questions profess no attraction of any kind—they’ve never had sex with their friend, never talked about sex, and never thought seriously about it. Just over 5 percent are on the opposite extreme, and report significant sexual tension or ongoing sex. There’s a range of experience in the middle—mostly versions of the dating-to-friendship narrative, or accounts of fleeting romantic interest.

The survey indicates that the question “Are straight men and women able to forget sex and engage in a truly non-romantic fashion?” is too narrow. It’s wrong to think of platonic friendship as a binary proposition—in which couples either avoid sex entirely and make the relationship work, or they don’t and it doesn’t.Sexual feeling within friendship exists on a Kinsey-type scale, and moderate attraction does not necessarily ruin or invalidate the relationship.

Bold emphasis mine.

I think that last sentence is vital. Many folks will admit that friendships between men and women can exist and thrive, but only in those instances where neither party has any sexual attraction to the other. But according to this view, if flashes of mutual desire surface, the friendship will inevitably transition into a sexual relationship or the friendship will end. If just one party “wants something more”, the strain of that wanting will invariably create a barrier between the two erstwhile friends, driving them apart with guilt and resentment. Or so the pop psychology argument goes.

First of all, this argument ignores the very real human capacity to weigh costs and benefits and consider friendship to be a particularly valuable example of the latter. Sticking with the heterosexual examples, a man and a woman might both be pledged to other people in monogamous romantic relationship. They might both be deeply invested in those relationships and in honoring the commitments they made. The two friends might also be keenly aware that if they were each single, then a very different kind of relationship would involve between them. Continue reading →

Seventeen May 4ths ago — a dream fulfilled, a friendship lost

Posted on by

Tra la! It’s May!
The lusty month of May!
That darling month when ev’ryone throws
Self-control away.
It’s time to do
A wretched thing or two,
And try to make each precious day
One you’ll always rue!

-Camelot

Seventeen years ago today, I started dating the woman who would become my second wife. I’d met Sara at a Twelve Step meeting in the summer of 1991. I was a year into my troubled first marriage and, at the time, just over a year clean and sober. Sara and I shared the same sponsor, and we became fast friends.

I fell in love with Sara very quickly. I’d had affairs while engaged to the woman who became my first wife, and that behavior hadn’t stopped after we’d gotten married. (This raises the excellent question of why I wanted to get married in the first place, which is another story). I never attempted anything with Sara, however. Rather, from the summer of 1991 until the summer of 1992, I spent as much time as I could with her and our friends in the program, minimizing my time in what was a very unhappy and frustrating marriage. (For which I take full responsibility. I was a wretched, manipulative, passive-aggressive, dishonest cad. I operated under the noxious principle that my own pain was so great it served to exculpate me from any pain I might cause others.)

Sara and I talked on the phone daily; I became her confidante and best friend. She figured out that I had a crush on her, but made it clear (in subtle and unspoken ways) that she didn’t reciprocate. Eventually, I left my first wife at the urging of the sponsor whom Sara and I shared; my sponsor told me, wisely enough, that I needed to find a way to be faithful in my marriage or I needed to end it. I chose to end the marriage in July 1992.

Sara and I grew closer, but even after I was single, I never attempted to start a relationship with her. I was terrified of losing the friendship, and was certain that her love for me was entirely platonic. So I pursued other romantic adventures, TAed classes, prepared for my doctoral exams, edited UCLA’s Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and lost a lot of weight. I dreamed about Sara at night, fantasized about a life with her, and kept it all to myself. ‘Twas a familiar story of unrequited graduate student longing.

On May 4, 1993, Sara invited me to her apartment in Brentwood, a few miles from campus. We had a weekly Tuesday night dinner arrangement, and these occasions were the highlights of my week. Sara and I would laugh and talk and gossip about the program; we would read poetry together and eat fat-free cookies for dessert. (Remember the “fat-free” craze of the early 1990s, long before the Atkins outbreak of a few years later?) That Tuesday night, Sara took my hand as soon as dinner was finished, and in a gentle, trembling voice told me that she had feelings for me. She explained that she’d always known how much I’d loved her, but while I was married, she’d blocked them completely. As we’d become closer friends in the months since I’d been separated from my wife, Sara explained that she’d begun, slowly, to reciprocate the feelings I had for her. She was in love with me, she told me that night, and wanted to know if we could start seeing each other in a new way.

I made it home to my apartment a little before five the next morning. I wrote in my journal as soon as I got in: “Yesterday was the best day of my life. I have never been happier.” And for the next week or two, I was walking on air. The dream of everyone who has an unrequited crush on a friend is that that friend will suddenly fall in love with them as well. It rarely happens. But it happened to me, and I was over the moon with joy.

