Are You Normal?

A nagging feeling that I should be "getting on" with my life has pervaded my consciousness for the past few months along with a strong desire to avoid "normal" people, "normal" advice and the "normal" world. Is this a dilemma? In my vision there are very few people scurrying about the earth who aren't "normal". I keep my eye out, but it's pretty dry.

I live in a university town, a very normal town that, were it not for the university would be exactly like any other closed-minded midwestern town. The townspeople generally hate the students and their feisty youthful behavior and an example of the townspeoples' method of "reaching out" to students is to have boring meetings outlining expectations for student behavior. We have, in the not-so-distant past, been famous for student "riots" after football games, which usually consisted of the burning of a couch or two in a student lawn accompanied by bare-breasted undergrads dancing around the fire like "heathens". Woohoo! The adult population is alarmed and mimics a scene from The Crucible, with interrogations, trials, banishment, burning at the stake, you know the story.

One well-known and revered portion of real estate in town consists of comically large McMansions facing the rich-man's version of the gazing ball, man-made "lakes". They afford prestige to some couples who require normal things like cocktail parties and the redecoration of their house each year to stave off boredom.

Sometimes it occurs to me that a normal day in the presence of normal people is very much like watching the Discovery Channel, with adolescent human males and females grouping together, eyes darting, tentatively trying to enter a social circle, sometimes taken in, but more likely driven away if the right signifiers (clothing, language) are not displayed. Mating rituals abound! The adult social norm is one male and one female who have mated and formed an exclusive family group who socialize with other similar couples. Marriage and the exclusivity of emotional and physical intimacy which it demands as "the norm" creates the largest in-group and out-group.

Sometimes when I am out in the world I am struck by the sheer volume of heterosexual couples moving hand-in-hand through their lives, year after year, and how we all grew up believing this was the only option that was acceptable and natural. How bizarre that it is radical not to believe that an exclusive life-long relationship is the only right and true way (and "God's will", no less). How much reinforcement is needed to constantly keep this vision of the world alive? (The DaVinci Code, while not a great book, is interesting because a book that blew the lid off the patriarchal "norm" which has placed men in a position of superiority and subjugated women in Christian culture for centuries was so wildly popular.) Perhaps there are fewer normal people out there than I realize, or at least fewer who are happy being normal.

And now that Judas may be revealed as a "good guy", what are good Christians gonna do with that? I will watch it like the Discovery Channel, with familiar human positioning, power plays, the use of guilt to produce compliance, punishment and fear tactics to deter behaviors. Containment is a full-time job.

Questions: Do you believe that the "rewards" of spending your life with one person are somehow special, or superior to the rewards of any other way of life? Is fear (of being ostracized or simply left alone) a motivating force behind marriage? "Heterosexual exclusive relationship" propaganda abounds in the media (movies, TV, mainstream magazines)... or is the media simply reflecting what is normal? How do you feel about love?