Homosociality

Have you ever noticed how, when American couples get together, the women gravitate toward the other women, and the men to the other men? Even in family settings, this seems to be true. I'm more likely to end up chatting with my brother's wife and my elderly great Aunt at a family reunion, while my husband will likely spend much more time with my father and brother than I myself at the event.

It's called homosociality, and once you take a step back from societal norms on the whole thing ('of course all the women are together in the kitchen on Thanksgiving') it's a bit of an odd paradigm. Maybe the argument could be made that if unrelated women and men spoke to each other at length, they might not be able to keep their hands off each other, but what about T-day? The brothers and sisters who are separated when they head toward their gender group at holiday get-togethers surely aren't concerned about sexual feelings coming up between them.

Long ago I realized that within my friendships with women, I value having different friends with different personalities and skills. I've had writer friends whom I call with writing woes, neighbor friends for swapping vacation-help, friends who nurture, friendships centered around political views, dinner party friends for good eats, friends from whom I learn, and others to teach. I love that not every friendship has to be everything to me, and that each friendship is a great fit for some facet of my being. But all this has been within the realm of homosociality, friendships with other women. I'd open myself up to a lot more variety of perspectives and skills if I had friendships with men as well.  I could have--I don't know--car-trouble friends!

In her fun little book, What French Women Know, Debra Ollivier describes how women and men are always seated away from their spouses at French dinner parties, sandwiched between two members of the opposite sex. Enjoying one-on-one conversations with a member of the opposite sex is par for the course, and flirting "is a civic duty." A French man is not threatened by his wife's interactions with other men, nor vice versa, according to Ollivier, because there is no culture of homosociality. So to the French (and surely to prehistoric humans), it seems imminently reasonable to expect a human being will have interactions and friendships with other humans of both the male and female variety...as wildly liberal as that may sound to our American sensibilities.

Carpe Diem: Meditations on Living in the Moment

From one risk-averse, internal-locus-of-control over-planner to the others of you that may be out there: 

Carpe Diem, quam minimum credula postero

(Horace, First Century Roman Poet)

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what final fate the gods have
given to me and you, Leuconoe, and don't consult Babylonian
horoscopes. How much better it is to accept whatever shall be,
whether Jupiter has given many more winters or whether this is the
last one, which now breaks the force of the Tuscan sea against the
facing cliffs. Be wise, strain the wine, and trim distant hope within
short limits. While we're talking, grudging time will already
have fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.

Jesus, in Matthew 6 (emphasis added):

 

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

    “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.  If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, Self-Reliance (emphasis added):

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Mother Theresa: 

"I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ to me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment."

To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time
(Robert Herrick)
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
    To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
    The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
    And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
    When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
    Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
    And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
    You may for ever tarry.