At 39 it occurs to me that all of my dreams have been patriarchal dreams

And none of them have involved community.

On the rare occasion I had the house to myself in my teenage years, I almost always did the same thing.

First I would assess the kitchen situation for the best snack- usually a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats. Then I would make my way to our family room and open the wooden cabinet where we kept our movies.

I would reach for one of three: While You Were Sleeping, My Best Friend’s Wedding or Sleepless in Seattle.

While You Were Sleeping was far and away the favorite.

I would settle onto our green couch watching Sandra Bullock alone in her Chicago apartment dipping her oreos in her cat’s milk bowl dreaming of her subway crush noticing her.

And 16 year old me would nod and hard relate.

I loved getting lost watching Sandra Bullock’s dreams come true- finding love at last.

Most of the movies and shows I grew up with depicted this exact same dream: a woman getting picked, finding love, thus securing her happiness forever….

I’ve always been a dreamer.

When I was a kid, I could lose myself for hours in imaginative play with my stuffed animals. Sometimes I was their club leader, standing in front of a map, organizing activities all around the city. Sometimes I was their teacher, other times their mother.

But when I became a teenager, all imaginative efforts got sucked into the “a boy likes me” vortex.

Romantic love was my greatest longing. I was so afraid I would never be picked that I actively avoided imagining my long term future just in case marriage and kids never happened.

But in the short term? Most nights I would go to sleep lost in my own daydream of some hypothetical situation of a boy choosing me.

Alas, so true Lady Featherington, so true.

Fast forward many years, having conquered the nuclear family dream, my dreams began to shift. I started to dream of that illusive perfectly optimized daily schedule that would solve everything.¹ Or that illusive perfect job, perfect body or perfect home.

If I was sad or lonely? Well, I just need to exercise, eat better, gratitude journal, work harder, get more sleep, meditate, make art. The solution to all my woes lie in self-optimization.

It’s only now occurring to me at 39 years old that all of my dreams have been packaged wrapped and left on my doorstep by patriarchy: the nuclear family dream, the American dream, the self help dream.

And I’ve fallen for them all.

Like a sucker.

And what’s so wrong with dreaming of romantic love and self-optimization?

Both dreams leave out a crucial human need: the need for community.

Not only has the need for community been left out of our dreams, it is rarely even acknowledged as a need.

A big fat hole in our model for human fulfillment

source

This is Abraham Maslow’s model of our hierarchy of needs. Written in 1943, but still used widely today as an assessment tool in education, health care, social work and kitschy Substacks, this model has been a north star for human fulfillment for the past 80 years.

And sitting atop the throne, what is the crowning jewel we are all working towards? SELF actualization. *Note the lack of the word “community” anywhere on the spectrum of human needs, even in the “love and belonging” section.

Maslow. Looking very actualized.

After publishing his work, Abraham Maslow wanted to observe other cultures to ensure his theories on human needs were universal, so he went to live with the Blackfoot tribe in Montana and Canada.

Only, the Blackfoot tribe did not prove his theories correct. Instead of striving for self-actualization as an end goal, for the Blackfoot, that was the starting line. Researcher Ryan Heavy Head said this of Maslow’s visit:

“...he did not see the quest for dominance in Blackfoot society. Instead, he discovered astounding levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, and high levels of life satisfaction. He estimated that “80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10% of his own population”²

Eventually Maslow realized the gaping hole in his theory: community. Twenty-three years after he published his hierarchy of needs he wrote:

“…self-actualization is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation. The good of other people must be invoked as well as the good for oneself. It is quite clear that purely inter-psychic individualist psychology without reference to other people and social conditions is not adequate." - Abraham Maslow

Unfortunately, this writing was never published³ and we’ve been left with self-actualization as the ultimate goal instead of community-actualization.

But man, how different would the Western world be if for hundreds of years we dreamed of community fulfillment instead of self fulfillment?

“To most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe.” - Abraham Maslow

Not only do our patriarchal dreams of romantic love and self-optimization not include community, they act as a barrier to it.

Lexi Eikelboom

in her recent article “On Losing to Win” describes how we lose real belonging by focusing all our connection efforts on securing someone to date:

“As they grow up, both boys and girls, at different moments and in slightly different ways, are socially pressured into giving up some of the ingredients required for true connection and real relationship, and are encouraged to pursue “relationships”, socially-sanctioned facsimiles of belonging.”

15thCenturyFeminist

recently described bell hooks describing how because of patriarchy we seek romantic love and self-optimization at the cost of community:

“In All About Love bell hooks argues that ‘capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy [the] larger unit of extended kin.’ She writes ‘replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation….’”⁴

60% of American adults report feeling lonely. We’re so busy chasing dreams of romantic love and self-optimization, but even when we reach high levels of both, we are still left feeling unfulfilled.

What if we dreamed in community?

What if Sandra Bullock didn’t dream of being held by a man when she ate her oreos? What if from the time she was little, she dreamed of being held by a whole community? What if instead of living alone with her cat on a 10th floor Chicago apartment, she was part of a stable multi-generational ecosystem?

What if instead of going to sleep each night fantasizing my crush would fall in love with me, I grew up fantasizing about loving and being loved by a whole neighborhood?

What if happily ever after wasn’t wedding bells, but a loving collective? What if happily ever after didn’t have to be earned?

What if when we turned on the radio instead of hearing endless anthems to romantic love, we heard song after song romanticizing kinship?

What if instead of seeing the absence of romantic love as an embarrassment, we collectively saw the lack of thriving communities as the real embarrassment? What if not contributing to a community was the most embarrassing thing a person could do in life?

What if instead of looking to optimizing our schedules and health as the solution to all of our problems, we looked to being with people we like?

How different would the world be if instead of dreaming of just two-stringed braids, we dreamed of dozens of strings casting on, stitching row after row together?

What kind of beautiful tapestries could we have knitted by now to keep us warm if we dreamed in community?

1. Not gonna lie, never met a daily schedule optimization video I scrolled past.

2. SOURCE

3. largely because of racism :(

4. Source: Men Performing Masculinity