#10: If it takes a village, why should we make one person our universe?
I’m back from an incredible 10-day adventure to Taiwan with my partner and two good friends, L and P. As we regrouped to sort our expenses on who owes what for all the little costs accumulated along the way— meals, bike rides, taxis, various activities like bowling and karaoke— we realized we didn’t need the spreadsheets or the apps we’ve previously used to make such calculations. Our financial privilege and that the cost of day to day spending in the country was low definitely made it easier to be carefree about ensuring we each paid our precise shares. As long as we all felt good about the general distribution of costs, there was no need to tally every expense.
It makes total sense, because L and P have demonstrated time and again what it looks like to relate to each other beyond quid pro quo calculations. They've opened their home to me and my partner, cooked amazing meals for us, checked in on the minutiae of our lives without second thought - all out of the pure joy of caring for friends, and not because they're keeping score. My partner and I have been stressing about how to repay this generosity, but they insist there’s no need to. Letting go of our capitalistic reflex to micro-account who “owes” who still feels foreign and that’s given me reason to pause and reflect.
A few weeks ago, I was laid up in bed with a bad cold and another friend offered to pick up and send me some groceries. On its face, it was such a simple and sweet act of care from my friend. I immediately dismissed it as too much of an imposition, telling him I could easily get my groceries delivered via an app. Why would I ask a friend to spend their time and energy on something I could pay someone else to do? In hindsight, it would have been nice to spend some unstructured time with this friend and accept his help, my contagiousness notwithstanding. It’s like I was subconsciously keeping score of what I’ve given in the friendship, and didn’t want to feel indebted or dependent on him or anyone else. But I keep thinking about what we miss when we don’t accept or give care to/from people because we feel that we can’t ask for these things from people who aren’t our partners or family.
I’ve been growing more frustrated by how we’re so conditioned (by the ruthless forces of extractive capitalism) to move through the world as self-contained units, pushing away anything that doesn’t directly serve our personal grind. We hesitate to ask for help, receive care, or make ourselves vulnerable. We're taught to worship fierce independence and going it alone, thanks to a capitalist culture that reduces everything to transactions and what we can extract from each other. But I don’t want to move in this way anymore.
It’s hard to be any other way though, especially in a place like New York. The ridiculous cost of living here drains us of any bandwidth to get together more often and more casually. We kill ourselves at jobs to fund these overpriced existences, with little time or energy left for the low-key hangouts and unstructured drop ins that would allow me to feel closer to my friends. Aside from some of my friends with spacious abodes, most of us live in tiny apartments that can’t accommodate any decently sized gatherings, so we turn to restaurants to host our hangouts, scheduled out weeks in advance. Many of my friends don’t want the hassle of going out to [typically pricey] restaurants so often, so we’re pretty much out of luck for third spaces where we can simple exist together outside the grind of work and consumption. Unscheduled drop-ins aren’t really feasible in New York and many places like it, so I just don’t see a lot of my friends anymore.
I was curious about the origin of the term and idea of third spaces— places outside work or home — and learned that it was sociologist Ray Oldenburg who coined this term to describe these places that once anchored community life. He defined it as a place where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity. In this post-pandemic era of remote work and decreased socializing, do we even have real third places anymore? Allie Conti wrote in the Atlantic that basically what’s replaced these city hangouts are just “ersatz third places.”
She puts it like this: “The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time. Urban-dwelling Americans, however, tend to place work at the center of life in part because cities are so expensive to live in. They might work 50-hour weeks to survive, leaving little to no time for leisure and community engagement. Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.” Is this not us?? Feeling ~seen~.
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Outdoor public spaces are cool when it's nice out. But what about the many months in NY when it's frigid or sweltering? With no third places, I feel like sometimes we're left grasping at shreds of intimacy, settling for rigidly scheduled "friend-dates" at pricey venues because we don’t have authentic third spaces. If you’re reading this and we are friends who catch up mostly at restaurants, I need you to know I still enjoy our restaurant catch ups—I mean I pretty much live to go to restaurants— but I’ve been finding that I spend more time with the friends who can afford these venues or enjoy this type of catch up and less time with the friends who don’t. Capitalism, baby.
Maybe if we practiced helping each other more with day-to-day small tasks, we'd build real community instead of living this false American ideal of self-sufficiency in isolated units. One of my favorite writers, Haley Nahman, once shared advice about friendship that really resonated. She basically said friendships aren't forged through monthly happy hour catch-ups, but by doing mundane things together - picking up groceries, helping someone move. So if you're trying to build closeness with someone, actually ask them to pick you up from the airport (okay, maybe not JFK - that place is a nightmare) or help your friends with small tasks. I think in these little ways we can start to cultivate authentic community infrastructure.
