There’s a million painfully bizarre ways that people refer to the central relationships in their lives but one of my the least favourite phrases I hear people say is “we’re settling down”. We are often led to believe that the heat, energy, and electricity we feel within connections are simply symptoms of early days excitement, and that compromise and endurance are what ‘true love’ looks like. But what if both these narratives are incorrect? What if the buzz we crave from new relationships is because capitalism has stripped the every day joy and ecstasy that is possible when we go deeper into our humanity? What if when we look at the idealised long-term monogamous relationship we are being sold something that feels like comfort in order to ensure we remain quietly complicit within the broken systems that are rapidly destroying the world around us?
In many ways I had a fairytale romance when I married and had kids with my best friend. We’d ticked the boxes and we were ready to be ‘settled’ as a nuclear family (albeit within a life full of debt and unhealed trauma). But to sustain the love story we’d need to commit to repressing whole parts of ourselves - in fact as two trans people hiding within a heteronormative world we actually needed to hide ourselves entirely. And this is not uncommon even within monogamous relationships between two cis hetero people. When ‘two worlds collide’ it is commonly believed that you have to lose parts of yourself if you want to maintain that connection. Goodbye solo travelling. Goodbye to the hobbies that consume ‘too much’ attention. Goodbye affectionate friends. Goodbye to the mother that annoys your other half. Goodbye to challenging the status quo because it’s better to be stay safe and contained now that someone loves us. Goodbye to changing the world. And that’s if we’ve even bothered to bring our full selves to our relationships in the first place - most people connect with others by presenting a narrow, curated version of themselves that they believe is most palatable to their colleagues, friends or lovers.
And while some of us might “choose” to settle down and narrow in these ways, many others find themselves forced into this way of living and loving as a result of their partners’ possessiveness or wider cultural or societal expectations. In “Abolish the family” this type of love is described as ‘property love’.
Until my relationship with my anchor partner Nick, I had no version of love that demonstrated anything other than the above. I never knew what love looked like because my free will/spirit had been crushed under the weight of the cis heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In “Abolish the Family”, Sophie Lewis shares a quote about “Relinquishing the organised poverty in favour of an abundance we have never known” and it makes me realise that my love only transformed when I accessed/ allowed myself experiences that were completely beyond my imagination. It is through those moments, where I step out of this world and experience a whole new world, that I learn how to keep expanding what is possible. It gives me the tools, insight and knowledge to build and shape an existence more powerful and profound than I could’ve ever dreamed.
When my partner says “We’re going to keep building a world where…” it runs through me more than words like ‘I love you’, ‘Marry me’, ‘I’m yours forever’ ever could. Because it shows me that our love is alive and active, and it doesn’t simply exist… it creates! As an example, when I have an autistic meltdown I no longer feel the need to shut down parts of me to protect my relationship, and Nick doesn’t feel like he has to pretend to be okay with things to protect me. Instead he holds it all, even when it doesn’t make sense, and says “We’re going to keep building a world where your brain and body has more of what it needs”. And this is now how I want to love everyone.
With my kids I don’t want my love to be expectant or imposing. Instead of “Because I love and care for you, you should listen to me”, we will get creative together. We will explore the shape of our love, and let it shape the way we live together. I also won’t love them passively out of duty and biology. We will work hard to create worlds together where we can discover our authentic connection, and our love will grow when we need it to, and retreat when they need more from others.
In addition to this I think it’s important that this world-building form of love is open and expansive. Sometimes we shelter within the worlds we’ve built - as a queer trans person this has been deeply necessary at times in order to protect my energy. But many people exist within a ‘batten down the hatches’ or ‘us against the world’ form of relating - creating isolation, separation from community and fuelling toxic cycles of co-dependency.
In ‘The Mushroom at the end of the world’ Anna Tsing talks about the symbiosis that occurs between fungi and other plants and trees. She talks about how humans have often focussed on categorising individual species, but that actually fungi often join forces with other living beings to create whole ecosystems, and that the ‘individual species’ within this would not exist without the other.
When I think about this, I think about the partners, friends and family I actively choose to connect with to create community. Community does not passively happen because we are simply connected. There must be investment in how ideas, culture, and value flows within that community. We are a community because we can create worlds together. Those worlds can simply replicate other worlds or we can love even more actively and put the work in to actually cultivate something magnificent.
And when loving is about world-building we can finally discover the true power of it. It is an endless expanding, renewing, cyclical resource. I’ve often joked to partners that the energy I feel as a result of mind-blowing sex is revolutionary, and that more good sex could be the answer to most of societal problems. But there is a half truth in that. As described in Radical Intimacy or this blog post on queer platonic relationships, capitalism has attempted to commodify everything including love and relationships. When we finally realise that our love can not be contained, and that loving others should not need to involve making ourselves and our worlds smaller, we might actually discover an authentic existence that is both electrifying and rooted, freeing and safe. An expansive world where loving is the currency that keeps us all thriving.