“normal”
A recent comment sent me on a bunny trail of thought that I just had to share with everyone here. Because I’m a giver! (Read that last sentence with cheesy self-mocking smirk, please…)
What, exactly, is “normal?” As a parent I find myself constantly asking if my children’s development is “normal”, and what I’ve also discovered through parenthood is that the spectrum of what is considered “normal” is almost unbelievably broad. A normal child may be rolling and scooting at three or four months, or six months, they may crawl at six months or wait to start crawling until after they start walking, they may pull up and “cruise” at nine months or twelve months, they may way ten pounds or twenty, they may babble or be almost completely nonverbal… they may be any number of variations and still be totally “normal”, because “normal” in that sense simply means healthy development.
But when we talk about what is normal or natural when it comes to sexuality, we almost always mean “average”. How boring would life be if everyone adhered to averages? How little would we grow? What is normal for me and normal for my husband doesn’t always match up (I mean in the bedroom and far beyond when I say that) and I ENJOY that fact, because the friction of being unequally paired forces both of us to grow. If we were identical, we’d fall into a rut and it would take an act of God to move us. So not being average is good- even though I think we’re both normal.
Is it normal for a woman to want children, to want to keep house, to want to wear pumps and pearls and make a mean roast? Sure, but it’s also normal for a woman to be a little weirded out by infants, to not know how to relate to children, to be hopeless in the kitchen but great at making bookshelves. Either of those fictitious women can be considered normal (albeit not average) and neither one of them has to be gay or straight just because of stereotypes, either.
Gather a hundred people in a room, and just look at them. Some are tall, some are short- they come in all skin tones- they come with curly and straight hair- they come with dyed and natural hair- they come with tattoos, they come with clean skin, they come in all weights, they come in all styles of sexuality… Some have babies on their laps, some have designer handbags, some have bluetooth headsets and some can’t figure out how to work their GPS. And what is normal? Well, all of it is. Not a bit of it is totally average, as who could really average out humanity?
Yet we are all still in this together. And we need our differences, we have to have them! We need to learn from each other and bear with each other and embrace all which makes us separate and makes us equal.
One thing we don’t need? Normal.
Romantic, Physical, Emotional: Attraction
This will be my final post on the subject for a little while, I think. I’ve already laid the basis for this post, explaining a little of my own journey and some observational “wisdom” if one can call it such. Now I’d like to try to lay things out very, very clearly.
I’ve witnessed three kinds of attraction: Romantic, Physical, and Emotional. One might be drawn to someone out of simply one of these, or all three. Some people seem to gravitate towards one kind of attraction and operate off of it alone. And let me be clear: I’ve seen women who only care about physical attraction and men who only care about emotional- so it isn’t as set in stone as one might think. While men do appear, as a whole, to have a much stronger physical pull and women are stereotyped as being romantics, I think that all people operate off of a combination of degrees of all three.
Ask someone, anyone- male or female, gay or straight- what their ideal relationship is, and they will likely offer examples of shared interests, shared dreams, shared experiences, shared family, shared anything. The point being that we all want to be able to share our lives with someone else, and to do so uninhibited.
Why, you may ask, am I belaboring this point? Because recently I had an experience where someone kept talking about homosexuality and how sexual it was. They literally emphasized the “s-e-x” as if that were somehow the most significant thing in the world.
I was a bit put off.
Because all of us share experiences. I can remember as a young girl, doing the common role-play of “mommy and daddy” with a neighborhood boy, play holding his hand and play kissing his cheek and pretending to have the kind of relationship my parents shared. And one day, while talking to a gay friend of mine, I discovered that he had not had that experience. Why? Because he’d never had any interest in gender-stereotype role-playing, not even as a very small child. And the fact that he’d never had any emotional interest in girls had always made him feel marginalized and different. He’d felt like a freak.
And it breaks my heart, because so many people don’t realize the pain and confusion that can come from not only a lack of physical attraction to people of the opposite gender, but from a lack of emotional and romantic interest as well. A lot of people seem to believe that the physical aspect of attraction is the only way in which gay people are different from straight ones. They seem to think that people can simply overlook their lack of physical attraction and engage with people of the opposite gender on a romantic and emotional level- and it simply isn’t there.
There is a fundamental difference.
So again, I will call to Christians to think about these issues of sexuality not in legalistic terms, but with compassion. Think about the many different ways in which our sexuality influences us, from the womb to our death, and be opened up for a real discussion.
We all have a lot to learn from each other.
