Tag Archives: Friendship

“I adore you; you confound me”: of old friends, Facebook, and ideological differences

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When I first went on Facebook a few years ago, most of my friends were my students and “youth group kids”; I was the oldest person I knew on the site. Today, a third of my 1700-odd friends and contacts on FB are my age or older, and I’ve found it a particularly useful tool for connecting with old acquaintances from my childhood and adolescence. I suspect my 25th high school reunion, coming up next year, will be planned using Facebook.

On Facebook, I often post links to news stories and opinion pieces which reflect my views on gender, sexuality, faith, animal rights and so forth. My friends are able to comment on the stories. Since my friends — and I use that noun in its traditional sense — run the gamut politically, sexually, and religiously, the debates are quite heated. And things have gotten particularly intense since “Leigh” started commenting. Leigh is a conservative Republican through and through, and not afraid to “mix it up” with my many liberal buddies on Facebook. Some folks have written to me in wonder, expressing disbelief that someone like Leigh and I could be friends.

I’m well aware that the capacity to be friends with folks who hold radically divergent views is a virtue made possible by privilege. For example, I have friends who are strongly opposed to marriage equality for gays and lesbians; they fight against a cause I champion. But because I’m a man married to a woman, their views (while exasperating and troubling) don’t represent a direct threat to my happiness. If I were a man who longed to marry another man but couldn’t, I might be less cheerful about opening my Facebook page, my heart, and my home to folks whose views I consider a real threat to my happiness. My extended family has been one that has been fortunate enough to embrace civility, even cordiality, towards one’s ideological opponents as a virtue. White folks in the middle and upper-middle classes have the luxury of seeing political disagreements as fascinating topics for a rousing argument rather than life and death. That cheerful willingness not only to overlook, but even celebrate those disagreements was something I was raised to believe was a sign of wisdom, of a capacity to put friendship and family over partisanship or faith. I still believe that, but acknowledge that that capacity has as much to do with race and class as it does with virtue.

In any event, while I do moderate fairly heavily here on the blog, where folks I don’t know can and do comment, a more free-wheeling atmosphere prevails on my Facebook page, where Leigh has crossed verbal swords with more than one of my other friends.

Leigh (not her real name) and I went to high school together. We were particularly close our junior year, when we were lab partners in Richard Fletcher’s legendary Wildlfe and Ecology course. Leigh and I talked about everything together at 16, and did our best to stay in touch in the years that followed. Our lives, as it turned out, followed somewhat similar trajectories: we were both divorced multiple times, we both struggled early and often with addiction to alcohol and drugs. And we both were fortunate enough to get sober relatively young; Leigh and I each have “clean time” measured in double-digit years. In sobriety, we both became marathon runners and endurance athletes; unbeknownst to the other, we each ran our personal best times the same year and at more or less the same pace. And in our journey towards sobriety, we both became Christians, born again as adults.

Leigh now lives in the mountains, in a small and isolated — albeit very beautiful — community. She’s a first-rate outdoorswoman, single, still an athlete despite battles against rheumatoid arthritis. And she’s also become, in no small part as a result of her experiences as well as her upbringing, very right-wing. When we write to each other, as we do fairly regularly on Facebook, we enjoy our shared reminiscences immensely. It’s so good to have friends who’ve known you for so long, longer than spouses and colleagues and the like. Without the entangled intimacy of family, but with the perspective of decades, old acquaintances remind us of how far we’ve traveled, of obstacles overcome , and of our own impetuous, often foolish, but still loveable youthful selves. But Leigh and I also have spoken of faith, sobriety, running — and, at least since last year’s election, a great deal about politics. When it comes to the former things, we are of one mind; on the latter, we could not disagree more. Continue reading →

A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars

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It might surprise some readers that the students in my women’s studies classes are as politically and religiously diverse as the students in my other general education courses. The widely-held stereotype that feminist-themed courses only appeal to those on the left-hand side of the spectrum has not proven true, at least not for me here at Pasadena City College. (And is it possible that this fall I will begin my seventeenth year of teaching here? Where does the time go?) Though my women’s history classes do tend to attract slightly higher numbers of white students, and correspondingly lower numbers of students of color compared to the college average, those students who do take the class and submit journals and participate in discussions do run the full gamut.

