Romance or community?

I'm starting to slip on this "Post once a day" goal I set myself, but maybe I can catch up.  I was thinking of posting my last dream of last night, just before I woke up this morning, but that seemed just a bit too desperate.  Surely I can think of more material than that.  Well I have thought of a couple other topics, actually, but I think they'll take a while to flesh out and I'm trying to write this on my lunch hour.  So I'll have to try for something shorter.

One thing I have mulled over recently, though, is a comment Debbie made to me last fall, in an e-mail where she was (even then) feeling her way through some of her mixed feelings about our relationship.  She said that on the whole she preferred to meet her own social needs "in community" rather than in a romantic relationship, because in her experience intense personal relationships were always unsafe.  She instanced, for example, her relationship with her parents when she was growing up: her mother was emotionally unavailable, and her father (by the time she was an adolescent) was drinking and violent.  And at the time she used this as a springboard for talking some more about us.

What I have been mulling, though, is this distinction: romance or "community"?  What does it really mean, and what are the differences between the two?  I take "community" in this case to refer to a circle of friends.  Certainly Debbie talked often about belonging to several interlocking communities: a couple of sanghas, her church community, her coworkers, ... maybe some others.  Now that she is enrolled in a chaplaincy program and has moved to another city, she's got a new church, a new sangha (or two), her fellow students, an Al-Anon group ... in short, multiple interlocking communities.  And this is how she most enjoys meeting her needs for sociability, for companionship.

It's a bit of a foreign concept for me, because I don't plunge myself into communities in the same way.  I get along comfortably with all the people at work, but there is maybe only one with whom I am partway down the path of making him a friend in the sense that we talk about our private lives.  I have been a steady member of the UU sangha for close to a year now -- maybe even a little more -- and I guess I'm settling into that.  I helped out at an event last weekend where the sangha volunteered to do something nice for the UU church that hosts us, and I was able to ask a member of the sangha to drive me home after my colonoscopy a couple months ago.  But I see the people there at sangha, and not outside of it.  So I don't really have anything like the extended network of friends that Debbie has, and that she makes a point of having around her at all times.

Probably I shouldn't even try to speculate about the differences between these two ways of being sociable, when I don't have the experience of her way.  But I can't help wondering about it.  Somehow it seems to me that it is easier to put on an act for the members of a "community" than for a romantic partner, to pretend to be a better person than you are.  Somehow it seems to me that, for good or ill, you have to be more honestly yourself in a romantic relationship -- at any rate, once the rose-colored fog burns off -- because you get closer to each other and (try to) tear down all the barriers in between.  I might be wrong.  Maybe if you live "in community" the way Debbie does you get so close to people that you can't hide behind niceness.  Maybe what I'm really thinking of is that it's easier to put on an act with strangers.  And she's not talking about strangers.  But my coworkers aren't exactly strangers to me.  They aren't strangers, but I'll wager they don't know most of my faults.

I guess I don't really know how to compare these two ways of being sociable.  Maybe I should mull them some more.  But I've told you my first thought.