CULTURE

Are You Ready to Abandon the Love Hierarchy?

How Covid-19 has revealed the worst hierarchy of them all.

One Little Virus and One Big Problem

As I approach the year anniversary of my former life, I’m taking stock on the toll Covid has taken on my relationship landscape. It has been quite a year. Major fault lines erupted in core relationships. Some have been strengthened, some have disappeared. Most of us have learned to live with less; less touch, less love, less security. Fear and anxiety took up residency in places it passed through easily before, and the Love Hierarchy that began to emerge in my inner circle at the beginning of this pandemic became a full blown family crisis only a few months later.

It all started with a basic fact about myself. I’m an Empathic Connector. I would define this as a step beyond extrovert. Empathic Connectors view their primary purposes in life to connect with other humans so they can then connect those humans to each other. We’re kind of like cultural glue. Oprah may be at the top of the mountain here if you need a point of reference. This connection can happen in a lot of different ways, but there’s no doubt that in-person contact is the gold standard. For an Empathic Connector there is just so much more you can receive from a person, and give to them, when you are in their presence. It’s akin to reading the entire book as opposed to just a review.

Being an Empathic Connector, it’s no surprise that the thing I am challenged by the most in this pandemic is the isolation. Even the most die hard introvert has been challenged by this experience, so it makes sense that I would find it akin to torture, and I’m not exaggerating.

Humans need other human contact to some degree. So, it really took only a week into the pandemic for my brain to start assessing the risk and perimeters around human contact so that I could spend some real face time with my people. Maybe I would just have one person over for tea. Maybe I would get outdoors more with others. Regardless, as the days went on I hunkered down and plotted. I read every available article on Covid and virology. I laid out my path through the mind field.

My first action was to tell one of my besties what I was struggling with, and that I may want to pop in for a visit soon. I was ‘taking her temperature’ on the idea. She is a bit more free spirited than my other friends and likes being with people, and physical touch as much as I do, so I thought she was my best bet to start building this new life.

I laid out my case, the core of which was this. If any of the people I care about were infected, I wouldn’t stop supporting them. Why would I stop doing that when they weren’t sick? I wasn’t talking about having a house party. I was talking about tea with one person, who is showing no signs and has no immediate contacts with symptoms, is wearing a mask, and sitting six feet away from me, probably outside. I was already taking a greater risk at the grocery store. Did this virus really mandate I couldn’t see ANYBODY I care about other than my children and their father?

I am, and was, in full awareness of the risk from asymptomatic carriers and that the absolute safest course of action not to see anyone you don’t absolutely have to. That being said, we have all had to evaluate our real need for, and the importance of, human contact. For me it was pretty clear that little to know human contact wasn’t going to be a viable, long-term strategy. Life, with its real joys and other big problems, also goes on. Those things need attending to in some fashion. As Covid has dragged us through the weeks, with the real possibility of becoming a permanent fixture in our lives through variants, we continue the nearly constant process of evaluating who we are willing to risk our lives for, and what the balance will be.

To this point, my friend text me the next day to tell me she wasn’t comfortable with us hanging out. While I was sad, I completely understood and buried myself in an article about the contagion factor of this virus to reinforce the need to be isolated. I did notice one thing though. Her fairly new lover was not in the same boat I was. She was invited to come and go as necessary, and I came face to face with the Love Hierarchy.

Let Me Introduce You to The Love Hierarchy

The pandemic has brought a lot of our systems, and ways of being, into stark focus. Everything from how we produce our food to who carries the burden of strain in our world, is seeing the light of day. With this focus comes the inevitable and righteous challenging of those ways of being. One of the structures that is being challenged is hierarchy and how we make choices of value in our lives both as a society and personally. Who lives, who dies? Who gets to touch you and who doesn’t? Who and what will you risk your life for? Who do you love more?

We live in a world of hierarchy of all types. Hierarchy is defined as a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority. Hierarchy is a system that facilitates choices based on perceived value. The child will receive the ventilator because they are more valuable than the elder. The wealthy person will get the vaccine because they have the money which equates to them being more valuable. The white person will be safely delivered their groceries by the person of color who has to risk their life to go to work.

