Unequally Yoked
Over at AmCon today, I’ve got a piece up “Starving for Communal Spaces” and here’s how it opens:
A man walks into a business establishment and pays a small sum of money for the use of their premises. He’s slightly furtive about it, and the proprietor would probably deny the nature of the service provided, but the gentleman is seeking companionship, and doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
I’m not describing the kind of tawdry hotel that rents its rooms by the hour, but a coffee shop or a fast food outlet. And the gentleman in question might be an elderly Korean man, one of the group that got ejected from a McDonald’s in New York City for repeatedly lingering too long over their coffees.
The retirees weren’t really there for the McCafé lattes, of course. I’ve pulled the same trick, scanning a Starbucks menu for the cheapest drink, picking out a chair, and pulling out a novel. The drink is really just a ticket, that, displayed properly, entitles the bearer to one seat and a bit of table space for up to two hours.
It’s quite reasonable that the baristas would rather sell me coffee, not lease me real estate. After all, if someone behaved this way in a restaurant, pulling out a laptop and settling in after their meal, they’d be behaving badly. But I’m not sure who we’re supposed to patronize for communal space instead.
The whole time I was working on this post, I kept thinking of an article from The Good Men project that I’d read a while before, “The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer.” The author talks about how there’s very little cultural space for casual person-to-person contact for men. Handholding, mussing someone’s hair, or just sharing a couch without an inch wide DMZ is perceived as sexual, whatever the gender of the person you’re touching.
As I read the piece, I certainly agreed it was a problem, but it hardly seemed exclusive to men. Now that I’m single again, the sign of peace at Daily Mass is usually the only time I touch another person. And, even then, everyone tends to space themselves out, one person every other pew, so we’re too far apart for anything but a quick wave and a mouthed “Peace.”
When I went on my exchange trip to China after high school, I remember being jealous when, during the briefing sessions, they warned us that in China, friends of any gender combination hold hands, and we shouldn’t assume our hosts were hitting on us if they reached out to us. I missed it when I returned stateside.
In college, there was a lot more platonic touch, which might be partly a knock-on effect of the casual social environment, but seems to also be driven by the availability of common spaces. When we were frequently in literal “common rooms” it was natural to all wind up draped over a couch or hitting each other affectionately. Now, as an adult, when I see more of my friends for coffee or at the theatre, our personal space feels more inviolate in these scheduled, structured times. When you don’t touch anyone for long periods of time (and, perhaps when you’re also a recovering gnostic) your body can feel a bit less real and a bit more tool-like, since it exists primarily to manipulate objects.
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