First of all, Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is a vital voice in the blogosphere. If you’re not reading her work, you should be. She’s in a very tight spot right now, so if you have a few dollars to spare, I urge you to consider donating via the Paypal button on her site. (You can read more about her situation here.)

I want to jump now away from Lisa to the broader phenomenon of folks rallying around a fellow blogger to offer assistance in a time of need, something I’ve seen happen quite a few times. It is, in my observation, starting to become standard practice for bloggers to receive some support from the blogosphere when the going gets tough, which I find pretty fascinating.

In my last post, I talked about our need, as humans, for love and support from more than one person — in essence, our need for community. Community performs a lot of different functions; in the last post, I focused mainly on our social and emotional needs, which are of course very important. At an even more basic level, though, community meets our daily physical needs for food and shelter. What does it say about the state of community today that the blogosphere, of all things, steps in to support people?

(Once again, I’m talking about big-picture phenomena here, not the specifics of the life of any person but myself.)

To me it says that, for a lot of people, the blogosphere, and other non-geographic communities, are the new neighborhood. Instead of having a neighbor to bring over a casserole during a hard month, many of us have, instead, a wide circle allies and readers to click on a Paypal button. (Or, if we’re lucky, maybe we have both.)

It’s great that people have that support. That kind of network is critically necessary; I’m very glad to see the blogosphere step up to meet that need where necessary. What’s interesting to me is that it is necessary — that, for many people, the networks that are presumably more immediate than blogland are either nonexistent or, more likely, just inadequate.

This does make some good sense. Neighborhoods (and, before, villages and even towns) used to be collections of people who shared a culture, complete with shared values, worldview, lifestyle and experiences. Today, many neighborhoods* and other Earth-bound populations in industrialized countries are basically random assortments of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they live on the same street. (This is not always true — there are still some thriving, supportive neighborhoods around. I’ve never set foot in one, though, and I don’t think my experience is particularly unusual for a middle class US-American.) These neighbors are often, but not always, in roughly the same economic strata. But the real glue of communities is usually totally absent: shared principles, priorities and worldview, shared identity and experience, shared culture and history. It makes perfect sense that my neighbors are basically strangers to me — we have very little in common.

Contrast this to a grouping like any given subset of the blogosphere — the queer blogosphere, for example, or the circle of progressive Jewish blog(er)s, or the online community of women of color feminists. Here we have, instead, a group of individuals who have self-selected for very similar interests, goals, opinions and values. Amongst the group there are typically many people who share an identity and/or similar experiences, not to mention language. The glue of community is there.

As we would expect, these communities function better than many neighborhood communities, and, for that reason, step up to the plate when community support is necessary (as it often is). It’s wonderful that people are crafting solutions to meet unmet needs, even if it is lamentable that the needs are going unmet in the first place.

More lamentable than the erosion of the neighborhood, though, is the related phenomenon of the loss of culture. My girlfriend and watched Fiddler On The Rough this week, so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about this, about the worlds and ways of life that we have lost: that I personally have lost, and that have been lost to countless peoples around the world, in the many tides of war, change, revolution, genocide. Some of these forces are horrible — genocide — and others — change, for example in the form of freedom movements — are very good.

But it’s a strange and complicated sort of problem. How do we move towards justice without eroding culture? Is it possible? How do we change for the better without irrevocably damaging our traditions? My life is better than those of my ancestors — I’m not poor, I’m comparatively free of restrictive gender roles, I can love (and, I hope, marry) the person of my choice regardless of her gender or ethnicity…

But these freedoms come at a price. have an unshakable sense of who I am, culturally — and yet much of that culture is missing from my knowledge. I ache for music and traditions and a language that are lost to me, for a country that shares my culture. (That country doesn’t exist, mostly because my cultural identity is a strange mishmash of many things.)

My grandmother mourns that she didn’t get to grow up in her parents culture: the tight-knit Sephardi community in Sofia, where she was born. Instead she was raised around western Europe (Spain, France), largely ignorant of her own culture. There was a permanent, irrevocable gulf between my grandmother and her parents — in some ways, they could never really know each other, never really talk to each other.