Hierarchy is so ubiquitous in our society that it seems completely rational until you understand that hierarchy is a self perpetuating system. It creates scarcity to support itself so ‘value’ has to be assigned and a choice made. Our current situation is a textbook case in hierarchy. It wasn’t created by a virus, but by the lack of supplies, resources, planning, information and action required to care for those infected. Had we made the preparations and implemented plans that have been called for for decades, we wouldn’t have found ourselves rationing out support based on value. But something else was deemed more valuable than this preparation and thus the hierarchical cycle was continued. Trump is the archangel of hierarchy and the power dynamic inherent in that system. He gave us a masterclass in using it by withholding needed resources to amp up the value proposition in a global pandemic.

This hierarchical dynamic has trickled down to the way we love and build our families. I call it the Love Hierarchy. It has flourished for millennia as we have moved out of the communal systems of our ancestors and into the individual systems of our present day. Because we are supported by relatively few others, and communal support of any kind (i.e. universal health care) is routinely demonized, we live in a scarcity mindset and a life that reflects that mindset. It feeds our ‘acquire, own and hoard’ mentality. This structuring has become so pervasive we are supported in categorizing the people in our life based on their “importance” to us. In broad terms; family first, everyone else next to last.

Under this structure, our familial support systems, which once included entire tribes, have been whittled down to the ‘nuclear family.’ We hoard our partners, our land, our food and shelter, and our means of productivity and wealth. At the heart of our most profound fear in this moment is that we don’t have enough. I would maintain that the pendulum has swung so far to the side of personal resources, or “toxic individuality,” that we indeed do not. We are scrambling to produce the communal response required. Proving once again that hierarchy is a self fulfilling prophecy of scarcity.

In addition, we have very little practice (emotional or structural) in communal culture living, as we don’t live in tribe anymore. As an example, in our culture a child is seen as a parent’s responsibility, not as a community’s investment. Therefore we accept a malnourished and abused child in this culture. In cultures where children are a whole community’s responsibility this doesn’t happen. Humans take care of each other regardless of what vagina they emerged from.

Who’s Worth the Risk?

The hierarchical scarcity mindset, and the structures built around it, have led us to prioritize who we love. I have met very few people who don’t make one type of love more important than another. Some prioritize their children, some their parents, others their spouses or lovers.

As an uncoupled person in a pandemic, I experienced this dynamic in a pretty blunt way. Several of my close friends have drawn a demarcation line between me as a non-cohabitating close friend and their non-cohabitating lovers. On the face of it, the only ‘difference’ in these relationships is that I am not sexually engaged with my friends. In nearly all other respects on the ‘value chart’ I click off the same boxes and exceed in some categories; emotional intimacy, logistical support, years of knowing, integration into larger life, etc. However, their lovers enjoy access and support that I don’t during this crisis. It begs the question of why I’m not worth the risk in these cases? Is an orgasm really that valuable?

Before the pandemic, I would point out a similar phenomenon when discussing the rampant insecurity in most monogamous relationships. The response to my observation was always something along the lines of the Love Hierarchy being a natural part of human behavior. I was told I shouldn’t expect people not to feel entitled to the exclusive and prioritized love (emotional and physical) of their partner, and thus become the victim of the corresponding jealousy involved when my presence in someone’s life threatened that relationship. But as Elle Beau points out in this brilliant article examining the large spectrum in the definition of marriage across both ancestral and modern cultures, the Love Hierarchy our culture engages in is anything but natural. It is a choice, just like all the other hierarchies.

When Hypotheticals Become Actuals

As it turns out, Covid provided me with a real life opportunity to choose whether or not I was going to practice Love Hierarchy or not. My bestie, the one who was feeling uncomfortable, eventually became comfortable in June. I think most of us did, save my wasband. Many people I knew were searching for a new normal and a path in which they could construct a life worth living for. Her and I decided to start testing the waters of hanging out under the recommended precautions. Her family and my family were following many of the same protocols so we felt fairly safe in what is now termed as “creating a bubble” with each other. Unfortunately, my friend’s trust was breached, and with it came a breach in our bubble. She came down with Covid, I had been exposed, and so had my kids, their father and his elderly mother.

