Just following on from the post I just sent on the GB friendship meeting tomorrow:
Thank-You Note I owe so much to those I don't love. The relief as I agree that someone else needs them more. The happiness that I'm not the wolf to their sheep. The peace I feel with them, the freedom--- love can neither give nor take that. I don't wait for them, as in window-to-door-and-back. Almost as patient as a sundial, I understand what love can't and forgive as love never would. >From a rendezvous to a letter is just a few days or weeks, not an eternity. Trips with them always go smoothly, concerts are heard, cathedrals visited, scenery is seen. And when seven hills and rivers come between us, the hills and rivers can be found on any map. They deserve the credit if I live in three dimensions, in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space with a genuine, shifting horizon. They themselves don't realize how much they hold in their empty hands. "I don't owe them a thing," would be love's answer to this open question. Wislawa Szymborska I am sometimes asked by guys why they should bother entering the gay community. Can it give them a lover, they ask. Can it give them sex? Can it help them avoid being forced into marriage? Can it help with practical problems like finding a job? And the truth is that one can't give a clear affirmation to any of these. A lover? Maybe. Sex? Possibly. Avoiding marriage? Some problems are too personal for outsiders to tackle. A job? Well, unlikely, to be honest. But there is one thing the community can fairly reliably provide, and that is friendship. Despite the many differences between people who come into the community, our sexuality is still something which can connect us. I've been in strange cities and made friends from just the next table simply because we recognised each other as gay. I've met friends of friends of friends, who have become close friends too, met people from all countries and cultures in Bombay, who on the slightest of connection have become friends, and all because of this common link of our sexuality. To a large extent, I guess, this comes from being a minority and having to stick together, which suggests that once homosexuality is part of the mainstream then these automatic friendships will stop happening. Its a sad prospect, but still a distant one, I feel. I have made enough friends in countries where there's high acceptance of homosexuality, to know that. So the community can offer friendship. Yet it sometimes seems to me that the nature of that friendship can be mistaken (and this is a general issue, not just specific to the gay community). What does a friendship entail? To all too many people it seems to require some, or all, of the following: - spending nearly all your free time with the friend. - being in touch all the time with the friend. - listening to your friend's deepest, most emotional feelings, and revealing your own. - sharing all your interests with your friend. - not having many other friends or, at least, other friends whom the friend doesn't know. - and the clincher: feeling guilty if you can't do any of the above, because you feel you owe it to the friend. We've all known 'friends' who feel this way. But is this really friendship? There is one person I am willing to do this with, and that's my boyfriend (and some of these things even we wouldn't expect from each other). And I'm willing to do these things because he is my boyfriend and we love each other and we change each other to some extent and because that is what a relationship is about. I don't think its what a friendship is about. Its this truth that Wislawa captures so brilliantly in this poem. We value our friends not because we love them, but because we don't have to - at least not with the intensity and exclusivity that love can demand. Friends can offer the unfettered companionship, the easy presence, the undemanding support, just the pleasure of having someone you know with whom you can go to a restaurant or a film. And its all the better for knowing that you don't have to be in touch all the time or pouring out all your feelings. Friends offer the gift of lightness in interaction, they allow you to go for weeks without being in touch, and then when you pick up the phone you can pick up the threads where you left them with no problem. Friends matter so much, because they don't really matter... they don't matter enough for you to keep thinking about them, about what they are feeling, about what you should be doing with them, all the time. Friends offer relief from all that. This is NOT to say that one should take friends for granted or never bother too much with friends. I will make huge efforts for my friends, if they need it. I will never take their feelings or their friendship for granted. Nor does it mean I love my boyfriend any the less for the intensity a relationship demands. What we get from each other, no friend could get, which is why we are together. Of course, there are elements of both relationships in each other. My boyfriend and I do have easy, just friendly times; there are friends where there is almost an element of love in what we have. Yet the truth of what Wislawa says mostly holds. I owe my boyfriend for the love we have, for the relationship between us. I owe my friends for the love we don't have, the lightness of connection, the ease of support that only real friendship brings. Vikram ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! 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