Originally appeared Sept. 11, 1997, in the Windy City Times.
FROM SEVERAL QUARTERS within the gay community, gay men have lately been hearing the message that they should settle down and form relationships.
The rationales for this generously offered free advice range across the moral spectrum: It will result in a more emotionally satisfying life; it will promote personal maturity; it will offer a more fulfilling sex life; it will provide someone to take care of you when you are old or sick; it will keep you from getting AIDS; it will lower the rate of HIV transmission below epidemic levels; it will reduce promiscuity, which is sinful; it will promote social stability; and so forth.
Each of these deserves a thoughtful response on its own, but we can also offer some more general cautionary notes.
Contrary to their claims, these writers are hardly courageous Jeremiahs crying out an unwelcome doctrine to rootless and anomic individuals. In fact, our whole modern culture is pervaded by the assumption of coupledom and strongly biased toward rewarding it - joint tax returns, family memberships in clubs, benefits for unmarried domestic partners, media images of couples, even "double occupancy" travel packages.
In fact, the notion that one "ought" to be in a relationship scarcely needs to be promoted to gays. If anything, gays tend to form relationships too easily, too unsuspectingly. Some people seem to end one relationship and within weeks announce that they are in a new one.
The belief that one can find happiness only in a relationship is responsible for the undue haste with which people unwarily enter unsuitable relationships, and the cause of a great deal of later unhappiness. If anything, gays need to start exercising more caution, more restraint. Instead of trying to provide supports for mismatched gay couples, perhaps we ought to provide support and teach coping skills to people to live on their own.
Now no one need doubt that relationships can be a good thing and that many people find fulfillment in them. But we should also make it clear that not everyone is a good candidate for a relationship. History and literature, to say nothing of the lives of our friends, provide abundant examples of people psychologically stuck in empty, drab, stultifying, demeaning, damaging and emotionally draining, miserable relationships.
Some people are unpleasant or mean-spirited, emotionally immature or psychologically unstable, insensitive or dull, or even complete jerks. Urging a relationships on such people would be a disservice to them or their potential partner.
Other people may be pleasant and interesting enough to be decent partners, but are focused on concerns other than a relationship: a career, a personal goal, a life-project or an exploration of their own individual potential.
Relationships take a good deal of time and work to foster and to maintain, as well as a good deal of compromising. Many people may not find the rewards commensurate with the time and effort required. One may simply be a bachelor.
And then too, for all of us, it is a matter of luck, chance or grace that someone falls in love with us at the same time that we fall in love with them. The wonder is not that falling in love does not happen more, but that it happens as often as it does.
The plain truth is that people are different from one another. They grow up developing different needs for personal space, varying desires to compromise, different needs for companionship and support, different abilities to cope with solitude.
Some people may have insecurities or self-esteem needs that can be met only with or by a partner. Some people, it seems, do not even know how to conduct a life on their own. They take their bearings from interaction with other people: They want the mental or emotional "structure" that others provide. Barbra Streisand's preposterous and neurotic song "People" is their anthem.
Other people develop a greater capacity for autonomy, for acting alone, for being able to amuse themselves, to make new friends easily, for developing projects that are personally satisfying. Absent a need to be in a relationship, they choose not to enter one.
Even heterosexuals are showing greater skepticism about relationships and marriage. Until the 1950s and 1960s, even apart from love heterosexual marriage was a virtual necessity: Women married to guarantee a means of support, particularly while they reared children, while men married to have a home and access to sex.
But those necessities have been obviated by the large number of women now employed and self-supporting, the large number of labor-saving devices that enable a single male to manage his own household satisfactorily, and the availability of birth control which provided sexual opportunities without the inevitability of children.
Gays face those same social realities: employment by virtually all participants; ease of single-household management; ready access to sex without the risk of children; and the similarly reduced inducements to long-term relationships. In addition, gays as two equal employed people without the strong shared bond of children and the problems of raising them, with which heterosexuals are deeply concerned, can easily find themselves growing apart and their interests diverging.
A different sort of obstacle to male-male relationships is the tendency of males "by nature" to be promiscuous. This is one of the best attested findings cross-culturally and among virtually all species of animals. The male tendency to seek a multiplicity of sexual partners is simply built into their genes, since those men whose behavioral tendencies were most reproduced were those who most widely propagated their genes; in turn, our own genes' "desire" to reproduce themselves is best served by inducing similar behavior on our part.
This is not to argue that we should always give in to "nature" nor to justify whatever "nature" suggests. Biology need not always win out, but it is always waiting for an opportunity to assert itself. So a social prescription that ignores "nature" or thinks it can be countered with a little exhortation is likely to have only limited success. And at the individual level it will create an unrealistic expectation of what is likely - or possible - for long-term male relationships.
Given all this, gay relationships need to be advocated or discussed with a good deal less simple-mindedness, a good deal more awareness of the obstacles and difficulties, and in a full awareness of the variety of human beings and our individual needs and capacities.