Creating opportunities for honest, non-condemnatory and respectful dialogue isn’t particularly easy, particularly when the issues we discuss (like abortion rights, or the merits/drawbacks to abstinence, or the intersectionality of race and gender) are so potentially explosive. As diverse as my students are, most come from backgrounds where women are conciliators and peacemakers; many come from the “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. And as a result, while we sometimes have very charged discussions in class in which emotions run high, my students tell me that outside of school, they tend to seek out friendships with those who are ideologically like-minded. The young woman committed to abstinence until marriage, for example, seems to find it hard to form a honest frienship (rather than a mere civil acquaintanceship) with the young woman who volunteers as a sex educator and talks openly about the physical aspects of the relationship she has with her boy — or girl — friends.

Labels like “prude” and “slut” have genuine power to wound. (Some women, of course, are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of both.) Those on opposite sides of the “abstinence divide” frequently imagine that it’s harder to be wherever they are; those who advocate for or live by a more progressive sexual ethic often carry the scars from words like “slut” or “whore” or even the surprisingly not-yet-dated “tramp.” Those who remain virgins (or who become born-again virgins) insist that theirs is the tougher cross to bear, that living in a sexually permissive environment where the pressure to fit in is enormous requires courage and resilience. There is an element, I note of the old “suffering Olympics” problem, in which various constituencies compete for the title of “most maligned” and “most deserving of sympathy.” Continue reading →

Men, women, friendship, and fidelity: revisiting the issue

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In the aftermath of the Mark Sanford debacle, Laura at the conservative Pursuing Holiness blog asks the old question: Can Men and Women be Friends? Her answer is the expected one: no.

Can men and women be friends? Certainly. My husband is my best friend – the ultimate “friend with benefits.” But it is unwise in the extreme to invest your emotions and build an intimacy with someone with whom you can’t complete that intimacy. Even if you are never physically unfaithful, is there any way to have an intimate friend of the opposite sex without depriving your spouse of the emotional investment to which they’re entitled?

I wrote a post four years ago on this subject. I re-read that piece of mine this morning, and as is so often the case with my “older” musings, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself in equal measure. As I mark eleven years clean and sober this week, I note that my own spiritual journey since 1998 has been a rapid and occasionally turbulent one — and as a result, my thinking on a variety of issues continues to evolve and shift as I grow and learn. The posts I put up in my first two years of steady blogging (2004-05) tended to be much more conservative in tone than the ones I’ve put up more recently. Four or five years ago, I was only just coming out of what I call my “boundary-learning” stage; after so many years of what might best be described as exuberant transgressiveness, I was until recently perhaps over-sensitive to the potential for a sexual charge in virtually any relationship. I’m glad I practiced that level of caution; it was a needed corrective to an earlier way. I note that by last year, when I put up this post about controlling boyfriends, my views had already begun to shift.

But in light of Laura’s post, and my own words from 2005, I’d like to revisit — briefly — the issue of male-female non-romantic friendship.

First of all, like Laura, in my 2005 post my approach was blindly heteronormative. If men and women can’t be friends because of the possibility of sexual attraction, then it follows that lesbians and straight women can’t be friends, nor gay men and straight guys. And bisexuals? Clearly a group for whom radical introversion and isolation is the only possible course. One mistake we make around these issues, over and over again, is that we can predict with certainty what sort of people we are going to be attracted to. The anecdotes are legion of women and men falling in love with people of their same sex after living — in many instances, quite happily — in heterosexual relationships for years and years. As a man who has been generally drawn to women throughout his life, I’ve been surprised once or twice by an unexpected twinge of attraction to a male friend. It is culturally imposed homophobia rather than biological hardwiring that prevents more men from admitting the same thing. Continue reading →

“My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked

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I’ve been thinking lately about some friends of mine, getting a divorce after more than a decade of marriage. Children are involved, but the two spouses are as amicable as one could hope to expect. What is clear, however, is that the husband and the wife each have very different support networks — or more accurately, that the wife has a fairly strong support network of family and friends, and the husband has virtually no one. And looking at the two of them is a reminder of one of the particularly unfortunate ways in which we structure white American middle-class masculinity; too often, not only is a wife a man’s best friend, she is his only friend.

