Love, Death, and Poly-Something

I have 78 year old neighbor, widower, who sits in her house alone most the time, waiting to die. I check on her. We share food. We talk. I listen to the stories she has told perhaps a hundred times as if I have heard them for the first time. She has family. We all do. They’re distant, they’re busy, or, as in the case with mine- they’re too bat-shit crazy to spend time with. My neighbor doesn’t want a roommate. She doesn’t want a new ‘fella.’ The few friends she has have suggested these things, some even telling her to get over ‘death,’ move on, and nothing makes her madder than hearing that. He was her high school sweet heart and they were together 62 years. “You don’t just get over that.” I don’t spend our time trying to persuade her. She is not suicidal. She simply exists, remembering her life with a man that is now gone.

Many of my own family have lived equally isolated lives. The statistics are quite clear, more and more people live alone, especially the elderly. We are isolated. We are experiencing epic rates of depression and anxiety. We’re more connected today than in any time in the history of people, thanks to media and cellphones, and yet, more lonely, more anxious, more untrusting of the motives of others, and more likely to be focused on maintaining our level of comfort than building relationships. If we’re parents, we’re more likely to be a single parent, raising kids alone with little family help if we have family help at all. Children or not, we’re less likely to stick together as couples than any previous generation. We don’t celebrate longevity of relationships, whether that’s people, or careers. The days of gold watches are over. We’re encouraged to leave and move on, sold the idea it’s better for us. It certainly better for the companies that keep wages low with high turnover rates. But consider, at least in terms of personal relationships, how many of us have actually stuck through some tough stuff to discover there is a better quality of relationship on the other side of storms? If we have family and friends- they’ll be in our ears telling us to move on, we can do better. ‘Life’s too short to put up with that.’ ‘Plenty of fish in the sea.’ And that’s technically true. There are enough single people on apps that every one of us has the potential of being traded out for an upgrade. There is always better. It’s also the explanation for why so many people fail to commit to long term relationships; there is always the potential of an ideal partner just a swipe away.

When I was young, I was full of the romantic notions instilled by Hollywood, Disney, and Fairy Tales of having that one partner for life. Part of me also wanted that because my own family life was so unstable that I felt like I needed someone that always be there. Unfortunately, the drama I lived through also became my inheritance. It took a while for me to grow up. I own that. With each next relationship, I fell further and further from ‘the ideal’ of one for life; but I became a better person, a better partner, a better lover. For the longest time I even feared hell because that’s what the Church of Christ assured me. My maternal grandfather was 70 something, having been married and divorced three times, a deacon in the CoC, and telling me and my first wife not to ever divorce; “I don’t want you to spend eternity in hell with me.” Serial monogamy is what it’s called today. The definition of monogamy has become one partner at a time.

We’ve changed. Our communities have changed. The way we relate to each other has changed. What we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. We get together, we fight, we break up. Most people are not bad people, but there is a real thing here: people will vilify a partner in order to justify the departure. We have to have a rationalization in order to blow things up, so that family and friends can be rallied into our alliance. We forget that children will love both parents and that they become collateral damage in these fights. Regardless of which parent they go with, they then see a string of dating relationships. We are now teaching impermanence in relationships. Statistics are very clear on this part: children are more likely to be physically and sexually abused by the new person than the bio-parents.

It seems to me, the most loving act a person can do for a partner is to help them cultivate relationships from the start of a relationship. Assume you’re in a loving relationship. Assume it’s a good relationships, one that will last until one of you dies. Would a loving partner want your dating life to be random? People on apps aren’t always honest. They have issues. They’re not necessarily financially secure. They don’t always have a person’s best interest in heart. Some people believe love is keeping someone, like property- and will break slowly break the ties of your present friends and family, subtly. One day you just wake up and everyone you know is gone or alienated because they don’t like the new guy. If there are children, sometimes the children are seen as a threat, or a serious distraction that keeps a partner from being able to spend ‘quality’ time with them. Competition ensues. Some people simply just don’t like someone else’s children. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have solved all of this up front, with both lovers taking serious interest in the quality of the friendships being built around them?

Not everyone is cut out for the hippy life style. Not everyone is cut out to be poly. It take some serious courage to push through the social artifacts in our paradigm that suggest monogamy is the only healthy way of being. We have to face our own insecurities and our own lusts. We have to face the fact that we have preferences and we are not truly wired to provide true equality, or perhaps equanimity, to the people we love and serve. We have dropped ‘service’ from our ideas of love. And what I am arguing for isn’t necessarily polygamy, or rationalization for as many sex partners as a couple can tolerate. I am arguing for a community. In the old-old days, we had the tribe. We shared everything. There were no secrets. If someone beat up on his partner, the tribe stepped in and put a stop to that shit. Children belonged to the tribe. Everyone shared in food and water. In the old days, we had a village, or a church. We helped each other. Now, we’re own our own. We judge people by their level of individuation. If you are living with someone, a parent, a sibling, or renting a room- you have failed. There are people, single parents and kids sleeping in cars because the stigma of going home is too great, and because the parent’s parents don’t want the kids and the grandkids- they too expect their kids to make it.

Here’s an idea. In addition to you and your partner cultivating friends, you make a plan to bring a community up in financial security. This has to be quality friends, the kind of friends you would call family. This new unit focuses on immediate solvency- such paying off one house, maybe even living together. On accomplishing this, everyone focuses on helping the friends reach the same level of solvency. Or, you go to the next door neighbor and you tell your neighbor, “We want to help you pay off your house. We will do this, but the caveat is, when we’re done, you help us pay off the next neighbor’s house.” Your street now builds towards permanence and solvency. A stability is establish. This is, ideally, what churches should be doing for their congregation. The Church building should be the most God-awful, small, ugly building ever- because everyone in the congregation is working on the whole congregation being solvent. Church buildings come and go. Communities don’t. When every member has a house that is paid off, the congregation now has access to greater ability to serve the community. Church was supposed to be about service, not spreading the word. People learned the word because they saw the fruits of a stable community.

I am not arguing for Christianity or any one religion. If you made pick one, I would pick Buddhism. I am arguing for loving, connected communities. Garden shares, hippy houses, communes, Kibbutz- these are the kinds of communities we should be building, not gated communities. We should be working towards having our homes off the grid, either solar or wind, and selling our excess energy back to the state, and the excess energy should be running desalination plants to take back some of the rising water from global warming. We need places where people are safe to love, share time, share food, share gardens, and look after each other from birth to death. Few people want to die alone in a nursing home. Hell, go visit a nursing home and tell me you want you to sign up for that! Urinating in your bed because there is not enough staff to answer your call light. Or people making you eat faster than you can swallow because they have a schedule.

Sign me up for community, a people who care and look after one another. They care about the homes and the land the homes reside on. Sign me up for love. Hold the kind of love for me that you would not leave me searching a world of crazy for something sane and stable. I would do this for you. Love does not seek to isolate. We are healthiest in communities because we are social. Being kind, sharing, and serving has always been the attributes of love.