The relationship, I’ll note, was an utter disaster. Sara and I had been magically close as friends; we were awful as lovers. It’s not that the sex was bad, but that our capacity to communicate seemed irrevocably compromised by romantic intimacy. What had flourished so easily in our platonic relationship collapsed very quickly under the weight of something very different. But we persevered. We were both — and here is the point of the post — desperate to make things work because to admit failure would have been to lose the friendship that had been the relationship’s genesis. Sara and I both felt we had no choice but to keep trying. And we spiraled downwards fast.

We were engaged before my first divorce was final, and we were married in a lavish Palm Springs wedding in the autumn of 1994. We were separated twenty months later, following my relapse after more than six years of sobriety. I haven’t laid eyes on Sara since she kissed me goodbye in a hospital in June 1996, and she remains the only ex of mine to whom I have been unable to make amends or even attempt closure. I do know that Sara ended up coming out as a lesbian a few years after our divorce. Where she lives now, I have no idea, and in this technology-saturated age, have resisted the temptation to find out.

A few years after we separated, a psychic told me that Sara and I were supposed to be brother and sister in this lifetime. That, the psychic explained, was the source of our intense platonic bond — and the explanation for why our romantic relationship had proved so catastrophic. “Your souls knew you were committing incest”, the psychic said, “even if you weren’t consciously aware of it.” That sounds like a lot of woo, but the point was a fair one. Sara and I had been such dear friends, so devoted to one another, that each of us had developed the fantasy that we could easily transition into an equally devoted and intense love affair. I developed the fantasy early; she developed it late, but we both came to believe in it.

And when we found that the chemistry we’d had as platonic friends turned poisonous in a sexualized context, our disillusionment and bewilderment was profound. I’ve never said such hurtful things to a partner as I said to Sara; nor have I ever been on the receiving end of hateful diatribes like the ones my second wife delivered to me. But our rage, I came to see years later, was rooted in a profound sense of mutual betrayal. Each of us blamed the other for not keeping the initial relationship as it ought to have been. Each of us clung to the illusion that we could make things work. It ended very badly.

One of the many small blessings of that second marriage was that it ended my habit of getting crushes on female friends. It’s a common dynamic: boy meets girl, boy projects a huge fantasy onto girl, girl just wants to be friends, things muddle on in a state of awkwardness. (Lots of boys in these instances have “Nice Guy” syndrome, rooted in a sense of frustrated entitlement.) I had these unreciprocated crushes and obsessions on and off for years, from 16 to 26, on perhaps half-a-dozen close female friends. Finally, with Sara, my most fervent wish came true. And the aftermath was sufficiently ugly that it served to cure me of the habit.

I could have posted about other things today. But for some reason, the date echoed in my head when I woke up this morning. More traditional posting coming soon.

“Divided you fall”: the myth of male weakness and young women’s internalized misogyny

Posted on by

I’m thinking once again about the “myth of male weakness” this morning.

Jonah Goldberg has a piece this morning with the whoppingly patronizing title “Where Feminists Get it Right.” (Don’t get excited, folks. Hell remains unfrozen.) Jonah concludes his piece, which largely focuses on the now-familiar yet ever-depressing litany of abuses against women in the less-developed world, with this gem:

Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

As I sigh at Goldberg’s piece, I think about an email I got from my friend Emily. She recounts a Facebook exchange she had with a female friend of hers, a fellow Christian. Em’s friend posted on her status update that she was “really disappointed w/the female human species.” When Em inquired why, and whether her friend was also disappointed in men, she got this response:

It appears as if men are weaker when it comes to sex, money, power. With that I am realizing that it is the women that should be held at a higher standard because we need to set the tone for our weak counterparts. If women looked at themselves as holy temples and didn’t allow anything less than excellence this may force men to step up their integrity and priorities…

We could go through the gospels, pointing out over and over again the places where Jesus demands that men show self-restraint comparable to that demanded by women. But I’m not just interested in responding to a fellow Christian. Rather, what concerns me here is one of the most troubling aspects of the myth of male weakness: it creates an atmosphere in which both men and women feel justified in policing other women’s behavior.

If men cannot control themselves, and women can, then it is (as Emily’s friend suggests) women’s task to set the limits for men which men cannot set for themselves. All bad male behavior, it quickly follows, is invariably a woman’s fault. We’re all familiar with the loathsome notion that a cheating husband or boyfriend deserves less ire than the woman with whom he cheated. (The “he couldn’t help it, but she ought to have known better because she’s a woman” theory). The end result is a culture of mistrust and hostility among women.