We live, after all, in a culture which shames displays of male vulnerability. Though some sociologists detect signs of a shift among younger men, millions of boys in this country still grow up with the “guy code” and its rules about toughness, competitiveness, and a steadfast refusal to cry. Even those young men who do everything they can to avoid playing by the “guy rules” — the sensitive, bookish lads, let’s say — find it difficult to find other men with whom they can be open, vulnerable, and safe.

A great many young women have had this experience: they’ve been dating a fellow for a while, things have started to get serious. A fight happens, or perhaps the dude has a setback of some sort or another. One night, he breaks down in front of her, surprising them both with his sudden vulnerability. He may say something like “This is the first time I’ve cried in years” or “I’ve never cried like this in front of someone before, not since I was a kid.” Now, it’s possible that he’s just being manipulative, seeing how far this kind of emotional flattery will take him. But dollars to doughnuts, there’s a good chance that he’s being honest — it’s only in romantically and sexually intimate relationships that many men find the chance to be vulnerable.

One rather flippant but generally sound piece of advice I gave (and still do give) in youth group about sex: “Don’t get naked until you’re ready to get naked”, meaning that in relationships, it’s often wise to have some degree of congruence between emotional and sexual intimacy. Generally speaking, emotional intimacy is a good precondition for sex; the danger lies in the attempt to reverse cause and effect, and using sex as a way of generating enduring intimacy. But of course, for many men, sexual intimacy is a kind of trailhead into some deeper and more concealed parts of themselves. This doesn’t mean that heterosexual men can only trust those women with whom they are sleeping, but it does mean that sex gives a kind of permission for a man to be vulnerable. (If I had a dollar for every woman who has ever asked me if it was “normal” for men to cry after sex, I’d have enough to take my family out for a nice vegan dinner. Many women are floored by these sudden post-coital displays of strong emotion; though not universal, it’s more common than many think.) Continue reading →

“Scrubbing the calendars of every conceivable risk”: Carolyn Hax on trust and fidelity

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Leslie very kindly sends me a link to this Carolyn Hax column that ran in the Minnesota paper. Carolyn responds to a young man who has broken off a relationship with his girlfriend over her refusal to give up her (platonic) friends of the opposite sex. After some general remarks about the importance of honesty, Hax opines:

…you were hiding, too, behind that ridiculous opposite-sex boycott. You were hiding from the very real risk every couple faces, that one of you will fall for someone else. People who love and respect each other do so not in a vacuum, but in a world populated by others — some of whom, inevitably, will prove tempting.

If your relationship can’t survive that, it can’t survive, period, no matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk.

Emphasis in the original.

“No matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk” is a terrific line, and I am going to borrow it regularly. Hax is on to something very important: despite our best and worst efforts, we can never — thankfully — control what an adult romantic partner will do. Part of being in a real relationship, a real marriage, is honoring the omnipresent possibility that your partner could make a different choice. For some, that reality is too terrifying to contemplate, so they stay in denial; for others, that reality is so terrifying that it turns them into over-controlling snoops. And for others, that reality is part of the risk of what it means to love someone. We cannot be vulnerable to the possibility of joy without being concomitantly vulnerable to betrayal; it is axiomatic that intimacy and risk are nearly perfectly correlated. To the extent that you are unwilling to take on the latter, you assure yourself of not having the former.

My wife is somewhere in central Africa at the moment. A classic ESTP and a successful businesswoman, she travels a great deal (sometimes without me). She’s beautiful and gregarious, and every day she meets and works closely with handsome men and gorgeous women in what is our town’s most famous industry. She has excellent boundaries, or so I believe; the ring she wears is an outer symbol of a profound inner commitment, one that I am confident radiates forth from her. Mutual friends have said to me that they have seen my wife in social situations (such as “girlfriend weekends” in Las Vegas) where I wasn’t present, and that she was exuberant, extroverted, and — in her words and actions and aura — evidently married. I like hearing things like that.

