We go through the world mostly unaware that our thoughts are made up of emotions – how the brain works in our ever-growing distortion of who we are. We categorize, we categorize, we have – this is how we define the maelstrom into meaning. It is a useful influence – without it, there would be no science or myth, no taxonomies and theorems, no poems and plots. It is also a hindrance – the most beautiful, beneficial, and transformative experiences in life transcend the categories that our culture has created to create confusion of consciousness, and nowhere more than in relationships – the mysterious blessings that bridge the gulf between people. one knowledge is another.
When we hide the words friend through overuse and misuse, when we create romantic relationships with responsibilities dictated by rigid, unrealistic expectations, we become prisoners of our own emotions. The history of feeling is the history of characters too small to have the affections that we are capable of – variable and dynamic changes from one form to another and back again. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of vulnerability to have an outsider’s perspective, to take each new experience, new relationship, new perspective on its goals and allow it to enrich life.
This is what Rhaina Cohen is investigating Some Essentials: Rethinking Life and Friendship at the Center (public library) – a journalistic study of the vast but invisible world of intimate intimate relationships, describing pairs of people in different situations and stages of life supported by such relationships, people who have “redrawn the boundaries of friendship, moving the lines further and further to include more space in each other’s lives and a friend,” people who meet each other.
What appears in the image of the type of relationship “hidden in plain sight” is a solution to the abuse of “a good place to visit one place” and “an invitation to expand what is open to us,” by giving a reminder. that we pay the price of living according to our culture:
While we weaken friendships by expecting too little, we destroy romantic relationships by expecting too much.
A generation after Andrew Sullivan celebrated the prize of friendship in a romantic culture, Cohen writes:
This is a book about friends who have been a us, although they have no records, no rituals, and few precious examples to lead them to long-term platonic devotion. These are friends who have moved across countries and continents together. They have been taking great care of their friends through organ transplants and medical care. They are co-parents, co-owners, and do-gooders for each other. They belong to a group that has no name or membership form, and often do not know that there are others like them. It fits with what Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, called “significant others.” Avoiding a normal life, these friends face dangers and discover things they could never have.
Recognizing that his interest in the subject is speculative, fueled by his growing relationship with another woman who is similar to his family, Cohen sees these anti-group relationships as an anti-cultural act of courage and resistance:
I began to see how these unusual relationships can also be a source of frustration – disrupting the thinking of people who affect our intimate life: That the central and most important person in a person’s life should be a lover, and friends are helpers. That romantic love is real, and if people claim to feel strong love, it’s not true actually being platonic. That adults who raise children together must have sex with each other, and marriage must be treated specially by the government.
It is an eye to the long line of people who have defied the groups of their time and place – the human race Comparisonwhich I wrote specifically to explore such relationships – he adds:
Criticism of social norms is not new, and platonic friendships are not the only critics. People who are feminist, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromatic, celibate, or cohabiting have questioned these ideas for years, if not centuries. Both have presented the opposite of what Eleanor Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Southampton, calls forced marriages: the idea that having a long-term relationship with one woman is necessary for a person to be a normal, successful adult. This is the opposite of Adrienne Rich’s feminist idea of ”forced homosexuality” – the idea, reinforced by social pressure and practical incentives, that the only valid and acceptable relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children force couples to get married, comparing people who find their “one true love” to living “happily ever after.”
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It can be confusing to be torn between the life you have and the life you believe you should be living.
On the edge of Other Important InformationCohen tells the stories of people who cut through the chaos to create lives that serve them through relationships made with people who benefit from the deepest and most authentic parts of themselves, relationships that rethink what it means to love and be loved, to see and be loved. saw – relationships such as Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.
Finish with the poet and philosopher David Whyte on love and reject the brutality of romantic literature, then return to Coleridge on the complexities of friendship and romantic love.