Relationships are a thing and I don't necessarily know how much value they will have in a world disintegrating from perennial abuse. John Berger said relationships erected a locus of exemption from the pain and suffering of the world so that in the vein of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres (being a vessel or construct of containment like a house or tribe) a pleasurable experience with a lover establishes an immunity from the bullshit. Of which there is so much you'd conceivably drown if you didn't every now and then delude yourself with certain sanctioned activities into feeling separate and safe from it. Which makes monogamy, even when making people more prone to sexual boredoms, still the crowning jewel in this pursuit of exclusionary securities.
I recently went to a wedding and it was beautiful and I got teary but the distinction was the money behind it and the parental and filial support which not every queer person gets when stepping out with a willingness to inhabit more normative relationship visibility. Again the money. Weddings are expensive and yes there's an essence of gifting to your family and friends but also there's an ostentation which performs consumer proficiency as a rite of passage towards maturity and adulthood, of which marriage is arguably the prima facie. To stress, the wedding was beautiful and I couldn't help picturing my own day and the kinds of things my friends would be saying while I sat at the bridal table (I am the bride in this scenario) vibrating with gratitude. I wanted to call my sister. I wanted to call my best friend. If anything the performances and speeches reiterated the importance of community over the centrality of normative relationship statuses, and considering the brides and their respective vocations it was no surprise their wedding would be so themed.
But again the money.
I would love to throw a big enough party and give my friends and family tangible reason to appreciate one another amidst rivers of food and drink at a beach-side venue with subsidised accomodation. And normative culture scrutinises lives which fail to deliver such rites as juvenile or anti-social. But it costs so fucking much that right here in this particular moment of my life I'm doubting if I'll ever have deep enough pockets to pay for that kind of tribute to my community.
But then consider everything life could be like without the expectation of finding a 'partner'. Are we really geared for such interlocking compatibility with a single Other? Is there really something in Nature's script that moves us so, or is it all conditioning and commercial incentives to join hands with a significant-other and combine your financial clout to become even better consumers? Certainly two guys getting married would be a structurally favourable move when stats give men economic privileges over women; basically gay marriage is capitalism's wet dream, even if it's taken society and law a little longer to catch up.
At the wedding I saw a boy I went to high school with who I was never great friends with but who I had a civil enough vibe with. He was also our head boy and in that vein diplomacy was the brand. When he was younger we definitely had run ins, me being an out gay guy and he being the fourteen year old playing with assertive masculine presentation and adopting homophobic angst, not from actual loathing of gays but from the decrepitude of normative-gender falsely convincing him he had to. When we were older and seniors and slightly more critical and we had enough mutual friends that it was no longer appropriate or self-serving for him to be homophobic he eased into friendliness towards me. But I never forgot.
And there he was at my adult-friend's wedding. It was in the queue for the bathroom we came across one another. I smiled, we hugged, and after a less than pleasant pause I said I'd pee outside and left him there, a practical pretence but also a loud enough signal that I was done with this, with him. The door then closed.
Would it have been better, less cruel to make small talk and then potentially hate fuck him later? Was that the fantasy I kept to myself while icily turning from him and barring the possibility?
The person I later told about this jarring encounter suggested that I in fact wanted to hate fuck him, and as he was saying this my brain shivered with flat out rejection of this notion because I knew it was not as simple as that. I wanted closure, triumph, connection. I wanted to shut the door and become best of friend's simultaneously, push a reset button and explore an intimacy (non-sexual, filial) that could've been if it hadn't been for silly arbitrary divisions of sex and gender that we didn't even understand at the time but which we pretended to understand because when you're fourteen signs of weakness make you vulnerable to attack from other pack animals. It was a missed connection, but a missed friend connection.
I wonder how many others I've missed in my slouching life-trajectory. How many people's lives have I brushed and ignored? How many of those brushes could've been nurtured into worthy bonds? It's a sobering thought and makes me want to live more slowly and more gently.
Until I get bored anyway.
And what the fuck is it about relationships that makes everyone froth or fear and measure themselves accordingly? What is the value, aside from the psychological cosiness of facing the void of existence with a support person? Being single for too long is pathologised, but then also someone who jumps from relationship to relationship is pathologised, meaning the measure of wellness which everyone holds up to each other with casual cruelty is their ability too sustain a single union. That is so fucking cooked, not every life can support a relationship nor should it have to. Relationships are premised on leisure time essentially because it's labour no one's paying you for. You need more time than late-stage capitalism could ever allow to commit to the project of intimacy, true intimacy with deep connection and not simply the performance of joint bank accounts and selfies from your annual vacation (and the ultimate soul-crushing body-ruining performance of child-rearing). Also there are no assured returns making it the worst kind of investment.
I think I would rather be rich.
Also you always get fat in a new relationship so on top of it being a suck of time and money you sacrifice the body and esteem for yourself you curated so carefully as a single person, not to mention interpersonal relationships beyond the primary partner are undermined by a hegemonic prioritising of the boy/girlfriend-spouse. That this unit has societal endorsement makes me wonder where our obsession with claustrophobic entombment comes from; an echo of womb experiences? A wish to die and so fortify ourselves against life's various highs and lows inside living coffins? Does the normative relationship model perhaps abbreviate the dialectal obsessions of society in which truth is formed and spread via contrastive binarising of everything?
Like, EVERYTHING.
Through the eyes of society the existence of anything is confirmed in pairs.
I don't know but if environmental collapse and societal degeneracy really are looming closer than they've ever done, I am seriously rethinking how much energy I'm reserving for a relationship which is only possible in a world that will soon cease to exist.
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