Peopleweaving
Spellcraft for community
Last Sunday night, Eliezer and I didn’t get married, and it was magical.1
The night before the not-a-wedding, I lay snuggling with another partner on a beanbag in a small geodesic dome full of loamy-smelling plants. As you do.
He asked, “What’s the emotional center of the not-a-wedding, for you?”
I answered. I told him about my feelings for Eliezer. How I didn’t know, before I met Eliezer, that there was anyone else on this planet who fit me so well. How compatible we are, how we’re the same kind of weird. How happy I’ve been, these last few years. I started to cry as I explained it.
And he petted me and he said, yes, that all makes sense, but those are your feelings about Eliezer, not about the party. What’s the point of the party? Implying, I think, that I could just be quietly in love with Eliezer in private, and therefore that the party must have some additional purpose.
So I told him about my desire to make a community event. Our shared community2 is palpable3, the social graph is densely connected. And in this community, we have a lot of events, many quite elaborate and joyful. I love this, I get a lot of value from it. I want to contribute.
As I explained it to him, I was thinking mostly of doing my part, pulling my weight, taking my turn to throw a party – though there was also a sense that I wanted to create something that was uniquely me-flavored, or me-and-Eliezer-flavored. “Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own,” intoned the Borg queen. Like that, except for parties.
In retrospect, though, my thinking was too shallow. I was contemplating a festive quid pro quo. My party would be fun and light and frothy, ephemeral, something to enjoy for a night, but not in any real way transformative for the guests.
I forgot that something deeper was possible. I don’t want to forget about it again. Maybe writing will help me remember.
How do communities work, what ties them together?
One model is that communities are static, you have the friends you have, and nothing ever really changes. Sometimes it works like that. There’s some consistency and comfort in it, maybe, but I prefer more dynamism.
A more common model, in my life, is that communities mostly change when the dyads in them change. Like Zeke and Yvette become closer friends, and Zeke starts inviting Yvette to more events in his friend group, and then maybe Yvette gets to know Xander and then Wendy, and slowly over time Yvette is knit into the group in her own right, not just as Zeke’s plus-one.
That’s all correct too, it does happen that way.
But I forgot that also, sometimes, you can do a more complex kind of peopleweaving, drawing many people closer all at once. You can work a spell. You can wind the threads of people’s lives together, creating social fabric and stitching it together, all in one transformative burst.
And maybe it’s all still dyadic, if you stare at it closely enough. But if you weave lots of criss-crossing pairs together simultaneously, the effect feels very different. That’s the magic.
I knew this! I’ve been woven into many fabrics over time. It was more common when I was younger.
For me, the strongest examples were summer math and science camps. We’d arrive as sixty gawky teenagers and we’d leave as a bonded pack, forever changed by the knowledge that, sprinkled across the world, there were others like us. That someday we’d escape our homes and our local high schools and find our kinspeople.
I didn’t know then, when I was young, that this kind of bonding was only going to happen a finite and precious number of times, and then it would be over.
I realize now that other people, adults, made those containers for us. They had a pretty good idea of what kind of container we needed, and how to create the bonding experience for us. Presumably they had once been young alienated nerds themselves.
We thought of ourselves as special, and we were right, but in another way we were just the latest bunch of mathematical hotshots, and we needed the same things as all the previous batches. There was a formula and the formula was correct. We needed to learn math, eat pizza, watch movies, and feel each other up, that was sufficient for the magic to happen.
I am suddenly very grateful to our nerdy elders, who gave us what we needed. Those camps changed my self-concept and my entire life trajectory. I would not be the same person without them.
Things kind of like that continued to happen, pale echoes of the first heady experiences.
I started grad school, twice. Some of the ingredients were there: a filtered collection of people, uprooted and joined in a new location, for a purpose – but the magic wasn’t quite there either time, maybe because school was just one thing, rather than the thing, that each of us was doing.
I started new jobs, or joined a new team at work. There was no magic there at all. One person joining an established group does not create the bonding magic.
I went to workshops and retreats. Some of them tried to do the magical peopleweaving, but none of them happened to work on me.
I never did join a cult, no matter what you might hear. Maybe I would have enjoyed it, but I stand by my non-cult choices.
Overall, the peopleweaving ingredient just vanished from my life. I didn’t get any more of it for a very long time. I missed it, but I had no idea how to get it back.
I mourned.
And then, at Duncan and Logan’s wedding in 2022, my first major social event in my current community, peopleweaving was back.
