Relationship practice
Normative relationships, normative love; autistic observations of. Queer relationships, queer love. Enacted love and affective love. Intimacy and sex. My working model for conceptualising relations.
I’ve written about relationships before, because they’re One of the Things I’m Interested In. This might be my third attempt? This time round I try to get more explicit about what (as a masked weird autistic queer) I’ve found confusing and difficult about relationships in the past, and how I now perceive relationships as a practice. I’ve been thinking about this for years and I’m only just starting to get any kind of understanding clear — as always, do not take this as a final word on anything.
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Human relationships can be categorised in myriad ways. We form friendships from acquaintances, and maybe some develop into best friends. When we achieve a certain degree of intimacy, or decide to formalise our relationship, we might become partners or lovers, or we can choose to gender our relations and become boyfriends and girlfriends.
Plenty of euphemisms exist for those with whom we share love; significant other, better half, darling, flame, beau, special someone etc. When love is legitimised by legal status and conferred recognition by the state, partners become wives and husbands. Once a partnership has made a commitment to wed, but before the ceremony has taken place, each can self-identify as fiancé or fiancée.
Single, which implies the absence of all relations, is a separate category which means that you are uncommitted to a romantic relationship. If you are single, or sometimes a bachelor if you are a man, you can fuck who you want without note, unless you cross an arbitrary line and fuck too many people; at which point you may become a slut or a legend depending on your perceived gender.
Familial love tends to be considered an obligation and a duty, and is distinct from more voluntary forms of love. Within the family, we are assigned roles according to gender and relative seniority or status; mother, father, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, nephew, niece, grandparent, and so on. These terms are fixed and exist in reference to the family tree. The positions cannot be negotiated, although parents and grandparents have some degree of choice about whether to be dad, mum, granny, grandpa, meemaw, and so on.
Despite the taboo, familial relations are replicated in a kink context — daddies and mummies offer caring domination to their littles. Kink-based relationship roles often refer to negotiated power dynamics; submissives [subs] relinquish power (whilst claiming a different form of power) to a dominant [dom, or domme]; some will choose to switch between the two positions. Tops fuck bottoms. Subcategories abound.
The queer world offers up a whole new set of categories. The gay community uses terms often based on appearance or physical attributes; twinks, bears, otters, cubs, etc. Metamours are the partners of partners; nesting partners cohabitate; platonic life partners make non-romantic life commitments to each other, for example to cohabitate or become coparents. Queer platonic partners and other such variations sit somewhere in between friends and lovers. Polycules are the networks of interconnected relationships that form in the polyamorous community, to which various descriptive shape-based names can be attributed, such as quads, triads, dyads and vees. Relationship anarchists might adopt less hierarchical naming conventions; anchor partners rather than primary partners for example.
These personal relationship categories are distinct from professional categories, which are often defined by their purpose and an implied power dynamic; the teacher and the student or the leader and follower, for example. The capitalist class are the owners, the shareholders and the landlords; whilst the workers are those who operate the mechanisms that produce their wealth. The boss is put in charge of the workers by the owners, and there are multiple forms of boss; CEO, partner, vice-president, manager, and so on. The Prime Minister or the President or the Chairman is in charge of the country, whilst the citizens retain limited power to effect change. In religion, there are Imams, Pastors, Cantors, Lamas, and more, and their congregations are their flock.
Humans and non-humans relations have their own set of descriptors. Animals that live in the home are pets, with the humans as their owners. Animals that produce food and other materials for us are livestock to be slaughtered or exploited by farmers. Wild animals are, well, wild. Our relationship to them is uneasy and complex, because they live outside of civilisation and refuse to be tamed or domesticated. We might love an animal deeply, but likely shy away from calling them our lover, because that implies a degree of intimacy that approaches bestiality, a powerful taboo.
All of these categories can be thought of as roles. Within any given culture, relationship roles imply socially constructed expectations for the forms and methods of relating — behaviours, expressions, and performances — that are acceptable, permitted and encouraged in order to constitute that particular relationship-type. Humans perform particular ways of being in relation with others in order to fulfill their chosen roles. People may also be assigned these roles when they perform the behaviours and ways of relating to others with which they are associated, when they display certain inherited characteristics, or when they find themselves located in a particular social position with regards to others who have already been assigned roles.
The specificities of these roles are contingent on cultural context. They are not universal, and they are not played or assigned uniformly even within a particular culture. My own observations and reflections here represent a generalised norm within the dominant culture that I found myself situated in by birth; white, cisheteronormative, middle-class, imperial-core England. I continue to unlearn aspects of this culture, to queer and decolonise the constructs that it has imposed upon me, but this is [will always be] an incomplete task — many of the frameworks remain stained upon my psyche.