My wife could be meeting all sorts of men on her trip: hot young European businessmen in the British Airways T1 lounge, dynamic Ugandan tour guides, impassioned volunteers with NGOs in Kigali or Kampala. Some of these men will be cuter than I am, younger than I am, better muscled than I am, wittier than I am, and so forth. But they won’t be the unique package of Hugo-ness to which my beloved has pledged her fidelity and her love, and I trust in that love and in her good judgment.

I meet all sorts of attractive people in my world as well. I’d like to think I exude a certain level of married-ness (uxoriousness?). I was a pretty damn good flirt in my younger years, and I consciously avoid being flirtatious with women (or men) these days. Though I always wear a wedding ring in public unless I’m working out, I am fairly certain I project a clear “taken” energy even when that David Yurman band is not on my left ring finger.

Better than most, I know marriages can end. A promise given on a wedding day is not, in and of itself, surety of everlasting faithfulness. For me, fidelity is a choice. It was a choice I made when I first decided to stop seeing other people and be “exclusive” with she who is now my wife. It was a choice I made again when I asked her to marry me, a choice I made when we were married, and a choice I make day after day after day.

The other day, I was in a coffee shop I don’t normally go to, playing with my iPhone, which I still don’t understand. An attractive woman near my age also had her iPhone out, and we started talking about our mutual frustration that the “new” model was coming so soon after we had purchased the soon-to-be-outdated ones. I was getting ready to go to Pilates, so I was in workout clothes with no ring on my finger. At one point, I caught “that vibe” from the woman in Seattle’s Best Coffee, the vibe that suggests at least some initial interest. And I made the decision that comes blessedly easily to me these days: I dropped a reference to my wife into my next sentence (remarking about my beloved’s far greater technological facility.) The tall brunette deftly picked up on it, and in that unspoken and yet obvious way, withdrew “the vibe” without the slightest hint of incivility. We chatted for a few minutes more, and off I went.

Bottom line: I make choices every damn day to honor my marriage. I have other options, my wife (younger and lovelier than I) has far more. My happiness and security are not predicated on controlling who it is that she talks to. My goal is to take all of my sexual energy and direct it towards her, and no one else: that means fidelity in fantasy as well as in body. She has told me she does the same, and I believe her. It would devastate me if I found out it were otherwise, but I am smart enough to know that joy and growth are contingent upon two things: my own trustworthiness on one hand, and my radical willingness to be open to devastation and betrayal on the other.

Carolyn Hax nailed this one; brava, sister woman.

My wife is not my daughter: a response to April Bleske-Rechek

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What is it with the two great Timeses (as it were), and their strange categorizations of stories? Jill complains, rightly, that the “grey lady” stuck an article about anorexia, addiction, and celebrity in the “fashion” section of yesterday’s paper. Meanwhile, today’s Los Angeles paper (truly a shadow of its once-splendid self) offers this article in the Health section: Married, with “just friends.” (The other feature article in today’s Health section has to do with seniors living on their own, which makes much more sense.)

The “Married, with just friends” piece mixes a few bits of solid insight with some whopping cringe-inducers. The author, Susan Brink, interviews some experts on the topic of opposite-sex friendships and heterosexual marriage. One such oracle of wisdom is April Bleske-Rechek, psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. Bleske-Rechek, musing on the notion that spouses are right to be mistrustful of one another’s opposite-sex pals, says:

Wary husbands and wives have an uneasy sense of the temptations out there, even if they trust their spouses. “It’s like when your teenage daughter goes to a concert dressed like a slut,” says Bleske-Rechek.

“She says, ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ And her father says, ‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’ “

Bold emphasis mine. No, professor, it’s not “like” that.

