Unnamed Relationships…

“We are friends, right?” “Yes, and much more…” A question so often articulated by one friend to another. Seeking reaffirmation, reassurance, declaring the relation, giving it a name. We strive to give all our relationships a name. Namelessness frightens us. Naming something is to make it familiar, make it controllable, pin it down to the realm of the logical, the comprehensible. Why else would killer typhoons be given innocuous names like Karl and Bret, Ethel and Emily, Betsy and Michelle? They sound tamer, almost friendly, manageable, harmless. The most forbidding sounding hurricane name I have come across is Hurricane Cesar…Yet these hurricanes have the power to kill millions, do kill millions each time they pass wreaking havoc, leaving behind a trail of devastation, death, despair…Ethel, says Wikipedia, killed more than 150 people and damaged property worth millions of dollars. These cold, hard facts belie the innocent names that have the power to draw blood...like relationships that leave us devastated, dead, havoc struck, reeling…

Nameless relationships are thus chilling, forbidding, daunting… Naming a relationship serves to tame it, enclose it within the border of the meaning imposed by the word—friendship, lovers, couples... each has a dictionary definition that tells the “participants” in the relationship what to expect, how much to give, where to draw the line, what is permissible…

“Friend” says Longman Dictionary is “someone who you know and like very much and enjoy spending time with.” How safely defined, so tame, neatly slotted and packaged--just someone to spend time with. No mention of the demands and commitments of friendship. No mention of the trust, the acceptance, the comfort, the lack of judgment, the unconditional love that friendship implies. What does it mean to “know someone?” There is no end to the meanings we can attach to this word "know." It is immeasurable, infinite, incalculable...Then, why define and delineate a relationship, give it a name…?

Because an unnamed, undefined relationship is borderless, limitless, boundariless thus threatening to become boundless, an impending doom…Such boundlessness escapes the bonds and norms of society, of civilization, of the world as we know it, and frightens us. Such limitlessness demands the whole of us, all of us, our heart, mind, body, soul, blood, sinews, bones, muscles…there is no holding back, no safe compartmentalization, no saying, “This is all I will invest—physically, emotionally, and mentally—and no more…” Do we have the courage to walk into a relationship fearlessly, without drawing any margins for ourselves, leaving ourselves wide open to wounds that will bleed for a long long time, that may not heal ever...

We would like to have that courage. We dream of an ideal relationship where we will display such courage, where we will give our all, our everything--how cliche these phrases are, how easily articulated by the tongue…but when the time comes, when the call to give everything arrives, we count our pennies, we calculate the loss and the gain, the possibility of pain vs. the promise of pleasure, preferring to be cautious rather than risk losing our all, we shrink back out of fear of being hurt, an innately selfish emotion, where the “I” in us looms the largest. The fear and concern and pain are all for this “I”, this “me”; the thought of “you” has vanished. We can’t ask, “Are you hurting? Do you need me? Tell me how I can heal your hurt.” We say, “I am hurting. You have hurt me. Why are you not here to heal my hurt? Aren’t you my friend? Aren’t you my lover? Aren’t you my wife, my husband…? Didn’t you promise me such and such…?”

Why can't we risk it all and say, "Yes, it was worth it. The hurt and the mess and the pain do not matter. I agree to pay the price. I would do it all over again for this one person..."

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