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labingi"Platonic Bonding" as "Relationship Orientation"
I told![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skinintheway that I would write a post about how I bond with people, which—for want of a word—I've been calling "platonic bonding." For clarity, the kind of bonding I'm talking about here is serious interpersonal love (or in love) bonding of the kind we'd generally associate with wanting someone for a partner. Here goes:
Let me start by laying out our more standard cultural paradigm as a baseline. We generally consider partner-bonding to involve some degree of the following kinds of attachments:
* sexual desire
* romantic attraction
* interpersonal bonding
As I think of it, sexual desire encompasses being physically drawn to someone; wanting to sleep with them, touch them; being wowed by their physical appearance; and so on. Romantic attraction (or falling in love/infatuation), which is often entangled with sexual desire, has an added dimension of thinking a person is fantastic, enthralling, admirable, impossible to get out of one's head, possibly a kindred spirit, or at any rate having a personality one feels "sparks" with. Interpersonal bonding occurs when people are in relationship with a degree of trust, mutual support, social contact, considerable knowledge of each other, often shared interests/pastimes, a sense of the reliability of the relationship, etc.
In our standard cultural narrative, people generally bond with a partner when they experience sexual attraction for someone, which grows (be it at first sight or comparatively slowly) into romantic attraction. If the feelings are mutual, the two people will get into a relationship and form an interpersonal bond, which may eventually become a long-term partnership. A less common but equally socially acceptable variant is the "friends falling in love" version, in which two people begin with an interpersonal bond, which then grows into sexual and romantic attraction. What doesn't vary is that a "partner" is ideally (and in our cultural narratives almost by definition) someone with whom one has strong sexual, romantic, and interpersonal bonding. It is widely understood that the sexual and romantic aspects may attenuate with time, but it's also widely regarded as a sad thing to be avoided if possible.
Most acknowledged sexual orientations are addressed by this formula. Demisexuals, pretty much by definition, hang out in the "friends fall in love" zone. Traditionally straight, gay, and bi people can generally fall anywhere on the spectra above.
Way off in the social margins but increasingly comprehensible to society at large are asexuals, who don't experience much/any sexual attraction. For them, partnering occurs through some combination of feeling romantic attachment and/or interpersonal bonding without the sexual desire.
It is also commonly understood that sexual attraction can exist without being in love or having an interpersonal relationship and that romantic love can exist without evolving into interpersonal love (ex. unrequited). But these situations don't lead to partnering, since partnering is interpersonal by definition. (The idea that romantic attraction can exist without sexual attraction generally boggles minds.)
And Then There Was Me
I don't fit any of these categories. (And I'm far from the only one. Perhaps this essay will resonate with someone else and help them feel less frustrated. Who knows?) There is no word I know for how I bond with potential partners. I have been calling it "platonic bonding" for years now, but that's pretty misleading because it connotes "non-sexual by definition," and that's not what I mean.
What I mean is sexual desire is not important to how I bond.
That sentence is simple but the concept surprisingly really hard for modern Western society to get. I am akin to an asexual in this, but I don't define as asexual because I have a definite sex drive and would consider myself fortunate, all things being equal, to be in a sexual relationship with really awesome sex.
(Side note: there is a sort of side-definition of "asexual" that encompasses someone with an up to normative sex drive but who isn't really invested in having sexual relationships with other people. I could fit under that definition, but it's never been widely used, and the asexual community itself seems to be steering away from it, so it doesn't seem worthwhile to class myself that way.)
For me—it bears reiterating—sexual attraction just doesn't affect my bonding with potential partners, at least not much.
Some notes on my sexuality. I'm heterosexual—or straight-gray, if you prefer. I have never been sexually attracted to another woman. My sexual attraction for men usually—and with some exceptions—involves very little drive to actually sleep with them. I rarely feel any impulse to even think about that. Rather I tend to fix on a sort of visual admiration that is definitely sexual and entirely different from aesthetic appreciation I often have for other women. I have an active fantasy life—plus or minus being too exhausted by life to have sexual desire—but it is entirely "fan fictional"; it only involves characters, never me, never men I actually know—never real people at all, except perhaps an occasional historical figure. It may involve a man and woman or two men but never two women. However, I am entirely capable of being in the subjectivity of a male character attracted to a woman. In real life, I very rarely experience much pleasure having sex, though I sometimes want to have it for the social bonding. In these respects I do consider myself "on the asexual spectrum," especially as my sex drive overall has decreased with age.