I tremble for the good professor’s students, truly I do. Continue reading →

Girl talk, depression, and culturally conditioned rivalry

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As a volunteer youth minister, I was very interested to read this in my morning paper: Girl talk linked to depression, anxiety. It opens:

Constant venting over crushes, popularity or other personal problems may lead to anxiety and depression in girls — but not in boys, according to new research.

A study of 813 students ages 8 to 15 found that excessive discussions and rumination about problems strengthened friendships for both sexes, but those tighter bonds came at a cost for girls.

The study appears in this month’s issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.

Lead author Amanda Rose, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said the results might reflect a cultural tendency among girls to blame themselves when they aren’t invited to parties or when boys don’t call back.

“The more they talk about it, the more depressed and anxious they feel,” she said.

The findings add a cautionary note to the perennial advice to the young that they should share their problems rather than bottle them up.

“Talking about problems is a good thing, but too much talk is too much of a good thing,” Rose said.

I don’t spend much time working with younger kids (say, those in the 8-12 range). I have spent a great deal of time volunteering with both boys and girls in early-to-mid adolescence; if there’s one age group I spend more time with than any other it’s high school frosh, who are usually around 13-15.

I’m no expert in adolescent psychology, but the study does “ring true”. It’s certainly not the case that those girls who are the most consistently verbal and open about their feelings are always the emotionally healthiest. My concern, however, is about the reaction of adults to this study. The last thing that we need is moms and dads deciding, having skimmed an article or heard a television report, that their daughters need to spend less time talking to their friends and more time bottling up their feelings! Even more worrisome is the thought that some parents and teachers might overtly or covertly discourage girls from approaching them with their anxieties and doubts for fear that providing a listening ear will only worsen the problem.

One popular trend these days is to focus heavily on the “boy crisis”; pop psychologists (and men’s rights advocates) have loudly complained that we’ve spent too much time collectively worrying about girls, and not enough about boys. These advocates for boys are often convinced that love, time, and resources are part of a zero-sum game, and that the trend of the 1990s (epitomized by Mary Pipher’s colossally influential Reviving Ophelia) towards focusing on girls was misplaced and led to boys’ needs being systematically ignored. Boys, these folks argue, are actually much more at risk of low self-esteem today than girls.

But the study reported today suggests that peer support systems are still less effective for many girls than for boys:

Researchers first looked at whether depression or anxiety increased the likelihood that students would obsessively discuss their problems. They found that boys and girls with emotional difficulties were more likely to ruminate about their troubles.

Researchers then examined the effect of rumination on students’ emotional well-being and friendships.

Boys reported no change in feelings of anxiety or depression, but girls said they felt worse.

Since the boys in this study were already self-identified as depressed or anxious, their tendency to report that they didn’t feel worse as a result of discussing their problem can’t be attributable to a masculine desire to appear strong and impervious to psychic pain. Rather, it seems clear that something about the way in which “girl-talk” functions among the young serves to exacerbate rather than relieve many emotional problems.

In my own youth, I struggled with both an eating disorder and chronic self-mutilation. I often found myself in support groups for those who suffered with similar issues; typically, I was (as a male) very much in a minority. I also was often the oldest person in the group, as my anorectic and self-mutilating behavior peaked in my early twenties rather than in my early-to-mid-teens, like many young women. And in these groups, I saw quickly how vital it was to have all discussion moderated by either a therapist or a mature fellow sufferer who had a lot of recovery. Unmoderated, discussion about dieting or cutting quickly turned competitive; a girl would say something like “Yeah, I’m not doing so good, I only ate a banana yesterday.” You could count on having another girl say seconds later, “Yeah, me too, I only drank water and diet coke yesterday.” The subtle one-”upwomanship” often left many of the young women in the group even more depressed and alienated, and it took good and aggressive therapists to keep things positive. (This was back before the proliferation of the “pro-ana” sites on the web that offer “support” to those who are competitively anorexic or self-mutilating.)

As feminists, we need to recognize that the way in which girls talk to each other about their bodies or emotions is heavily influenced by a culture that encourages bitter female rivalry. We know that anxiety about body image and boys begins well before physical puberty, and that that anxiety is shaped in ways that emphasize competition with other girls. This rivalry is much stronger among girls than among boys. This doesn’t mean boys don’t compete, it means that their competition is far more limited. Boys tend to compete only about sports and grades and (later) real or imagined prowess with the other sex; girls compete over their appearance, and it seems, over their very identities.