My mother was then raised primarily in the United States. Another culture, another unbridgeable gap. In some much smaller sense the same thing happened to me, because my mother and father raised me in a different part of the country from where they grew up. (New Mexico is very different from New England.)

No one understands this pain better than my grandmother, and yet she does not understand.

“Let’s go back to Europe.”

Where it would only happen all over again, to my children and to me. That world is already gone.

* I am, of course, excluding intentional communities here — they’re the response to this very situation.

What is problematic is the massive culture conceptualization of monogamy, which, in my estimation, goes way beyond how many people one is sleeping with. It is, rather, the cultural construction of love itself, which seems to amount to the idea that each person should get (and give) all her love from (and to) just one person. It is the idea that we should have all our emotional needs met by a sole other person, and meet 100% of that person’s needs in turn. It’s the idea that adults should have only one really important adult relationship — that the (sole) person one is sleeping with should become the single most important person in one’s life, that one’s spouse should exist on this sacred plane of total devotion, while our friendships should be basically casual, basically unimportant, or, at best, less important.

I think this causes a lot of heartbreak, both in the form of the strange disappointment of discovering that one’s lover is not, as one had been taught to expect, a perfect carbon copy of oneself, but a complex human being, and in the form of the loneliness, anxiety and frustration of trying to get all one’s emotional needs met by one person and trying to singlehandedly meet all of another person’s needs. And I seriously think that many of our common ailments are the result of the pervasive lack of strong social support systems, the grievous lack of real community. So it’s a doomed mission and we would do well to abandon it, whether we practice sexual monogamy or any of the various forms of polyamory.

(By the way, I first put this idea into words in a comment over at Dave Pollard’s excellent blog How To Save The World some months ago, on this post. This post is largely an elaboration of what I said there.)

So, I don’t know how many sex partners humans are supposed to have — I suspect it varies widely, and I also suspect that that’s not really the point, in terms of what I’m talking about here.

Some people are much happier with polyamorous relationships, and that’s great; others do best with monogamy, and, as I said earlier, that’s great, too. I’m very glad for everyone who’s found what makes her happy. Those are important issues. They’re also, I think, personal issues. I don’t think it’s a matter for political consideration, really, how many sex partners each person has, beyond the obvious statement that we should respect and recognize each person’s choices.* What is a social and political issue, though, is how many people each of us loves — or, more to the point, how many people we are permitted to love, and what love means in our society.

That is the problem with monogamy: that we are expected to love only one person. Family relationships are recognized, but they’re also marginalized — we’re expected to see our parents, siblings, still-living grandparents and grown children only a few times a year (and what of our aunts, uncles, cousins?); they’re not set up as vital relationships in our daily lives.

What a bereft existence! I think it’s absolutely clear that no one is meant to love and be loved by just one person, and that we slowly kill ourselves when try to make this happen. No one can meet all of another person’s needs, and there is no reason to expect anyone to do so. People are complicated, multifaceted creatures; those of us who are waiting for someone who is totally compatible with every facet of our being are going to be waiting a long, long time.

A much better solution is to encourage everyone to have many important relationships (and again, this has no bearing on one’s sex life) — diverse, fulfilling, important relationships with many people, so that some parts of oneself get exercised and appreciated with some people, and other parts with other people. This both assures that our various needs actually get met, and takes the pressure off of other relationships — I suspect it’s much easier to forge a good romantic partnership, for example, if you’re not expecting your partner to be perfect or trying make the relationship as big as your whole life.

Having major relationships is, of course, work. It can be hard work. It is also some of the most fulfilling work a person can do. It is worth it. And the natural outcropping of this, when we do it daily — when we form many diverse loving relationships, as many as will grow, and treat their maintenance as important work — is community.

*And beyond discussions of legal arrangements and recognition, but that’s a whole other thing.