One ongoing theme in this blog centers around deep intimacy and physical closeness in friendship. I have particularly focused on cross-gender friendships but I also have looked at friendships beyond male-female love. Saturday, my good friend Jennifer Roach shared a link on my FB wall regarding some simple thoughts from a middle aged Catholic celibate man who enjoys physical affection in friendship with women. He wrote:
"I like holding hands, arms around waists, hugs and light kisses. The best relationship I ever had was a Platonic friendship with a woman who was openly and unconsciously affectionate...Were I ever to marry, I believe it would be with just such a woman." It's a simple but thoughtful post.
He laments about how for many men (and some women too) physical affection is not on their radar screen--especially in friendship.
It reminded me of our deep embrace of post-Freud sexualized assumptions about love, romance, and physical closeness in contemporary America. You see, other cultures not impacted by Freud embrace a variety of expressions of physical intimacy in friendship. On the same planet, different time zone, about 7,000 miles from me, in India, present-day affection between male friends (no sex on the table) include public handholding--interlocking fingers and pressed palms--handholding.
One Indian, commenting on physical affection, "Indian men show no shame in interlocking fingers and pressing palms."
It's interesting that this writer talked about "no shame." How much have Freudian assumptions about physical closeness shamed men and women from practicing affection in public? In private?
Here are some old pictures of men in America embracing each other in a different era:
Ponder another one:
Pretty close, wouldn't you say? Look at this next one:
John Isbon in his book, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in EveryDay American Photography has "everyday" common, pictures of physical closeness like these. He writes, "American males, together in pairs and larger groups, once had professional portraits of themselves taken with a revealing frequency, in dramatic contrast to the virtual lack of the practice today. The poses they once commonly struck were even more revealing than the fact that the portrait was taken. With notable nonchalance, they might hold hands, sit on a companion’s lap, share a chair, drape their arms around each other" (italics inserted). This was before Freud and company impacted physical intimacy and friendship.
Then he writes about how sexualizing affection began to make it's impact as the twentieth century progressed early on: "The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s."
If you read my post about disputable matters and breastfeeding, Isbon's comments here reveal how much intimate physical affection became problematic in every relationship (parenting and friendship) but the sexual/romantic couple in the early part of the twentieth century. No matter where one turns in reading the history of friendship in America in the first twenty years of last century, one encounters a profound growing discomfort with physical intimacy in friendship. It's no wonder so many of us are uncomfortable about expressing physical closeness (handholding, cuddling, lingering physical touch, shoulder and foot massages, and so on) outside of romance.
I can tell you at least in the evangelical community, contemporary female friendships are far ahead of male friendships expressing physical closeness. In a recent public setting ("public" meaning there were more than two people present) I saw one female friend lavishly express affection/tenderness through a brief shoulder massage, and lingering physical touch (at least 15 minutes) with the other friend just soaking it in. It was beautiful. It was physical tenderness. It wasn't a warmup to foreplay. This reflects the growth and progress in female friendship, post-Freud. Male friendship, even in the evangelical community hasn't fared that well.
Had I done that in "public" with one of my female friends, I would have to brace myself for the implications of a countercultural or a counternormative response. We could do it, but we better be prepared for a counternormative backlash.
But physical closeness in friendship is returning in dyadic friendships. Intentional choices, intentional practices to deconstruct Freud, to tear down the wall between sexuality and friendship brick by brick are happening. Deep expressions of physical tenderness are not to be sequestered for only romantic relationships or sexual relationships. All affectionate impulses and longings are not, Freudian sex-laden. One can embrace deep feelings, deep emotions, deep tenderness, deep physical affection as love in friendship--not sexualized love.
Where do you find yourself?
In God's world (Christian or non-Christian), God is moving and working in and through friends who are counterFreud, counternormative. To embrace this, means you open yourself up to risk, criticism, difference, and gossip. But it also means you open yourself up to Love greater than cultural rules and limitations.
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