I’ve been feeling the lack of social infrastructure in my bones when confronting my future role as primary caretaker for my older sister Charlene. She’s a year older than me, but my family and I have had to take care of her like a child. She has autism with high support needs, meaning she has restricted social communication skills, and requires substantial, 24 hour care. For now, my parents are still able to provide that intensive care, but I know the mantle will pass to me sooner rather than later. As someone who is choosing not to have children, the prospect of becoming a full-time parent to my sister is overwhelming and daunting to say the least. «« I really had to sit with that thought and give myself permission to say this out loud.
Some wonderful friends have generously offered to pitch in with caring for Charlene down the line. And isn't that just so beautifully kind? At the same time, it's forced me to really examine the hangups and boundaries I have around asking for help and leaning on my community in that way. I've worked hard to negotiate healthy boundaries in romantic partnerships, but definitely haven't been as intentional about doing that work with platonic friendships. Like, what are the reasonable limits there before it becomes an imposition?
Just as I’ve begun to struggle with these topics, writer and journalist Anne Helen Petersen, who pens an excellent newsletter called Culture Study (likely one of the most popular newsletters that exists now, I think?) posed this timely question: “What parameters have been set for us by convention that are keeping us out of one another’s business?” She was inspired to ask this question because of the book How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong, where the author explores how “there is a line to cross toward more intimacy and interdependence when we put aside the modern conventions of friendship and get up in one another’s business.” The very American doctrination of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, prizing the insular nuclear family unit, has cut us off from building true community, and the interdependence we all need to thrive. I would link it here but it was a paid subscriber thread.
But I did dig into some of Birdsong’s work this week and came across this book talk, where she says “The way we’re socialized into the American Dream- anyone with a little grit and determination can work really hard and find success and happiness. It’s written as independence, the insular nuclear family is part of that, being wealthy is part of that, so we have ideas of what it means to be successful and happy….It’s an orientation toward lives that seek to disconnect us from other people.” She’s saying that this disconnect is exacerbated by the message we receive that asking for help is a sign of weakness and failure.
The traditional nuclear family ideal was never meant to solely provide for the full depth of our human needs. It's a relatively recent, unrealistic invention that places way too much burden on one or two partners to be everything for each other - co-parent, best friend, lover, life coach, spiritual confidant. As Birdsong puts it, "The insular nuclear family is an anomaly that's not serving us." I love that this totally mainstream, non-polyamorous writer is making the same point non-monogamous folks have been screaming about for so long.
We’re bombarded with societal narratives that tell us having a life outside our one romantic partner and nuclear family is selfish. How often do we see people get shamed for having hobbies, friends, and any joy separate from their spouse and kids? This mindset promotes an unhealthy overdependence on this monogamous falsehood— it’s just not sustainable for a single person to uphold. The idea that we should have one person meeting all our needs is wildly limited.
No individual can be the sole source fulfilling every aspect of our human experiences and yearnings. Expecting that heavy burden from just your one partner is unrealistic and is a recipe for resentment. I’m not saying everyone should be polyamorous or that any one way of relating is superior, but I am challenging some of these monogamous “one true soulmate” norms because they prevent us from building community beyond just couples or family units.
So where do we go from here? Here is where I got serious writer’s block, btw. Birdsong writes that we need to reimagine what it means to think beyond these rigid norms around who has access to our lives and labor. We need a broader web of sustained care and support, one that allows us to move easily between different roles as our needs evolve. This is the point I’ve been making in previous posts how many people (of course not all people) require more expansive intimate relationships beyond the confines of a single, monogamous partnership. Just as we aren’t meant to be self contained islands, many people aren’t meant to channel all their intimacy and desire through just one person.
I’d love a world in which we all get to experience the diversity of ways care and intimacy can manifest - whether that's dynamic, fulfilling friendships, bringing more folks into our innermost circles, or exploring the full spectrum of committed non-monogamous ways of loving.
As I prepare for the likelihood of someday being Charlene's primary caretaker, I'm forced to reckon with my own conditioning around self-reliance. The ingrained revulsion to accepting help. I appreciate the way Birdsong reframes it: "Asking for help is one of the things we can do to honor the people who care about us. It allows for the divine circle of giving and receiving, reminds us that we're in community with each other where both people are practicing generosity."
We have to look to ways of living in community. We need to relearn how to open ourselves up to different, negotiated boundaries and set aside the restrictive scripts dictating who can access our innermost lives. As Birdsong says, we must "get rid of the very narrow confines of how we think about friendship and what we think friendship is for."
Enjoy these gifs I made of my favorite moments in Taiwan, and then take a moment to share Ask a Hedonist with a friend.
I completely forgot to mention how I am attempting to create a third place with Chinese Dinner and how even that is becoming cost prohibitive to some people now too. But it’s the closest thing I have to a third place.
I loved these meditations, and the braiding together of thoughts on caregiving, travel and ethical non-monogamy. This also made me think of a braided piece I put together during our last cold NYC winter. I wonder if being pent up inside and away from each other naturally gives rise to these longings for third spaces where we can be more often together, and for models from the past or from nature that we might recreate for a better future. This was the piece:
https://ryanroseweaver.substack.com/p/3-mourning-and-re-making-the-village