To get a sense of this, listen to how girls use the word “hate” much more frequently to describe other women whom they envy. “She’s so pretty and skinny, I just hate her!” is a fairly common phrase to hear from fifteen-year old girls. When was the last time you heard a teen boy say of a peer, “He’s so handsome, I hate him” or “Peyton Manning is such a great quarterback, I just hate him”? (Boys may hate the star of the opposing team, but they are much less likely to loathe the lad who’s leading their own squad.) Intra-female conversation among teen girls is much more likely to be self-deprecating than that among boys, and it’s also far more likely to include disparaging remarks about the appearance or identity of perceived rivals.

It’s not the case that girls are “naturally” more introspective, or more filled with self-doubt, or are more cruel than their brothers. But because we inculcate in girls an absolutely impossible, unattainable ideal of physical and emotional perfection at such an early age, we set many young women up both for self-loathing and for hostility towards their female peers. It’s little wonder, then, that this study finds that talking about anxiety and depression isn’t as helpful for girls as it is for boys. It is a sign that those of us who care about young people need to be particularly attuned to the lack of resources that young girls have for safe and healthy opportunities to talk. Safe and healthy, by definition, means an uncompetitive environment, and it means providing them with understanding listeners whom these girls will not perceive as either judges or rivals.

Nezua on friendship in a time of bitterness

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The best post I’ve read all month is over at Feministe, and it’s from guest poster Nezua: Love is Revolutionary (the Threat of Friendship). It’s a very long, superbly written and compelling essay on the ways in which engaging in political dialogue (particularly in cyberspace) makes us dangerously prone to “othering” (seeing those who disagree with us as embodiments of the very evils against which we struggle).

I feel expansive and at peace, when I can listen to a fellow human being with a different kind of intent. Where I remember that the person in front of me may be just like me. Too often, instead of using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly and thus more easily identify with them, we use the anonymous, dissociated vehicle of online text to dehumanize; to strip the message of worth or heart or meaning so that we can pounce or perhaps just to rouse the negative energy buzz.

Sometimes people talk to me certain ways in threads and I say to myself Where are these people? Who are they? Because they only seem to exist online. I do not meet them in my life walking about. I have lived and grown up in a number of places, and for almost forty years and in city, country, and suburb—and I have never seen a conversation in a room progress, on a regular basis, into people rising up, shouting, leering, screaming, getting high on mob fever, dropping cruel and indiscriminate barbs. That’s jail behavior, if anything. But in everyday life and society? I do not run into people spitting invective or insult at me in our disagreements during the course of a day or in their very first statements to me being utterly and blatantly unfeeling. Nope. It does not happen

Nezua (who is moving towards Chris Clarke territory as potential blog-crush material) writes at his own place as well at Feministe: the Unapologetic Mexican. They very title makes it clear that his defense of friendship and kindness isn’t just another well-meaning but clueless attempt by the privileged to silence the legitimate anger of the marginalized and the oppressed. What I find so engaging about Nezua is that he is committed to the notion that kindness and forgiveness and friendship ought to be priorities even for those who are doing the hardest work in the trenches, fighting for social justice and global transformation. And let’s be honest: when well-meaning white folk say “Love your enemies” it often rings hollow; when those whose life experience has given them far more enemies than I will ever know, whose sense of disenfranchisement is more visceral than I can understand, when the likes of these speak of dignity and kindness it carries considerably more weight.

Some reflections on male-female friendship

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I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on the responses to yesterday’s post "All of my best friends are guys."  Keri distinguishes "sisterhood" from feminism in ways that I find useful, especially since I am inclined to use the terms as synonyms!  Altmama has her own response at her place, and I encourage folks to check out her blog.  And Antigone has pointed out the rather unfortunate Ladder Theory site that attempts to explain male-female friendships in a most unpleasant and stereotypical (albeit humorous) way.

