Romantic relationships are great. Putting them over other relationships and getting all of our fulfillment and needs sourced from them: decidedly not.
❤️💀❤️💀❤️💀❤️💀❤️💀❤️💀
I was visiting family in Bangladesh in my teens when the first seeds were planted. The seeds of knowing the fundamental structure of (Western) society, the nuclear family unit, was off.
It was a rather simple thing that tipped me off, but I noticed how much better things flowed when there were multiple adults around, in this case my aunts + my parents. There was a sense of less pressure from the parents onto the kids and I can imagine vice versa as well.
I returned to Canada from that trip, feeling the off-ness of everyday life more acutely in comparison to my recent experience in Bangladesh.
I read a quote from the book SCUM Manifesto that captured how I felt: “Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.”
An article I read discussing the absence of the “third place”, also solidified my ideas. Specifically, the phenomenon of shuttling oneself from car —> work/school —> home. Where’s the third place for people to simply congregate? Without it, opportunities for connection become limited.
Four years later in 2017 I had a stronger benchmark to compare my feeling of everyday off-ness. And that was Standing Rock, the Indigenous standing of ground in the face of DAPL. The sense of community I felt there is something that will have its impact on me forever.
I remember someone I didn’t know initiating a hug as we crossed paths. I remember how efficiently everything ran, in its nonlinear way. For example:
There was a large shipment of food that arrived, but it all needed to get to another place. Lugging it all back and forth by foot would have taken at least hour. After one such back and forth schlep, I thought to head to the main fire to make an announcement for help. Immediately ten people showed up. Shortly after, a truck showed up. We got it all done in minutes.
The community kitchens there were amazing, too. Although I love cooking, I couldn’t help but think how much easier it was to have a couple of people tasked with bulk cooking for lots of people compared to the day to day effort of cooking for oneself.
Community and romantic relationships are intricately connected, in the sense that in the absence of community networks our romantic partners become the community encapsulated in one person. One can imagine, and lots have been written about on, the detrimental effects of expecting from one person what everything we historically would have gotten from the community.
Amatonormativity: the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types — Elizabeth Brake
As I write this, in a similar case of Indigenous people standing ground on their own land in the face of invasive energy projects, RCMP have arrested the leaders of Wet’su’wet’en. That’s not an accident that the colonial machine is operating like this.
And it’s not an accident that our society is set up as little “isolated family units”. Quite frankly, it is a lot easier to make money off of people when they are divided rather than when they share their resources.
“The capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal state promotes relationship hierarchies based on romance supremacy and amatonormativity. It endorses treating sex like a product, protects heterosexual men in their consumption of female bodies as sexual objects, promotes the buying and selling of women’s sexualized bodies. The capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state WANTS you to invest all of your free time, energy, resources, and emotion into romantic couplehood, into marriage, into sex. It WANTS you to devalue friendship, to stay isolated from everyone who isn’t your romantic partner, to be a self-interested individual with no ties or commitments to anyone but your spouse…because friendship and community are almost impossible to commodify and harness for the purpose of feeding into the capitalist economy and creating bigger profits for the wealthy elite. Sex and romance make rich people money all day every day. They sell it to you every waking moment. They can’t use friendship and community to sell you shit. They can’t turn friendship and community into products. If they could, they would’ve spent the last century doing so, instead of teaching the public that friendship is worthless and money is more important than community.”
— The Thinking Asexual
Encapsulating the community into one person, and valuing the relationship with the SO above other relationships is one aspect of why codependency is so rampant. It’s one aspect of why break-ups are so painful, because we’ve severed the source of the bulk of our safety and connection.
It’s a self-fulfilling cycle: society is set up so that community is hard to come by and people gravitate towards finding connection in romantic relationships —> Romantic relationships become exalted over community & friendships because those are the only relationships we see truly having our needs met in.
I’ll be damned to admit it’s isn’t difficult to branch out, though, and that it’s not something I’m actively working on. Even though I was aware of amatonormativity being a thing, it was still easy to fall into the trap of getting most of my needs sourced from my romantic relationship, just because I’ve found deep community hard to come by.
And before I was aware of amatonormativity? Things were a hot mess, people. But actually, it’s most damaging aspect did not manifest in romantic relationships. For me, it manifested in a platonic relationship.
Which I will write about in the next post. Stay tuned!