The Survival of a Counterculture by John Mill

Author:John Mill [Mill, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765808059
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2003-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Intimacy: Coupling, Uncoupling, Recoupling

We love each other

It’s plain to see

There’s just one answer

That comes to me

Sister-lovers, water-brothers

And in time maybe others

So you see, what we can do

Is to try something new

If you’re crazy too

I don’t really see

Why can’t we go on as three?

From a song, “Triad,” by David Crosby, © Guerrila Music, Inc., 1970. Sung by Grace Slick, of The Jefferson Airplane.

In Stephen Diamond’s book on the New England rural commune to which he belonged, there is a whole chapter on the events that ensue when he leaves his woman, Kathy, and goes to San Francisco because their relationship has become “routine.” Kathy then gets together with Laz, another member of the commune, but she soon follows Diamond to San Francisco to see if there is still anything between them. There is. Next day, Laz shows up in San Francisco and Kathy returns east with him because “her life is at the farm.” Then Diamond returns to the farm to reclaim Kathy, and Laz leaves. Guilty and remorseful for the pain they have caused Laz, they call him back, and eventually Kathy gets pregnant by Laz.1 But amid all this pain and their talk about cultural revolution, it apparently never occurs to any of them that they might have gone on loving each other “as three.” Group marriage experiments notwithstanding, coupling still hangs on even in culturally revolutionary “anarchist” communes.

But it is a fragile kind of coupling, which is only too reminiscent of the situation evoked by a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago: the scene is obviously a wedding reception, and the bride introduces the groom to one of the guests. “I’d like you to meet my first husband,” she says to the guest.

It’s hard not to be interested in sex and intimacy, but it’s almost impossible if one has a serious interest in communal living. But sex and intimacy were far from our primary concern when my research group undertook its study of child-rearing in counterculture communes. Along with economic issues, sex and other aspects of intimate interpersonal relations are major causes of membership turnover and communal failure. Communes often founder either because of insufficient money, labor skills, or other economic resources to sustain the enterprise, or because interpersonal tensions and hostilities from more intimate sources grow to the point where routine cooperative actions become difficult or impossible to sustain.

The economic problems, of course, are frequently expressed as interpersonal tensions.2 Over the years, several people left The Ranch because they were unwilling to yield to the increasing pressures to create financial interdependence or to subordinate their private “trips” to the increasing demands for labor dedicated to the collective effort. But in my attempts to sort out the most significant dimensions of the research, the sexual and other intimate aspects of communal living loom as increasingly important because they are directly connected with some of the features of communes that made them sociologically interesting in the first place.3 It seems clear enough that communes with an articulated

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