However, in one way, I fit perfectly our dominant stereotype of women's sexuality: sexual attraction and romantic attraction are strongly linked for me. It is very rare for me to be sexually attracted to someone I don't have some degree of romantic attraction for.
Some Examples of Bonding and What They Illustrate
At fifteen on the bus coming back from the Mt. Lassen field trip while night descended and the radio played "Leaving on a Jet Plane," I realized I was in love with JD. I admired him profusely: he was incredibly intelligent, witty, nice, shared all my political leanings, had great courage of his convictions (this was a guy who, in 1990, wore lipstick and fishnet stockings at a Catholic school to show solidarity with his gay friends), and was precisely my physical type right down to the huge, brown eyes. I was in love with him for seven years. But I never had an interpersonal relationship with him. I never really knew him outside of school.
I'm not demi. I'm perfectly capable of falling madly sexually in love with someone without knowing them interpersonally. And, more to the point, sexual attraction, for me, does not grow out of romantic attraction/interpersonal attraction. If it wasn't there to start with, it's not going to develop—or at best mildly.
I am also entirely capable of falling in love without any sexual attraction. When I was seventeen and on vacation in Greece, I fell for a fellow female vacationer. I was swept away by her within 24 hours of meeting: I couldn't stop thinking about her, I couldn't take my eyes off her, I couldn't say two coherent words to her, I felt a profound need to have her in my life—and was rather hurt that she stopped answering my letters after one or two. I also found her extremely beautiful, but I never had any desire for any kind of sexual contact, not a kiss, not a touch, nothing.
On a much more emotionally profound and interpersonally bonded level, this is what I felt for R, the person whose betrayal of our friendship I've been struggling with for the past couple of years. Though not so adolescently weak in the knees, I was also bowled over by her: I found her brilliant, witty, kind, a true kindred spirit—and also very beautiful, but not in a way I ever wanted to be physically close to. I did have a friendship with her, and she is someone I explicitly considered at one time as a possible good partner. She wouldn't have been, but it was plausible to me. And that was partner bonding completely without sexual attraction.
Until my present partner, the most successful partnership of my life was with G, a woman for whom I had neither sexual nor romantic attraction. But as I got to know her over a couple of years, I found her a true kindred spirit, a bright and intelligent soul with whom I had much in common and whom I could imagine myself living with happily—even though she's thirteen years older and in poor health. I was ready to go the distance, to take care of her in her ailing years and watch her die of old age. She is the one who broke up with me. If she hadn't, we might still have split up eventually over my wanting to adopt and her not being able to handle the stress of raising more children after her three. But we might have stayed together. I might even have revised my adoption plans to be with her. I did want an open door in our relationship to the possibility of having a sexual relationship with a man at some point. She saw that as a sign I had drifted away from wanting to partner. Not so. I was very committed to her. I am glad to say I am still good friends with her.
Prior to my present partner, my most conventional romantic relationship was with JR. Now, he was looking for a friend with benefits, and I was looking for a partner to adopt kids with, so it was a foregone conclusion we wouldn't stay together. As to my feelings, I always found him "sort of attractive" and liked him a great deal as a friend. (His feelings for me were much the same, I think, maybe somewhat more sexual attraction.) There was a time I told myself I loved him, but that was me trying to fit the social narrative. He—wiser—had the good sense to tell me he didn't love me back. That hurt at the time, but he was right, and really I wasn't meant to love him either. We were meant to be good friends, and we still are. In terms of bonding, my sexual attraction for him never budged much. It was moderate at the start and got milder over time. That's all.