I went into immediate quarantine which fucked up my custody schedule (the holy grail of all co-parenting relationships). I got tested and waited for the fallout. My bestie and I were practicing safety protocols when we hung out and those paid off, my test came back negative. My family however, imploded. My pre-teen boys called me during the quarantine and bitched me out for getting exposed. My wasband’s natural anxiety, exacerbated by the pandemic, exploded with my exposure. A lot of horrific things were said, and a lot of doubt was cast on my love for them. The question that kept coming up was “why?” Why couldn’t I just sacrifice my need for others to protect those I was supposed to care about the most?

For days I struggled with this question myself. Why was I being so selfish? Why couldn’t I just forgo my needs for those most important to me. I had certainly forgone many important personal needs in my life to take care of my family, so it didn’t make sense that I wouldn’t here. As I wrestled with the answers, I could never seem to come up with one that truly explained my choices. Then I realized the answer was so elusive because I was asking myself the wrong question. The issue wasn’t why I could forgo my own needs and sacrifice for my family, the question was why wasn’t my family more important than my best friend?

When the question changed, the motives for my choices became crystal clear. The reason I didn’t choose them over her wasn’t because of my Empathic Connector needs, it was because I chose not to participate in a Love Hierarchy. There are many layers to this decision, not the least of which was that my bestie had some life going on at the time that required my full presence, but the deepest factor probably was the fact that I was raised in a non-traditional family headed by a single father. Throughout my life several women had stepped into the role my mother vacated. They took me on as if I was their own, and molded me into the strong woman I am today.

Additionally, those people who are closest to me now aren’t those who share my blood. They are those who have chosen to make me important in their lives. We have adopted each other, just as those women adopted me. Life has shown me that the only way to survive is to have a community, as well as a family, standing beside you. More importantly, it is imperative that this community look beyond the hierarchical constructs imposed on our practice of love.

The Imperative of Abandoning Love Hierarchy

This may be the point where you tell me to fuck off. You might be feeling defensive or confused at the suggestions that you should put someone else above your kids or your partner. It sounds pretty ridiculous on the face of it doesn’t it? I mean, that’s the whole point of having a family isn’t it? To have people in your life that put you first.

If you really want to take care of your own first though, you will abandon Love Hierarchy as fast as you can because families, and the humans that make them up, don’t survive in the isolation that is dominating our culture today. If you need empirical evidence, look no further than the millions of healthcare workers and teachers that are risking their lives every day for complete strangers– for you. Thousands of them have died to protect your access to healthcare, education and childcare. If they had made the choice to protect their own first, hundreds of thousands of more people would be dead than already are.

It is only in societies that value love as an infinite resource to be given and received freely among strangers and families alike, that we realize sustainability and evolution. It is Love Equanimity, if you will, that insures our ability to thrive as individuals. You don’t need to take my word for it either. Science is showing not only was Darwin’s work misinterpreted to the conclusion of “survival of the fittest,” but that the quintessential construct of human survival and evolution is, in fact, community. It was, and always will be, our ability to rely on each other, in large groupings, that has guaranteed our survival.

The question then becomes simple. Do you want to exist in a world in which you are vitally important to only a few people and thus supported by a few people, or do you want to live in a world where many people would hold you with value and provide a deep bench of support? And if the latter is your preference, how can you not break down Love Hierarchy in all the constructs it currently inhabits, starting with your own?

©Kathryn Dickel 2021

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Kathryn Dickel writes about relationships, spirituality, culture and business from her perspective as a woman, 20-year founder/CEO and scholar of Theology and Political Science with degrees from Cornell College. She is the Founder of Pollinate Ritual and EIC of Pollinate Magazine. You can follow all of her work @pollinateritual or @Kathryn Dickel on digital channels.