We chose to be “hippies” or Goths. We wear black because we don’t like white; we listen to loud dissonant music because “soft” music represents the establishment. We don’t trust authority because we feel betrayed by those we had hoped to trust in our childhood or are adolescence. Together with our friends, we forge an identity that—ironically–is still beholding to the dominant norms of society—though now we are conforming by doing the opposite of what we are “supposed” to do. At the core of this collective multiplistic stance is a belief there are no enduring truths in the world. For these estranged youth there are multiple truths that are based on quests for money, power and/or social status. The golden rule becomes “those who have the gold are those who rule.”
There is another group of young multiplists who also embrace this alternative version of the golden rule. For these young people, truth is a commodity to be exchanged for some ulterior purpose. We do what we need to do in order to get ahead. As a young adult, we cozy up to our boss, learn how to “play the game” and fit very nicely into the dominant social network. I remember as a young man talking to a classmate who spent a considerable amount of time playing golf. I asked him why this was a priority. He indicated that he wanted to skillful enough as a golfer to always loss a game of golf by a few strokes when on the course with his future boss or clients. For this young man, the world of business that lay in front of him is nothing more or less than a set of interactions on a golf course. He joins with other opportunists (and rebels) in considering life to be “just a game” with no transcendent purpose.
Commitments and Intimacy
Whether one is a rebel or opportunist during these multiplist years, the role played by friends is critical. There is still the lingering dualism. The world is now framed as one in which there is truth and righteousness, or as one where anything goes. If the latter is the case, then we are likely to trust only a few people (often not members of our family, for they led us to believe that there are enduring truths and there is a right way to behave). One can only count on a friend who belongs in the same tribe. This tribe provides the only version of reality that one can trust in the midst of competing truths and codes of conduct. This tribal-based reality is worth fighting for and even dying for—as represented dramatically in theatrical productions such as West Side Story.
This depth of commitment to friends during the challenging years of adolescence can often be great. It can even be intimate in nature. Not intimate with regard to sexual activity, but intimate with regard to sharing of personal hopes, dreams and fear. This intimacy that is manifest in a search for support and comfort during moments of stress and distress. The relationship with a friend becomes an intimate sanctuary that provides safety and renewal in the midst of stormy existential despair.
Harry Stack Sullivan (1953a) even suggests that we learn about and experience intimacy in our adolescent relationships with friends (“chums”) rather than in our relationships with the people we are dating. Sulllivan (1953b, p. 145) makes this observation:
“. . . it is a specific new type of interest in a particular member of the same sex who becomes a chum or a close friend. . .[An adolescent] begins to develop a real sensitivity to what matters to another person. And this is not in the sense of “what should I do to get what I want” but instead “what should I do to contribute to the happiness or to support the prestige and feeling of worth-whileness of my chum.”