It jumped up on me like a sweet but poorly trained German Shepherd, front paws firmly planted on my chest. The sudden immersion bowled me over. I could feel myself getting woven into the social fabric, in a way I thought I never would again. I barely slept for days afterwards, as I turned the experience over in my mind and tried to make sense of it. Was this a one-off, or was it real? Would it happen again?
It happened again. This community, it turns out, specializes in peopleweaving. It has happened to me at Solstices, at Shabbat dinners, at most events that take place at Lighthaven, and yes, at sex-related events too, like Red Means No orgies and Slutcon. Now that I’m plugged in, I get the feeling of kinship and interconnection regularly, and I know where to get more. I’m so grateful.
I don’t think peopleweaving is unique to this community! It’s a very human experience, and I would guess it was a major feature of the ancestral environment.
Weddings are, I think, primarily intended to be peopleweaving events. That a central part of their purpose. They’re not just about the two people getting married, it’s their families and their friends too. “We are one.”
Most modern-day weddings fail at this, in my own experience.
I’ve been involved with a lot of weddings that were too much about executing the ritual and not enough about the heart and the community. They’re too sterile, too wrapped in tulle and gauze. Everyone has their lines to say. Everyone performs their part.
And buried deep within all the layers, the couple’s hearts do often beat quicker. They are happy to be there. It means something and it matters.
But it’s hard for most of the guests to connect to, in the moment. The feelings are too insulated to be infectious.
You show up, you drink, you dance. You leave just as disconnected as before.
I don’t think our not-a-wedding was a perfect example of peopleweaving, not at all. Many guests were probably at the fringes, not quite sure how to fit in or engage. Others had a good time. For them, it was just a party. They had drinks and cake, they mingled, they’re glad they came, but they were mostly unmoved.
But I think – for some significant fraction of guests, and definitely for me and Eliezer – we did better than that. I think we bound our friends closer together in a way that will stick. I think we gave them a feeling of community and belonging, of being a part of something, of being cherished and valued by us and by the other guests. I think they came away with in-group memories of having been there on a memorable day, and having that in common with the others there, and of being closer, not just to us but to each other.
Some of them got just a shadow of that. Some of them got a heaping dose. Perhaps nobody got as much of it as Eliezer and I did, and that’s probably okay. It was our not-a-wedding, after all.
I think we threw a better party, in part because it was not a wedding. That freed us up to invent everything from scratch, to throw away the scripts and optimize, to ask ourselves the question, “how could we make this even better?” And then ask that again, and again.
I deliberately included many games and activities that would encourage our guests to interact with each other. We had mild and spicy bingo cards that got people rapidly past small talk; we had a book discussion corner with a new book under discussion every ten minutes; we had kinky speed dating. There was special party currency that you could earn by participating in party activities, and you could use the currency to enact trade with the other guests. What’s a party without its own economy?
My rationale for all of this, originally, is that I don’t enjoy unstructured parties with nothing to do but idly chatter with strangers. Maybe it’s just the autism, but I like to know what we are doing and why we are doing it, even at a party, so I have something to directly optimize. I want to be playing a game of some kind, always, and then I want to excel at that game. The game doesn’t have to be competitive, necessarily, collaborative games work too – the key is for progress and achievement to be possible – while still being optional, silly, and fun.
I guessed, blindly, that many of my guests would enjoy having party-purpose, too, so I gave them a way to excel together, if they felt like it. And of course they could still just idly chatter if they wanted!
This party was only my first, semi-unintentional, attempt at peopleweaving.4 There was definitely room to do much better yet. But it was a credible start.
If I’m right that we successfully worked a peopleweaving spell, then that was the answer to my boyfriend’s question. That was the emotional center of the party. That was what I was trying to do, without even realizing it consciously, without naming it in advance, without particularly setting out to achieve it. I wanted to draw our community closer around us, to tie them to each other as much as to us.
I gathered the materials for my spell, and then to my delight, I think it worked. We’re all bound together a little tighter now.
Maybe next time I’ll do it on purpose.
Eliezer and I had a not-a-wedding. While it was definitely not a wedding, I give you permission to think of it as a wedding. You’ll be wrong, but you’ll be close enough. Explaining the difference is not the point of this essay.
Broadly speaking, the Berkeley rationalists, or something like that.
Both figuratively and literally, a lot of us are huggers.
I’m tired and don’t want to do it again soon. But it does occur to me that you can get not-married as many times as you want, it’s an idempotent operation.
I love this so much! The message I wrote you earlier was before I had read this, and I think this nails it. I felt so honored to be there with so many wonderful people. Reading this does make me wish I had tried harder to connect even more with the completely fantastic people at this event, but I was thoroughly exhausted by the two nights of partying beforehand. I am looking forward to more opportunities.