A great many of the young women I work with claim to have trouble liking other women. Call it the “most of my good friends are guys” phenomenon, which is sufficiently common as to merit a word other than “phenomenon”. Many young women — even in feminist spaces — will list the countless ways in which they have felt judged, policed, or betrayed by other women. Many will say things like “I expect men to let me down. But when a woman hurts you, it’s worse because she doesn’t have an excuse.”

The point that feminists try and make in these discussions is that the myth of male weakness is at the very root of this internalized misogyny. The logic is inescapable. The less self-control women believe men have, the less they hold men responsible. The less they hold men responsible, the more responsibility they ascribe to themselves and to other women. The less they believe in men’s capacity to self-regulate, the more hostile they are trained to become to any woman who seems unwilling to engage in the rituals of female self-policing. At its most extreme, every mini-skirt becomes not only a threat to the fragile order women have established for mutual protection, it is perceived as an act of both betrayal and hostility towards one’s sisters. The hisses of “slut”, “whore”, and “bitch” soon follow. Continue reading →

Affirming and redirecting: a post about marriages, friendships, emotional affairs, and how Tolstoy gets it wrong

Posted on by

SamSeaborn asks a question:

a female friend recently asked me over to her place for coffee – she’s like a sister to me and she’s been married for a couple of years. Now she tells me how she’s sexually unhappy in her marriage that she’s wondering about cheating… and obviously felt very guilty about those thoughts. I’ve liberated myself quite a bit from my Catholic guilt, but this is a dilemma for me.

Is there a morally sound way of action for her when she wants to be with her husband (whom I don’t know as closely as her) but he can’t give her what she wants sexually and she can’t even speak to him about this, otherwise she wouldn’t turn to me to talk about these things… her happiness is important to me, and her happiness is very likely tied to a morally sound solution of this issue. So, as someone who has clearly thought about this kind of problem – if you have any idea how to address something like this, I’d really appreciate a brief reply.

First off, let me say that I think it’s important for married heterosexual folks to have friends of all sexes. I think it’s terrific that Sam has a friend whom he thinks of as a sister. At the same time, I’m not the only person who will read his query with a small bit of concern. Infidelity isn’t just about sexual activity with someone other than a spouse; emotional affairs can be as — if not more — toxic than those that are consummated physically. I wrote about the trap of emotional affairs here, and defined it thus:

(An emotional affair is) a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others.

Communicating with a partner about sex isn’t always easy. Clearly, Sam’s friend is unhappy and frustrated, and has every right to feel the way she feels. But Sam’s certainty that she “can’t” talk to her husband about sex is offered a bit too quickly. It may not be easy, it may not be pleasant, but unless there’s a clear and present danger of being physically injured as a result of raising the subject, one of the responsibilities of a married person is to bring ze grievances — in a loving but honest way — to ze spouse. If she “can’t talk” to her husband about it, the inevitable solution will be either prolonged depression or some sort of affair, either physical or emotional or both. Neither is a “morally sound” option. Marriage doesn’t impose a contractual obligation to suffer indefinitely in frustration and silence; marriage also doesn’t impose (as I’ve written before) an obligation to provide sexual satisfaction. Marriage does impose the obligation to communicate, to compromise where possible — and when not possible, to choose to end the marriage through divorce rather than through an affair or “frozen martyrdom”.

I take Sam at his word that he doesn’t have a carnal interest in his friend, and he isn’t (as Job puts it), “lurking at his neighbor’s door” waiting to step in as the answer to a sexually frustrated woman’s prayer. But I think he does have an obligation to call her out on her flat insistence that communication with her husband is impossible. It may be that this woman’s husband is so intransigent and unreachable that any attempt at counseling or conversation will fail. If that’s the case, then divorce is the morally sound and psychologically responsible option. After the divorce proceedings are begun and the husband has been informed that the marriage is over, then she’s certainly free to look elsewhere for sexual fulfillment. But it’s part of Sam’s job as a friend to point out these options.

Good friends listen to each other and affirm each other. They know that sometimes a companion needs to “dump”, and doesn’t need a solution proposed. (We all know the classic axiom about men and women in conversation, and the traditional American male desire to “fix” a problem immediately.) But good friends, true friends, challenge and push each other. They affirm feelings and validate frustration — and in a loving way, nudge one another towards making important changes. Sam’s friend is stuck, and simply talking about her frustrations to him is unlikely to get her “unstuck”. A loving and firm push in one of two directions — towards either counseling or divorce — is the most helpful thing Sam can offer. Continue reading →