Holden Relationships

Holden longs for being close and developing relationships with other humans. Throughout the story he tries to develop various types of relationships and different types of intimacy with other people. In the story, Holden criticizes and hates everyone that he comes in contact with, but at the same time wants them to join him for a drink and hang out for the evening. In any of his sexual encounters, he is unsure of how to respond to his sexual feelings.

In the story Holden is a virgin, but he has a great obsession with sex, which is kind of ironic seeing that he feel that sex is part of the phony adult life. Holden struggled greatly with his relationships with women. He often talks about Jane, a girl who he deeply cares about. He feels that he probably wouldn't have sex with Jane because he cares about her to much. Holden states " I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it." (pg62) Although he feels this way, he often fantasizes about having sex with her, and how their sex life would have been. However, we learn from his encounter with Sunny the prostitute in chapter 13, that he isn't quite ready or mature enough for a sex life. He was about to lose his virginity to a prostitute, and when he realized that he wasn't ready he paid her without having sex with her. In the story he speaks of the many opportunities he had to lose his virginity, however, he never went fully through with any of them. "I've had quite a few opportunities to lose my virginity and all, but I've never got around to it yet. Something always happens." (pg92)

Holden's non-sexual encounters with most people probably ended in him calling them phony. Holden is extremely judgmental of almost everything and everybody. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are "phony." Holden was very lonely and tried to isolate himself as much as possible. At the same time, Holden takes few steps to tone down his loneliness. Whenever he feels lonely he calls up someone to meet up with. However he ends up sabotaging it before he can get hurt. For example, He calls a boy named Carl Luce, whom he used to know at the Whooton School, and Luce agrees to meet him for drinks later that night. When Luce arrives, Holden bothers him with questions about sex. Luce refuses to be drawn into the kind of sex discussion that they had had at Whooton, and he suggests that Holden needs therapy. Luce became annoyed by Holden's immature comments and questions, and left. After Luce left, Holden said, "Old Luce. He was strictly a pain in the ass." (pg149) Although, Holden felt this way, not only about Luce, but about everyone else he came in contact with,