April 6th 2010

Tribal Thinking: Can’t We Grow Out of It?

The email arrived three days ago.

“In college, I wanted no part of hooking up,” it began. “I was always looking for a committed relationship with one person. I was incessantly teased by other girls, the fraternity guys we hung out with and even, in one instance, by a doctor that I went to see who wanted to know why on earth I was still a virgin at the age of 21.”

The writer, Cara, is a 32-year-old lawyer in the Midwest. She is married. By most standards, settled. Yet the ridicule she received years ago as she looked for, in her words, “a committed relationship with one person,” continues to haunt her. The teasing influenced a number of decisions she made during and after college, she said, not all of them wise.

Why do people who champion the idea of having choices disparage those who do not make the choices they would make?

It is one thing to observe, or listen to, a friend whose lifestyle you don’t share and offer alternatives if she seems unhappy. That’s what friends do. It is something else entirely to put her down simply because she chooses a different path.

Actress Ellen Page, who played a pregnant high school girl named Juno in the 2007 film of the same name, said in a Guardian article this week that the movie was criticized for showing Juno having the baby and then giving it up for adoption.

“Because she kept the baby everybody said the film was against abortion,” Page said. “I was like, you know what? You all need to calm down. People are so black and white about this...I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what's funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don't love abortion but I want women to be able to choose...”

Newspaper columnists have suggested recently that our social discourse in general is increasingly one of tribal politics: Either you belong to my tribe and believe and act as we do, or you are our enemy, attempting to dismantle the tribe, and must be vilified. It’s the grownup version of junior high school.

Cara, the lawyer, experienced this sort of "tribalism" in college:

“My basic reason for not hooking up is that I did not want to look back with regret on my sexual history. I tried to explain my reasons to my close friends. Some felt like my reasons were a personal attack on their judgment or morality – even when I tried to explain that just because I may have made this choice for myself doesn’t mean I think they were making a bad choice or a wrong choice for themselves.”

This particular tribe was really big, Cara said. With all the hooking up that was going on, she couldn’t find a guy who wanted to be in a relationship. By the time she was a junior in college and ready to have sex, her virginity was a problem:

“I was told by friends that some of the guys that I'd been out with (to date parties or just hung out with) didn't want to actually date me because I was a virgin. The explanation I got was that these guys didn't want to be the asshole that took my virginity and then dumped me or they thought that because I was a virgin this late in the game, I would not be giving it up to them. They also didn't want to be tied down. I would explain to my friends (and pretty much anyone that would listen at this point) that I wasn't looking to get married, that being a virgin was no big deal, that just because I was a virgin didn't mean I wouldn't have sex and that, in fact, I actually really, really wanted to have sex, I just didn't want to do it with some random person. Unfortunately, that just never was enough...

“I am fairly well adjusted but the self esteem problems that came from feeling unwanted by guys and unpopular with other girls contributed to …things such as depression and anxiety.”

Decisions on whether, when and with whom to have sex can be difficult to make, especially in your late teens and 20’s. The least we can do is reject tribal thinking and be civil, if not kind, to the young woman or young man making the decision, regardless of what it is.