Jerry Seinfeld, recently married and with kids, remarked that he used to look at married people when single and think how awful, how can people do that to themselves. Now he looks at single people and thinks what a shame. What does that say? That neither condition is so great perhaps? Or simply that a world which identifies people in terms of their marital status is just a bit fucked up, a tad narrow maybe?

So what would be great then? Well, I was drawn to a recent article about friends and about young people currently favouring friendship within a group over the exclusive relationship. The obvious problem of transience was pointed to and how people have to eventually move on to a life of responsibility and commitment. The idea was also criticised as a charter for perpetuating immaturity.

But maybe there’s more than a little confusion in that criticism. I’d say that participating in an open friendship community (nobody’s term btw) would require considerable maturity, probably more than most are capable of. There, one would be unable to make an exclusive or contractual claim on another as the means of ensuring loyalty. Commitment would have to be earned and possibly lost if the dynamic wasn’t right. Bonds would have to be secured by a genuine reciprocal connection and not by a unilateral demand for fidelity.

Perhaps it’s the current conformity that encourages immaturity. I suspect the convention of finding an exclusive partner, soon followed by a contractual arrangement, then on to building a nuclear family is society’s way of dealing with the fact that most people remain throughout their life really quite underdeveloped emotionally and need rigorous structures to stop their world falling apart. Calling that maturity is glossing it up a bit.

The further problem is that the structure itself tends to inhibit the natural development of what might otherwise constitute growth. A more open community may be tougher to work through but in the end could produce better individuals and with that a better society.