I’ve been thinking about my friendships with women.  I’ve blogged before about my friendships with men, and how precious they are to me.  (And how long it took me to be able to trust men and get close to them.)  I don’t blog about my relationship with my fiancee out of respect for her privacy.  I’m honored that hundreds (on a good day, thousands) of folks come to this blog; I have "put myself out there" and attracted a fair degree of animosity for doing so.  (And no doubt annoyed many with my waffling and my hubris.)  I want to protect she to whom I will be married from all of that.  It’s not easy marrying a man like me, you know; she deserves absolute privacy.

Though I’ve mentioned past marriages and relationships, I’ve never written much about my female friends.  It’s true, today I have fewer female (and more male) friends than I did in the past.  As a high school and college student, I was the sort of guy who was uncomfortable around other men, but I had a great many wonderful female friends. (Taking women’s studies classes certainly helped with the ratio!)  The vast majority of these relationships were never explicitly romantic or sexual.   

But the fact that these relationships were "platonic" (in the vernacular sense) did not mean that they were entirely without some degree of longing.   I certainly did have "crushes" on some of these women, almost invariably unrequited.  At least until I left college for graduate school, I was what my friends called a stereotypical NGB  — a "Nice Guy, But"  (I became a less kind person in my twenties, to put it mildly, and lost that label rather quickly.)  I loved having so many female friends, and lord knows, I learned from them.  I would never have ended up doing what I’m doing professionally  had it not been for some exceptionally loving, patient friends who gently guided me towards not only doing gender studies, but doing real work on issues related to women, men, sexuality, and violence.  I’m so grateful for all that they gave me.

Today, I’ll be honest:  I have far fewer female friends than I did in my teens, twenties, or early thirties.  There are a number of reasons for this.  One, I’ve been very intentional about developing friendships with men.  In my limited time for friends, I’ve focused on hanging out with other guys, both  teens (whom I mentor) and peers.    Two, I’ve got little tolerance for friendships with ambiguous boundaries.  Though I’m an absolute believer that a straight man and a straight woman can be dear friends without any romantic tension whatsoever, I’ve found such relationships to be rarer than I had imagined when I was younger.   Human sexuality is an immensely powerful thing, more powerful than I think many folks recognize; the desires of the heart are often equally compelling.  I’ve been fooled more than once into believing that there was no chance of desire emerging in a given relationship, only to be stunned into embarrassment, awkwardness, or worse.

Three, I care about what other people think.  When you’re young, you’re supposed not to give a damn what your wider social circle thinks of your behavior.   But I carry the trust of a great many people: my fiancee, my family, my kids in youth group, my students.  I’ve made some fairly bold claims about how my life has been radically changed since coming to Christ.  My past gives folks plenty of reasons to gossip.  Many of my professional decisions (like teaching a course on gay and lesbian studies) provide grist for rumor mills.  So when and if I’m seen in public by friends or students or kids I work with, having a meal or a cup of coffee with a woman who is not my fiancee, I need to be prepared to explain my behavior.   That doesn’t mean I never go to lunch with female friends and colleagues, I do. I just need to be mindful of what others perceptions are.  When I was younger, I could ignore appearances; I’ve learned how fragile reputation is, and I’m working hard to keep the trust I’ve been given.  None of this means I don’t still have wonderful female friends!  I do, but for all three of the reasons covered here, the number is far smaller than it was in years past.

I do believe a healthy human person needs friends, and needs friends of both sexes, in order to be truly whole.  I don’t believe that sexual desire or romantic attraction inevitably undermines mixed-sex friendship.  I do believe, however, that when we’re young (and sometimes not so young) we lie to ourselves about how powerful and potentially dangerous these forces are.  Few of us come to full adulthood unscathed by the fallouts of such a friendship gone sour.  And without question, past experience has made me warier about forming and maintaining such friendships.  I don’t pretend that my experience has been everyone’s.  Others may find it easy to do what I found quite challenging, and I am sincerely glad for them. 