I’m not going to implore you to decategorise your relationships — although I do find this idea conceptually interesting. We’re always performing roles, and this isn’t an inherently harmful way of being — although enmeshment became a problem when I lost mt sense of self. It has though been very helpful for me to spend time considering my role in the collective pursuit of liberation, and to conceptualise life and all the small acts within it as performance.
It can be also useful to set parameters around the ways in which we organise ourselves. Clarifying the ways in which we relate to others through the explicit discussion of relational form seems to be a healthy and desirable aspect of any relationship.
However, as an unidentified queer autistic person growing up, I often found myself incredibly confused by the parameters that different roles seemed to imply. The rules for performance are unspoken, mostly learned through observation and interpretation, and the inconsistencies and contradictions make it a difficult lesson.
I desperately wished for certainty so that I might perform my assigned roles better, thereby gaining normative belonging and approval. My low-quality performance of normality — masking — could never bring belonging and approval though, only alienation and discomfort. Perhaps if I had perceived the flexibility of many roles, and the potential for improvisation within their often loose parameters, I would have felt less uncomfortable. The best relationships are cocreated, negotiated and intentionally shaped through the experimental collaboration of their participants; not comprised of people inflexibly attempting to play off-the-shelf parts. Normative culture encourages the latter — but the freedom exists for us to ignore this encouragement and make our own way.
I also think it is worth considering how the relational roles that we adopt may contribute to the reproduction of the dominant culture and of dominating power. Through an unconscious adherence to socially constructed norms — by following relational scripts to the word, adopting the expected behaviours completely, and performing the roles as they were performed to us by a culture imbued with hierarchy — we risk reinforcing and reproducing white supremacist, ableist and misogynist structures. What does it mean to be a friend or a partner or a teacher? Are these meanings introjected into the super-ego unthinkingly, or have they been considered and negotiated with concern for the power dynamics, expectations, and responsibilities that are implied?
Conversely: by queering preconfigured relationship categories and roles and consciously intentionally fucking with relational forms — we build new cultures which have the potential to be less dominating and hierarchical. By playfully-seriously cocreating embodied and authentic relations that are consensually and mutually constructed from the ground up by the participants, we can live more bespoke, pleasurable, and exquisite lives.
Why should we not kiss our friends?
Indeed: why should we not kiss our friends? This question gets to the heart of one of the most confusing aspects of dominant culture relationship roles from my perspective: that there are certain forms of love and intimacy which are considered appropriate to perform within one relationship but are discouraged within others.
To some degree this is reflective of the trust and desire present within the relationship. Trust is an internal [individual & collective] emergent influence upon the form and intensity of intimacy within a relationship, and relationship roles can be thought of as proxies for expected levels of trust; it is expected that there would be more trust in the relationship between partners than there would be between friends; and therefore it follows that there might be more intimacy between partners. This correlation is obviously imperfect though: the actual, real, level of trust that exists within these relationships depends almost entirely upon the real interactions between the participants in a relationship which build or corrode trust, and there are plenty of partnerships absent of trust which still contain intimacy (even if it is coercive intimacy).
What forms of intimacy might be expected between partners is a social construction, which sets out what forms of intimacy are generally considered permissible within different relationship types. This layer of taboo mediates and interacts with our shared and individual desires for intimacy - I might have wanted to kiss my friends and there might have been sufficient shared trust for it to happen: but I also felt that it was socially unacceptable to do so and hence repressed the possibility of desire.
Until 1967, homosexual acts were a criminal offence in England and Wales. Even after decriminalisation, sex between two men — regardless of the relational context — was considered taboo in a way that sex between a cis woman and a cis man would never be. Without any cultural context, it is difficult to explain why an act of intimacy shared between two or more people could be vilified in this way.
Similarly, procreation out of wedlock — itself a bizarre term — results in a bastard child, a term which carries purely pejorative connotations. Babies born within a marriage suffered no such stigma. These are now historical examples in the UK, but echoes of these traditions persist, exemplifying the contradictory, confusing, and stigmatising cultural connotations of certain relational forms, or ways of intimately relating within particular relational forms. Unmarried procreative sex is taboo; gay sex is more taboo; hetero sex is less taboo; married procreative sex is still a little bit taboo.
