Avocado Redux

Despite moments of infatuation on both sides, these were not love relationships. The few hustlers excepted, they were not business relationships. They were encounters whose most important aspect was that mutual pleasure was exchanged—an aspect that, yes, colored all their other aspects, but that did not involve any sort of life commitment. Most were affable but brief because, beyond pleasure, these were people you had little in common with. Yet what greater field and force than pleasure can human beings share? More than half were single encounters. But some lasted over weeks; others for months; still others went on a couple of years. And enough endured a decade or more to give them their own flavor, form, and characteristic aspects. You learned something about these people (though not necessarily their name, or where they lived, or what their job or income was); and they learned something about you. The relationships were not (necessarily) consecutive. They braided. They interwove. They were simultaneous. These relationships did not annoy or in any way distress the man I was living with—because they had their limits. They were not the central relationships of my life. They made that central relationship richer, however, by relieving it of many anxieties.

I refused to accept that my only options were to go at things alone, or to somehow luck out into finding 'the one.'”' It was certainly the antithesis of my political leanings. I was a baby radical who believed in expanding social safety nets, that change could come through collective action, that we as a society had a responsibility to take care of each other. Why, then, did it feel like I was being bombarded with cultural messages from across the political spectrum, that care would come to me in the form of another individual?