"a bunch of fat happy women and no crime?"

Probably no one will recognize the punch line above; it came from an 80s sitcom that I caught a bit of channel surfing one night. This is really the only thing I recall about it; Queen Latifah was in it, and she delivered the line above in response to the musical question, "Can you imagine what the world would be like without men?"

My point is not to bash men, but instead to demonstrate what I think is the extreme. It's a silly, goofy response, because it's a silly, goofy question. In my not-so-freaking-humble opinion, when we ask or are asked the kinds of questions Heidi and Lauren have raised this week, we tend to a)become far too serious and cerebral and then as a result b)miss the point altogether. My own opinion is that it's really not about men and women or codependency and independency, it's really all just about being human.

From our earliest moments on the evolutionary tree, human beings were programmed to be social animals and to live in groups. In those times, the concepts of need and dependency were very literal. One person couldn't bring down an auroch or gather enough nuts, fruits and berries to stay alive. One person couldn't hunt/gather and also care for a small child. People needed each other in a very practical sense, were dependent upon each other in very specific practical ways. There was no psychology to it at all.

It's not just an anthropological early-human phenomenon. Barn-raisings, town meetings, wagon trains, military units, pirates, pilgrims, convents, covens and bargaining collectives all come out of the idea that one person isn't enough to get done what one wants to be doing.

It's only been very recently (possibly traceable to the advent of self-help books) that we've begun to question need for and dependency on other people. I think the notion that somehow we SHOULD question it is really the problem here. We're getting pretty solid programming that we, especially women, are all islands to ourselves. We're told to be independent. And we do a reasonable facsimile of that. But if you look closely at it, how independent is anyone really? You might work and make your own money and pay our own rent and buy your own groceries. But someone hired you, and you work for someone else, someone handles your payroll, someone provides the place you live and yet some other someone elses actually built it. Other people own that grocery store where you buy those eats, and furthermore, other people actually grew the veggies and packed them and trucked them in to your store or farmers' market, or worked in factories to make and package that macaroni and cheese you made when you got home from work.

No one, male or female, is really independent of all other people. All people need other people, no matter how hermitlike someone may aspire to be, because that's just the way society works. Being "in a relationship" isn't the choice here, only the level of intimacy is the choice. And it's intimacy, not relationship itself, that brings on the expectations, and the meeting or deflecting of those expectations is generally what makes people start asking obtuse questions about need and codependency.

The fact is, we all need each other. None of us are or can be "complete" without other people in our lives. We are all interdependent. How we choose to deal with that realization is up to us as individuals. This special kind of "needing" that we seem to mean when we ask "does any woman need a man?" or "am I too needful of my partner" is to a certain degree invented; in a strange way, we seem to be using that question as a surrogate for questions about our own self-worth. And once again, I get to bring out my favorite character from literature, the Fisher King. Our challenge, like his, is not so much finding the answers as identifying the proper questions.

--E. Marie