Although I am a bastard, the term never felt painful. More immediately confronting were the relational expectations that were projected onto childhood friendships. Whilst girls and boys mixed in primary school, at some point it became clear that I was not expected to relate to girls in the same ways that I related to boys. Any interaction with girls was met by teasing or hostility from boys ~and~ girls, or patronising questions about “my girlfriend” from adults.
Meanwhile, behaviours or ways of relating that might imply that a boy was ‘my boyfriend’ were discouraged by implicit and explicit policing from peers and adults. To some degree they were offering labels for us to describe our relation; helping us to understand the implications of its aesthetic and form. But what was more immediately damaging was the inculcation of the belief that to be in any form of relationship with a girl was at least referencing romantic love — playing at procreation — and to be in any form of relation with a boy was platonic.
This uncomfortable dichotomy which discouraged me from pursuing any form of emotional or physical intimacy with either gender became even more confusing in my gender-segregated secondary school, where physical and emotional intimacy between boys was even more explicitly discouraged and boys would brag of their sexual conquests over girls that they seemed to hate. Here, friendship most definitely could NOT include kissing, whilst kissing (and sex) implied some kind of power-over that was anathema to the kinds of relationship I was interested in.
I found the apparent variability of cultural permissibility of intimacy and love in the performance of particular forms of relation to be overwhelming. I really needed queer love.
I found it eventually.
Cultures throughout the ages have made their own taxonomic categories of Love. One common modern way of conceptualising love is to dichotomise romantic and platonic love.
A little while ago there was a ‘Scale of Me’ story going around Instagram, where people would place themselves on a series of two-dimensional dualistic scales, between for example ‘Mono’ and ‘Poly’. The scale that particularly confused me was ‘Aromantic’ to ‘Extraromantic’.
Am I romantic? Do I feel romantic attraction? Do I practice romantic love? I am perhaps nebularomantic — I autistically fail to comprehend the distinction between platonic and romantic love. So I asked the question: ‘What is romantic attraction to you?’
These are the answers of a largely queer and neurodivergent selection of people:
To me there is no romantic attraction, rather romantic compatibility
It feels more interpersonal & an exchange rather than something I am or am not?
Romantic is more loving and devotional than platonic alone. Lovers w/o sex.
I think falling in love in its purest form is about wanting to know the depths of someone
Something to do with commitment? I think! Entanglement? Intentionality?
Wanting to go on dates and holding hands and hugs and love letters and playlists etc
I’d imagine that romance has the undertone of “who would I like to help me with taxes forever” dunno
For me platonic = wanting to be AROUND someone, romantic = to be WITH someone (not nec sexually)
My cheeks go hot or I get a warm pleasant feeling that says this person is precious
Shared gentle pursuits, deep resonance, mystery of the ‘je ne sais quoi’, trust, sacred simplicity to ‘be’
For me yes, I can have a platonic romantic attraction! It is a deep, emotional, sensitive vibe, for me
Deep resonance. A chest full of glowing tree sap. Curiosity for all the hidden parts.
Platonic romantic I think is real for us deconstructing ppls
I think it’s just love by another name, one of those things that enables a hierarchy
It doesn’t exist. Romance is an idea designed to sell an image of love that conforms to norms.
Romance clearly means different things to different people, even within a particular demographic subsection of the overall population. I tend to agree with the idea that romantic attraction is love by another name, and that the division between platonic and romantic love is an arbitrary and constructed one. I do not believe in ‘true love’, that special and distinct form of love reserved solely for the romantic monogamous soulmate.
Whatever your own definition, using such shorthands as platonic and romantic without elaboration can clearly create confusion, as we refer to our own partially super-egoic conceptions of what these forms of love mean and the relational practices they entail.
Love as a feeling — Affective Love — draws me closer to someone or something, human or otherwise. It is the feeling of safety, of home; as well as excitement, an inviting but mysterious path opening up into a foggy and unknown distance. It is finding self in other and other in self as a swelling inner warmth. It is a feeling of affection and desire intensely associated with a subject or object; animating and beautiful, sometimes painfully intense, mayhaps sweet and syrupy.
Love is also an verb — Love Enacted. It is empathy offered and received; caring and being cared for, support, compassion, forgiveness, and empathy; a tender force and way of relating that holds the world together. Love can be expressed and enacted in myriad different ways, but it acts in direct opposition to abuse.
I think it is possible to act with love towards everyone and anything; enacting love as a default. This does not mean that I feel the same affective experience of love towards everyone. How overwhelming that would be! It means that I attempt to imbue all relational acts with love, and leave space for the possible blossoming of affective love in all relations — without grasping for it.
