(Important, pre-blog post note, as this was drafted three weeks ago: opinions are opinions and not to be confused with facts)
One of my favorite movie lines comes from Platoon and John C. McGinley’s war-weary Sergeant O’Neill: “Excuses are like assholes, Taylor, everybody got one.” A recent article I read in The Atlantic reminded me that you could say much the same for opinions.
In her piece, titled “Singles and Couples Are More Divided Than Ever,” Ginny Hogan describes an added relationship dystopia to the bleakness of our current Covid-19 situation. If one were to believe what she describes, people in relationships are a bunch of arrogant a-holes, flouting social distancing recommendations, pausing their 24/7 lovemaking sessions to proudly tweet that there is no one else they’d rather quarantine with, and rubbing this romantic bliss in their single friend’s faces when they check in to see how they are doing. In a truly baffling passage, Hogan bristles at “coupled” acquaintances and family members asking how she’s doing all alone. “The idea that I need the company or validation of a man so badly[…] is genuinely offensive.”
Hogan walks back some of this straw man hyperbole near the article’s end, yet she still closes her piece with the hope that the rupture between those who are single and those who are in relationships will not persist when the pandemic ends.
The problem with that? Opinions are like butts: everybody got one. Once we’re Covid free, singles aren’t going to stop liking their singlehood for the time being (or for some, wishing and longing they were not single). Relationship holders are not going to stop loving (or pretending to love) their relationship. And meddlesome relatives and friends aren’t going to stop suggesting to the single person they know that the right man/woman/person for them might be just around the corner.
Because why? Let’s check the list, shall we? People have butts. Check. Oh, and yes, they have opinions. Check.
Perhaps I’m taking the article too seriously. Articles gotta articulate, publications gotta publish, and writers gotta write and pay the bills (and have opinions), after all. Just ignore it and move on.
I wish I could, but this is a tribalism–a dichotomy–that I have run into time and again. When I and my then fiancee told people that we did not have an engagement ring, there were choruses of voices, defending the choice to have an engagement ring, and even arguments that Jessica really did want a ring and was just pretending (“Neal,” she said, “I would never play games with you like that”).
And when we decided we were not going to have children? It’s difficult to find a more contentious debate. Opinions among the childfree can range from “we like kids, but don’t want our own,” (an opinion Jessica and I share), to being among the most vociferously hateful I have ever heard, calling those with children “breeders,” (like we’re all stuck in some Mad Max film, lorded over by some neo-gothic warlord in leather pants named Killer McKillerface). On the other side of this divide are those who tell friends and family members considering not having children that “you’ll change your mind some day,” a line of reasoning that builds up to doctors refusing to provide sterilization procedures to adult men and women when they ask for one. And that’s before you even get into the usual grass-is-always-greener argument about who has a happier life with or without kids.
If everybody got opinions, are we condemned then to stand in our wrongness and be wrong and get used to it (no matter how amusing it was when President Bartlett said it on The West Wing)? We could, I guess. We’re kind of trending there more and more, it seems like.
But that’s only if we assume that because we have opinions (and butts), those opinions are also absolutes. Just because Jessica and I didn’t have an engagement ring, and just because we don’t have kids, doesn’t mean we begrudge other people those things. There are elements that are out of control when it comes to engagement rings and weddings, but the ideas at their core are of luminous beauty and nothing to begrudge. Even if I did not find them luminous, it’s a far better world where I allow them to be for others who do find them so.
There are certainly people who would begrudge and not allow, of course, those who would build a wall around those of their own opinion to keep those against them far and away from their vision of how things ought to be, believing that the separation they have created means they will no longer be affected by those they have put on the other side of their fortifications.
What if, instead of focusing on how everybody wants to not be affected by the opinions of other people, we instead realized that we are always affected by other people’s opinions? If we were not already affected by those we call “other,” walls would not be argued for or created. What would the world look like, if we just accepted the reality of everybody around us having opinions–and the requisite differing of those billions of points of view?
There are limits, I know, to humanity’s understanding and capability. But my friends, my friends, we have set up our walls so far short of those limitations.