Integrating the complexity of human relationships
Thursday, 16 June, 2005
It's one week 'til our end-of-term exams and the tension is rising. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by my own troubles and worries but then I go to prayer group or talk to someone else at morning tea and discover what sorts of things they are going through. Today I found out that there are ten couples in our year (including couples where only the husband studies) who are expecting babies. Funny enough, all these babies are due around the same time. However, I also found out that there are a couple of girls in our year who have recently had miscarriages and are struggling with a tempest of emotions that arise every time one of the pregnancies mentioned above is announced. Infertility is so sad. I hope I never have to go through it but I think I know how to cope with it if I ever do.
At college I've also come face to face with the kids/no kids division amongst couples. Friends of ours live in residence but don't have kids and the wife told me she feels awkward about going out and hanging in the playground area with the other wives who are there watching their kids running around simply because she doesn't have a real reason to be there. She also said that her and her husband were asked by another couple to babysit their kids while that couple went out for dinner. They were all going to have dessert together when dinner was over. She and her husband couldn't do it because they were otherwise engaged so the couple asked another couple who also had kids and they all ended up having dinner together. Even though the effect wasn't intended, my friend felt a bit snubbed; why could that couple have dinner with the other couple but not with her and her husband?
To me, the kids/no kids division is, socially, must like the single/married division. Married people sometimes have this tendency to exclude single people so single people can feel left out, especially in a gathering of mostly married couples (though, in my cynicism I have to say that some single people would feel that way just because the rest of the group were marrieds, even if the marrieds were doing their best not to make the single person feel left out).
However, sometimes single people exclude married people. I remember an incident I witnessed at NTE last year. Our mission team was comprised of single students, Richard (who is in his forties) and me and Ben (the only married couple on the team). I remember the final evening of mission that this semi-flirtatious game had developed between the girls and boys where they were playing tags and trying to tip each other behind the knees. I remember feeling a bit left out because they were carrying on this comraderie without including me—not that I really wanted to be part of it because I thought it wasn't particularly appropriate for them to be engaging in this activity and therefore it wasn't appropriate for me to engage in it either.
Perhaps I was overreacting; perhaps it was my abandonment complex kicking in. Feeling left out is a big thing for me whereas, for other people, they couldn't care less. But other incidents come to mind where I have felt excluded by single people. Like at NTE where my strand group decided to ask the leader questions about what it's like to be married and how did you know he was the one? when she had only been married for a month and I had been married for almost five years (but then she was older and had more experience). Like at church sometimes where the single people who struggle with singleness talk to each other about it but don't feel like they can confide in married people about their struggles because they wouldn't understand. (Which is really a load of nonsense; there are married people understand what it's like to be single and how hard it is. If I didn't understand something about the struggle of singleness, I would never have written Bridget.) Like when people tell me they left their last church because there were mostly married couples there and they didn't feel like they had a peer group with whom they could hang out and relate to (never mind that some of the married couples were their age).
I don't think there should be this division between people at different stages of life. The body of Christ just isn't like that. Do you think that, when we get to heaven, we'll just hang out with people who have the same social status as us? My old old church at Gymea was big on this and that's why they encouraged people in the 18+ group to attend the early morning service every now and then with the more senior members of our congregation. I realise that peers are important and it is nice when you find someone in the same stage of life as you because you have more in common and can relate quite naturally. But it is also good to mix with others who are not in the same stage of life as you so that you can learn from them and support them. When we were at Gymea, Ben and I used to go to a Bible study group where everyone else was older than us by about 10 years. Some of them even had kids. We learnt so much from them and I really appreciated the time we could spend with that group before we moved down to Wollongong. I also appreciate the relationships I have with single people (I've spent most of the last ten years hanging out with Uni students; I'm used to spending time with people who are younger than me), with married couples (I'm meeting more at college), with couples with kids (don't know many at the moment but I'm sure I will, the longer we are at college), with people who are older than me, etc. And I hope that if/when Ben and I ever start a family, we won't just hang out with other couples with kids. I'd still want to see my single friends and couple (but no kids) friends whenever it's feasible. It's silly to think that, once you get married or once you have kids, certain kinds of relationships are basically over. They may take more effort but they don't have to vanish like that.
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Amen sister.
Re-experiencing this whole not-single thing after three years of being single (it really didn’t seem that long) is quite interesting. We both well understand the difficulties of being single and the things that just make hanging around them difficult or unhappy and fully intend on trying not to be the couply couple. And yet, various people around us are still find us difficult to be around and we find it difficult to be not-couply.
Back to my old catchcry, which is “relationships suck”
I guess what I want is for single people to allow couples to still be modestly “couple-y” while in the company of others, and couples to recognise that singles do struggle and to be appropriate in their behaviour.
Ditto for childless couples and childful couples.
To me, it’s the love ethic that balances what’s good for the individual with what’s good for society (“love your neighbour”); one should not be sacrificed over the other.
Have posted on this at my blog. Click on George below.