My present partner, also male and a sexual partner, is someone I initially didn't find attractive at all but liked pretty well right away, and on the strengths of a friend's avowal that we'd be a good couple, I took a chance on dating, and it was a good choice. My sexual attraction for him has grown over the years with my interpersonal bond, but not a lot. I now find him "sort of attractive." I've never been very romantically attracted to him, though I love him profoundly. In many ways, my bond with him is much like my bond with G, but a better fit for raising kids, socially easier because it looks like a standard male/female pairing from the outside, and somewhat more sexual (though not very).
In essence, what I need to consider someone as a potential partner is twofold:
1) A strong sense of interpersonal friendship;
2) A strong sense that our lives would be compatible for living together (which involves an ability to trust our commitment).
Whether I feel sexual or romantic attraction just isn't relevant to this basic equation. Mind you, sexual attraction and romantic attraction are nice, and they would be an added benefit. But think of it this way: most folks would find it nice if their true love ended up being drop dead gorgeous, but this doesn't mean they can't be happily married to an average-looking person. Or to use a different example, most would consider it a blessing if their true love was independently wealthy: no worries about health insurance, working a job you hate, or dying poor! But few would restrict themselves to only dating millionaires. I have nothing at all against sexual-romantic attraction; I just don't need it to partner with someone. At the end of the day, it has no effect I have yet discerned on how much I love them, how committed I am to them, or how happy I am with them.
Coda
There's an episode of Cheers in which Rebecca is coming on to this gay man, not realizing he's gay. After some amusing miscommunication, he figures out what she's doing and says, "Rebecca, you know I'm gay, right?" She is mortified and says, "I usually assume people are straight until I find out they're gay." (It was the '80s.) He says, "Funny, I usually assume people are gay until I find out they're straight. Sometimes we find out together."
I've reached a point where my patterns of bonding are so obviously "normal" to me that I tend to assume other people will understand them (for example, if I write a character who functions similarly). And I'm constantly brought up against the reality that most people just don't. There is no language for it. There is no social place for it. It is a love that has no name to speak. Witness the fact that I've just used over 2000 words to convey information about me roughly equivalent to someone else saying, "I'm straight" or "I'm gay" or "I'm bi-ace." But hopefully this little essay has helped elucidate my orientation, and I hope it may express solidarity with others who have no words for this fundamental part of their lives.
I told
skinintheway that I would write a post about how I bond with people, which—for want of a word—I've been calling "platonic bonding." For clarity, the kind of bonding I'm talking about here is serious interpersonal love (or in love) bonding of the kind we'd generally associate with wanting someone for a partner. Here goes:Let me start by laying out our more standard cultural paradigm as a baseline. We generally consider partner-bonding to involve some degree of the following kinds of attachments:
* sexual desire
* romantic attraction
* interpersonal bonding
As I think of it, sexual desire encompasses being physically drawn to someone; wanting to sleep with them, touch them; being wowed by their physical appearance; and so on. Romantic attraction (or falling in love/infatuation), which is often entangled with sexual desire, has an added dimension of thinking a person is fantastic, enthralling, admirable, impossible to get out of one's head, possibly a kindred spirit, or at any rate having a personality one feels "sparks" with. Interpersonal bonding occurs when people are in relationship with a degree of trust, mutual support, social contact, considerable knowledge of each other, often shared interests/pastimes, a sense of the reliability of the relationship, etc.
In our standard cultural narrative, people generally bond with a partner when they experience sexual attraction for someone, which grows (be it at first sight or comparatively slowly) into romantic attraction. If the feelings are mutual, the two people will get into a relationship and form an interpersonal bond, which may eventually become a long-term partnership. A less common but equally socially acceptable variant is the "friends falling in love" version, in which two people begin with an interpersonal bond, which then grows into sexual and romantic attraction. What doesn't vary is that a "partner" is ideally (and in our cultural narratives almost by definition) someone with whom one has strong sexual, romantic, and interpersonal bonding. It is widely understood that the sexual and romantic aspects may attenuate with time, but it's also widely regarded as a sad thing to be avoided if possible.
Most acknowledged sexual orientations are addressed by this formula. Demisexuals, pretty much by definition, hang out in the "friends fall in love" zone. Traditionally straight, gay, and bi people can generally fall anywhere on the spectra above.
