Faith Dance

Cross-Gender Friend or Fiancée: Friendship or Eros?

One of the questions posed to me frequently focuses on discerning the difference between a close cross-gender friend and a potential marital partner. 

With deliberate focus, I've appealed to singles in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions while I was critical of the romantic myth.  This myth includes the belief that there is a perfect partner for us, a perfect match in which sexualized intimacy is realized in marital bliss with unrivaled happiness forever and ever. All other relationships are peripheral to the ideal romantic couple's idealized absorption in each other. Okay, lest someone think I am exaggerating, popular songs express so much of this idealization: "Ain't no mountain high enough," "You will always be my endless love," and so on.

The "right person" is central to romantic ideology. According to the romantic myth, perfect union is finding the perfect match, the "right person." You find the right person through chemistry, then add intimacy, and abracadabra, you both will be sexually, spiritually and emotionally fulfilled forever and ever. In the myth, "Love and sexuality are fused together in the ideology of romance" (Kathy Werking). 

Friendship, Sexuality, and Physical Closeness

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."  

Evangelical Attitudes Toward Marriage and Cross-Gender Friendships are Changing

It wasn't that long ago when you could not find a book by a mainstream evangelical publisher to acknowledge the goodness and beauty of transmarital, intimate cross-gender friendships. Go back twenty years, twenty-five, and thirty years and you will not find anything like that in books on marriage. But society and evangelical views of women have changed rapidly in the last 30 years. 

And the attitudes toward close, cross-gender friendships are changing, too. Are You Waiting for "The One"?: Cultivating Realistic, Positive Expectations for Christian Marriage by Margaret Kim Peterson and Dwight Peterson is a refreshingly new book published by IVP. While IVP turned down my book proposal, they reveal the changing attitudes toward cross-gender friendship in this book aimed at those who are young adults and preparing marriage. Not only is the book to be commended for supporting cgfs, it promotes romantic realism rather than romantic idealism. I maintain this has immense implications in cgfs before they ever get married and then after they are married. 

Are Passionate Friendships Returning?

One of the things I sought to highlight in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions was the beauty and deep goodness of "passionate friendships" with a particular focus toward male-female friendship.   As I attempted to briefly demonstrate in the book, deep love between friends (emotional commitment, deep attachment, intensity of relationship, thought preoccupation, warm physical affection including cuddling, holding hands, or close physical touch, vulnerability, sweet language, etc.) has a long and rich history--particularly true among Christians.  

Christianity (which affirms the triune God is love) has scores and scores of stories of passionate friendships going back to the life of Christ. Then the friendships of Naomi and Ruth plus David and Jonathan have encouraged many friends to love each other passionately throughout their lives.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand and Cross-Gender Friendships

I'm not Catholic. I have come to deeply respect my Catholic brothers and sisters--especially when then write on friendship. I discovered such a rich history in Catholic spirituality when I was researching for Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions. 

This is not intended to be a long post. I want to share my great delight in finding another Catholic voice on the beauty and vision of communion and friendship for men and women who are not married to each other. The late philosopher, Dietrich Von Hildebrand. I did not know of him prior to the publication of SUSP. 

Imagine my delight as I was reading his chapter on friendship between men and women who are not married to each other when he described that it is gloriously possible for them to experience "spiritual communion" in friendship.

Add another Catholic voice to those who believe in sacred unions! Love, deep love has a way of seeking union. A man and women who are not married to each other, may as friends, experience a "purely spiritual communion of singular depth, ardor, and purity, and particular completion, mutual understanding and enrichment."  He adds, "Through this communion, Jesus (who said, 'Wherever two shall meet in my name, there I shall be also) is glorified." 

It is rare to find such positive language of communion and friendship among evangelicals. It is typical for evangelicals to only focus on one relationship as a form of communion or oneness: marriage. Evangelicals tend not to see love and oneness in friendship as significant for spiritual and sexual formation. 

Jesus prayed that we would all (including men and women who are not married to each other) be one.