What does this mean for feminism?  I’m not sure.  My feminism and my faith teach me that women are radically equal to men.  We are not only all worthy of being friends across the gender divide, I believe we are called to form platonic relationships with the other sex in order to become fully human and whole.  Feminism tells me, rightly so, that most of the obstacles to healthy, non-sexual, non-romantic mixed-sex friendship are social constructs.  But experience has taught me that construct or no, though I may have reason not to be fearful, I am called to be wise and to set good, healthy, boundaries.

Why gender matters

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Stentor, in a comment on the post immediately below, asks:

I have to admit that I don’t quite “get” what you’re saying. I’m trying to figure out what specifically you think men need from other men — what is it that you can give Craig that a female friend couldn’t?

Fair question, and I don’t think the answer is inherently obvious.

First of all, a woman can’t give Craig intimacy without any possible hint of sexual attraction. No, I’m not saying that platonic friendships between men and women are impossible. But virtually all of us have stories of the strains and stresses that attraction can put on those relationships. For Craig, a heterosexual married man who is struggling with what might be called sex addiction, he needs to be able to reach out to someone with out either party having any sexual motive. I can give him that in a way that virtually no woman can. When one is married, friendships with the opposite sex become even more problematic. If Craig’s wife knew that Craig was sharing their marital difficulties with another woman, she would have every right to be furious. I doubt another man would threaten her in the same way. That doesn’t make her, or any other woman, irrational — it is just an acknowledgement of our deep-seated sexual identities.

Of course, on a more basic level, I do think that men and women are in many ways profoundly different. I am a zealous advocate of equality for women in the workplace, and of egalitarian relationships. But acknowledging equality is not the same thing as denying difference! Our biology impacts our identity far more than 1960s and 70s feminists (who were convinced that gender was simply a social construct) were willing to realize. Nowhere is this difference more obvious than in the area of sex.

Are there women out there who have done what Craig has done (cheat on a spouse with a prostitute)? No doubt there are a few, but I’m fairly certain that their numbers are small indeed. Many women tend to be mystified, not to mention threatened and enraged, by that kind of behavior. Few know what it is like to struggle with sexual temptation in the way that so many men struggle. (Women do, of course, have their own temptations and trials, often of a sexual nature — but they rarely “act out” in the same way.) All of the men whom I know well “get” the kind of struggle that Craig is going through. We ALL “get it”, even though many of us, thankfully, have not had to go where he has had to go! Thus while a woman might even be sympathetic to him, a man can be empathetic. Men can offer other men not only the stories of similar “falls”, but more importantly the vital experience of temptation overcome, of commitments honored, of relationships restored, of spiritual transformation. We can offer this with compassion and complete understanding and without any interpersonal sexual tension.

Men ultimately show other men how to live. Mothers can tell their sons what kind of men they ought to grow up to be, but they can’t show them how to do that job of growing up. Our female friends can offer us valuable and different perspectives on life; my life has been enriched over the years by wise counsel from both my biological and spiritual sisters. But what has kept me sanest and soundest has been the presence of men in my life.

Especially among young people, the failure of same-gender friendships seems to have hit epidemic proportions. I know many of my high school boys who are much more comfortable around girls than around their male peers; similarly, if I had a dollar for every female student who has ever written in her journal “All my good friends are guys”, I’d be able to afford a semester off. Opposite sex friendships are especially appealing to the young, and not merely because they often offer the “spice” of sexual attraction. What is most appealing is the freedom from the competition and the judgment that so many young men and women feel in the presence of their same-gender peers. But invariably, those who have no close friends of their own sex feel at a loss at certain critical life points. In order to lead healthy lives, we have to work to overcome our own fears about being judged by those of our same sex. We’re going to need folks beside us who know what it is like to live incarnate as a man or a woman. What makes me a man is more than my Y chromosome and my genitalia — it is a thousand thoughts, feelings, experiences that so many of my brothers know so well. Men need each other, desperately.

And if there is one thing I have come to know with near-certainty, it is that men who have other men (not just boys) in their lives to love them and hold them accountable make much better husbands and lovers, fathers and brothers to the women around them.