Way off in the social margins but increasingly comprehensible to society at large are asexuals, who don't experience much/any sexual attraction. For them, partnering occurs through some combination of feeling romantic attachment and/or interpersonal bonding without the sexual desire.
It is also commonly understood that sexual attraction can exist without being in love or having an interpersonal relationship and that romantic love can exist without evolving into interpersonal love (ex. unrequited). But these situations don't lead to partnering, since partnering is interpersonal by definition. (The idea that romantic attraction can exist without sexual attraction generally boggles minds.)
And Then There Was Me
I don't fit any of these categories. (And I'm far from the only one. Perhaps this essay will resonate with someone else and help them feel less frustrated. Who knows?) There is no word I know for how I bond with potential partners. I have been calling it "platonic bonding" for years now, but that's pretty misleading because it connotes "non-sexual by definition," and that's not what I mean.
What I mean is sexual desire is not important to how I bond.
That sentence is simple but the concept surprisingly really hard for modern Western society to get. I am akin to an asexual in this, but I don't define as asexual because I have a definite sex drive and would consider myself fortunate, all things being equal, to be in a sexual relationship with really awesome sex.
(Side note: there is a sort of side-definition of "asexual" that encompasses someone with an up to normative sex drive but who isn't really invested in having sexual relationships with other people. I could fit under that definition, but it's never been widely used, and the asexual community itself seems to be steering away from it, so it doesn't seem worthwhile to class myself that way.)
For me—it bears reiterating—sexual attraction just doesn't affect my bonding with potential partners, at least not much.
Some notes on my sexuality. I'm heterosexual—or straight-gray, if you prefer. I have never been sexually attracted to another woman. My sexual attraction for men usually—and with some exceptions—involves very little drive to actually sleep with them. I rarely feel any impulse to even think about that. Rather I tend to fix on a sort of visual admiration that is definitely sexual and entirely different from aesthetic appreciation I often have for other women. I have an active fantasy life—plus or minus being too exhausted by life to have sexual desire—but it is entirely "fan fictional"; it only involves characters, never me, never men I actually know—never real people at all, except perhaps an occasional historical figure. It may involve a man and woman or two men but never two women. However, I am entirely capable of being in the subjectivity of a male character attracted to a woman. In real life, I very rarely experience much pleasure having sex, though I sometimes want to have it for the social bonding. In these respects I do consider myself "on the asexual spectrum," especially as my sex drive overall has decreased with age.
However, in one way, I fit perfectly our dominant stereotype of women's sexuality: sexual attraction and romantic attraction are strongly linked for me. It is very rare for me to be sexually attracted to someone I don't have some degree of romantic attraction for.
Some Examples of Bonding and What They Illustrate
At fifteen on the bus coming back from the Mt. Lassen field trip while night descended and the radio played "Leaving on a Jet Plane," I realized I was in love with JD. I admired him profusely: he was incredibly intelligent, witty, nice, shared all my political leanings, had great courage of his convictions (this was a guy who, in 1990, wore lipstick and fishnet stockings at a Catholic school to show solidarity with his gay friends), and was precisely my physical type right down to the huge, brown eyes. I was in love with him for seven years. But I never had an interpersonal relationship with him. I never really knew him outside of school.
I'm not demi. I'm perfectly capable of falling madly sexually in love with someone without knowing them interpersonally. And, more to the point, sexual attraction, for me, does not grow out of romantic attraction/interpersonal attraction. If it wasn't there to start with, it's not going to develop—or at best mildly.
I am also entirely capable of falling in love without any sexual attraction. When I was seventeen and on vacation in Greece, I fell for a fellow female vacationer. I was swept away by her within 24 hours of meeting: I couldn't stop thinking about her, I couldn't take my eyes off her, I couldn't say two coherent words to her, I felt a profound need to have her in my life—and was rather hurt that she stopped answering my letters after one or two. I also found her extremely beautiful, but I never had any desire for any kind of sexual contact, not a kiss, not a touch, nothing.
