Relational Itinerancy
Wandering in the wastelands
There's a lot of benefits to being single. I have a lot more time than my friends who are dating/married, for one, which allows me to do things like write a Substack. One of the pitfalls, however, is chronic loneliness. As a man in the church who plans to pursue celibacy, the question I always come back to is "will I be alone?" This condition, that appears to me and so many other singles in the church as inevitable as death itself, is something I call relational itinerancy.
An itinerant is someone who travels from place to place, often finding work for only a few months at a time before moving to the next town. In other words, a wanderer. To my mind, the defining characteristic of an itinerant is the lack of a home. Where does the wanderer rest his head? What warmth does he have to return to? No one to commiserate with after a long day at work, no one to ask how a day was, no one to chat with while doing the laundry. This is precisely the situation I worry about my life becoming in the future.
I'm in college. This is, by all accounts, the best possible time in one's life to make friendships — it's all downhill from here. And so, I worry. About simple things, too.
Will I have anyone to come home to after work?
Will anyone be there to listen to how my day was?
How often will I get a hug after a rough day? (I'm a physical touch person.)
There's bigger things, too. I, unlike many gay people who grew up in the church, am lucky enough to have a family that loves me unconditionally. But even then, my parents will die one day, and then I have to ask: where will I spend the holidays? Who will care about me enough to invite me over? Who will care for me in, God willing, my old age? Will I die alone?
This condition, these worries, constitute relational itinerancy. You see, I'm worried about these questions because no one values friendships here. I seem destined to wander through friendships, being with the same people for a few months or years at a time, but never reaching a point of stability. Not once have I ever heard of someone turning down a big job offer to stay in his current location for a friend. For a romantic partner, perhaps—but not a friend. I have no ability to hope that anyone will not dump me at the sight of the slightest economic upward movement. Do you have any idea how debilitating this is—to believe that no one will ever see you as more valuable than five thousand dollars a year? I'm worth less than a car.
It seems to be my fate that I will have friendships, even good ones; but nonetheless, friendships that can (and will) be permanently altered, weakened, broken, at the drop of a hat. There is no certainty. At least, no certainty that they will continue to value the friendship as much as I; nor that, barring divine intervention or disaster, I can rely on them to be there for me. And when there is no certainty, there can be no home. Home is, in some sense, defined by this kind of certainty. Can you call home a home, if you have doubts about your parents loving you? This is what many of my gay friends worry about—I have more than one friend who feels he must hide his relationship from his parents. At least one of them introduced his boyfriend as “just another friend” to his parents recently. Is home really a home, if you're worried your parents will kick you out, or your friends will leave you for a small increase in salary?
There's a bit of irony in "relational itinerancy", because what I'm most worried about is others leaving me. I'm not yet in a position where I have to choose between a job and a friendship, but I do believe that, if and when that situation comes, I would at least seriously weigh the two. But alas, it is obviously and clearly the case, indeed so clear that I need not say it, that romance is the only situation one ought to dare to commit to another human being.
People are so afraid of commitment. It's even crept into how people view romance; fewer people are getting married, and when they do, it's later in life. So if even romance, that once-shining bastion of commitment over fomo, is in decline, what hope is there for me? Will I ever be worth more to someone than an expensive laptop?
The most troubling part to me is that I ought not be having these worries. Indeed, no Christian, whether straight, gay, married, single, whatever, should be facing these questions. Why?
Mark 10:29-30: Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, [30] who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (ESV)
As it currently stands, I plan to sacrifice any future romance I could have, all my desires to have a husband and a family and be a father, for Jesus. He promises me (and, properly understood, all Christians—Christianity calls us all to leave something) a hundredfold brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands.1 But not just in the abstract, no, he promises them now. Jesus promises us all a new home. So where is home? Sure, I’ll probably make new friends as circumstances change, but to have a home requires certainty. Why is the body of Christ, the body of him who made these promises, bereft of commitment to people like me?
This seemingly radical idea of committing to friends is not without precedent, even within the Bible. What am I talking about? I speak, of course, about David and Jonathan:
1 Samuel 18:1–3: As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. [2] And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. [3] Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. (ESV)
If I took this passage and replaced “Jonathan” with “Bathsheba”, not one of you would blink an eye. Yet this is not about marriage; these verses, which speak of two souls being knit together, one soul loving another as his own, is about friendship.
I do not mean to imply, by this, that I do not have great and wonderful friendships now. On the contrary, I have many friendships that are wonderfully deep, men I truly love with my heart of hearts. But these are friendships from college. Cynically, rationally, I know that most of these friendships will, if not stagnate, at least go into hibernation. Even those that don't, they likely stand to falter as we all move our separate ways. This is part of the horror of the ability to move across the country for a job. Right now, I have friends in my life who would die for me, and I them—but where will we be next year, or five years? Will we even be in the same time zone? I know not.
Christianity must recover both its honor for singleness and its understanding of friendship as a fundamental need. Just look at this article showcasing male-male affection from within the past century or two. Many of these look, even to my eye, like they must be homoerotic. But they were not. That was simply the norm for friendship at the time. Many friends, even two centuries ago, would decide to live together permanently.
I, of course, write from the perspective of a gay celibate. But I have heard straight friends who are committed to celibacy wonder about the same questions. So the question I would pose to the church is threefold:
Does Jesus promise that all would find a home?
Do all homes need to be founded on marriage?
Can we return to honoring friendship as equally good, pleasant, and fulfilling?
All of us need family, but maybe we don't all need romance to have family. Maybe some of us just need a friend—a Jonathan to my David.
Once I have my sources all lined up, I plan to write many articles about this. To give a short preview: siblinghood, a word Paul uses hundreds of times in the New Testament (“brothers and sisters”) was considered the closest relationship possible. Not marriage! Every time Paul invokes “brothers and sisters”, therefore, he is calling his congregation to live as though they all shared the closest possible relationship.