On a much more emotionally profound and interpersonally bonded level, this is what I felt for R, the person whose betrayal of our friendship I've been struggling with for the past couple of years. Though not so adolescently weak in the knees, I was also bowled over by her: I found her brilliant, witty, kind, a true kindred spirit—and also very beautiful, but not in a way I ever wanted to be physically close to. I did have a friendship with her, and she is someone I explicitly considered at one time as a possible good partner. She wouldn't have been, but it was plausible to me. And that was partner bonding completely without sexual attraction.
Until my present partner, the most successful partnership of my life was with G, a woman for whom I had neither sexual nor romantic attraction. But as I got to know her over a couple of years, I found her a true kindred spirit, a bright and intelligent soul with whom I had much in common and whom I could imagine myself living with happily—even though she's thirteen years older and in poor health. I was ready to go the distance, to take care of her in her ailing years and watch her die of old age. She is the one who broke up with me. If she hadn't, we might still have split up eventually over my wanting to adopt and her not being able to handle the stress of raising more children after her three. But we might have stayed together. I might even have revised my adoption plans to be with her. I did want an open door in our relationship to the possibility of having a sexual relationship with a man at some point. She saw that as a sign I had drifted away from wanting to partner. Not so. I was very committed to her. I am glad to say I am still good friends with her.
Prior to my present partner, my most conventional romantic relationship was with JR. Now, he was looking for a friend with benefits, and I was looking for a partner to adopt kids with, so it was a foregone conclusion we wouldn't stay together. As to my feelings, I always found him "sort of attractive" and liked him a great deal as a friend. (His feelings for me were much the same, I think, maybe somewhat more sexual attraction.) There was a time I told myself I loved him, but that was me trying to fit the social narrative. He—wiser—had the good sense to tell me he didn't love me back. That hurt at the time, but he was right, and really I wasn't meant to love him either. We were meant to be good friends, and we still are. In terms of bonding, my sexual attraction for him never budged much. It was moderate at the start and got milder over time. That's all.
My present partner, also male and a sexual partner, is someone I initially didn't find attractive at all but liked pretty well right away, and on the strengths of a friend's avowal that we'd be a good couple, I took a chance on dating, and it was a good choice. My sexual attraction for him has grown over the years with my interpersonal bond, but not a lot. I now find him "sort of attractive." I've never been very romantically attracted to him, though I love him profoundly. In many ways, my bond with him is much like my bond with G, but a better fit for raising kids, socially easier because it looks like a standard male/female pairing from the outside, and somewhat more sexual (though not very).
In essence, what I need to consider someone as a potential partner is twofold:
1) A strong sense of interpersonal friendship;
2) A strong sense that our lives would be compatible for living together (which involves an ability to trust our commitment).
Whether I feel sexual or romantic attraction just isn't relevant to this basic equation. Mind you, sexual attraction and romantic attraction are nice, and they would be an added benefit. But think of it this way: most folks would find it nice if their true love ended up being drop dead gorgeous, but this doesn't mean they can't be happily married to an average-looking person. Or to use a different example, most would consider it a blessing if their true love was independently wealthy: no worries about health insurance, working a job you hate, or dying poor! But few would restrict themselves to only dating millionaires. I have nothing at all against sexual-romantic attraction; I just don't need it to partner with someone. At the end of the day, it has no effect I have yet discerned on how much I love them, how committed I am to them, or how happy I am with them.
Coda
There's an episode of Cheers in which Rebecca is coming on to this gay man, not realizing he's gay. After some amusing miscommunication, he figures out what she's doing and says, "Rebecca, you know I'm gay, right?" She is mortified and says, "I usually assume people are straight until I find out they're gay." (It was the '80s.) He says, "Funny, I usually assume people are gay until I find out they're straight. Sometimes we find out together."
I've reached a point where my patterns of bonding are so obviously "normal" to me that I tend to assume other people will understand them (for example, if I write a character who functions similarly). And I'm constantly brought up against the reality that most people just don't. There is no language for it. There is no social place for it. It is a love that has no name to speak. Witness the fact that I've just used over 2000 words to convey information about me roughly equivalent to someone else saying, "I'm straight" or "I'm gay" or "I'm bi-ace." But hopefully this little essay has helped elucidate my orientation, and I hope it may express solidarity with others who have no words for this fundamental part of their lives.