The specific form and exchange of love that any given relationship contains is cocreated, by myself and the other(s) that form that relationship. The degree to which this basic fundamental level of love intensifies as an affective experience and as a relational practice is a function of conscious and subconscious processes expressed externally, becoming something in the ether between us; recognition, trust, safety offered, overlapping models recognised, joy sparked, soft comfort, synchronicities noticed together. It is a beautiful, experimental, adventure — shared.
What if love was an organisational principle for ALL relations? One part of every single role that we perform throughout our lives?
It is interesting that only one person sharing their thoughts on romance referred to sex. I think this is because sex is distinct from love. Love (affective or enacted) does not necessarily imply sex, and sex does not necessarily imply love — although the affective experiences of sexual attraction and love often flow into one another, and sex can definitely be an act of love.
It is because of this distinction between sex and love that we have to talk about sex when considering relationship forms. I think the two things often get conflated in the dominant culture.
Sexual intimacy is categorised by itself in the cisheteronormative monogamous model of relating. It is a distinct form of intimacy that is appropriate within some relationships, but not all. It is best not to fuck your friends. Other acts that reference or approach sex are also often covered by this loose rule. The rule is loose because it is not universally adhered to or enforced. Thanks to misogyny, men are less severely punished than women for sexual relations outside of the romantic partnership. Conversely though, men are also less likely to have non-sexual relationships which contain emotional intimacy.
It is unsurprising to me that sex is distinguished as a form of intimacy. As a mode of intimate connection, sex contains the potential for intersubjective depths that are difficult to achieve through other modes of relation. What other forms of intimacy allow you to share a transcendental peak experience with another person by becoming part of their internality, bypassing external representative communication and tapping into the non-representational twitches, pulses, and ripples of the body’s connective and epithelial tissue, muscles, sphincters, and glands? To literally consume a body’s fluid pleasures? [These questions not purely rhetorical] There is something to these intimacies that is, to me at least, special and beguiling.
[Note: this is not a hierarchy, nor a universal absolute. Sex is not a ~better~ form of intimacy, and interactions that are ‘more intimate’ to me will not necessarily be so to others.]
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I just want to feel
Around my softest skin
Your tender twitch
Talk to me with your subtleties
Your unspoken linguistics
I am inside you, and you, me
I understand this language
It comes, naturally —
As you do also
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The dominant culture also instrumentalises sex as a site of social reproduction, in so doing splitting it from other forms of intimacy. It recognises the political and economic import of the act by which the citizenry [the labour force] is created, and hence regulates, defines and legitimises sex in accordance with its distance from the act of life-creation. One method of doing this is by naturalising one particular relational form — the romantic cisheterosexual monogamous partnership — as the form of relation to which all others are referential and where sex is most permissible.
The specific definition of sodomy as a legal and colloquial term has shifted over the centuries, but it has always been a concept used to reify procreation as the primary purpose of sexual activity, and the cisheterosexual partnership as the venue. Sodomy is unnatural and immoral because it tarnishes the sanctity of procreation, and procreation is holy because it is the most basic productive act. It is the productive act that enables all others.
[Dominant culture has a productivity fetish. Capitalism is a kink? Not sure, but it is a driven by libidinal forces.]
Sex of all kinds exists on a spectrum from less taboo to more taboo. Sodomy remains more taboo than procreative sex. Sexual perversions, kinks, and fetishes of all kinds tend to be more taboo than so-called ‘vanilla’ sex. Queer sex is taboo. BDSM is taboo. Fisting is taboo. Chemsex is taboo. Weird sex is taboo. Ropes are taboo. Cruising is taboo. Piss is taboo. Nudity is taboo. Breasts are taboo. Armpits are taboo. Unshaved legs are taboo. Bodies are taboo — trans bodies are especially taboo. Kissing on the street is taboo. Loving visibly is taboo. What the fuck is taboo
Queer sex is proof that sex has the potential to be a divine, rapturous act of connection regardless of how productive it is. Transgressive and taboo sex is sometimes the most beautiful. No new life must be formed for sex in all its base, sometimes abject, intimacy to create new shared worlds, imagined and real. No new life must be brought into the world for sex to be a life giving act. The cocreation of affect/experience/feeling is a wondrous potentiality contained within the unproductive ecstasy of sodomy.
But whilst sex is special to me in some way, it also exists on a continuum (not a hierarchy) of intimacy alongside texting, voice notes exchanged, spoken conversation, eye contact — and body contact: a hug, holding hands, kissing. It is distinct in some ineffable way, but it also isn’t. Does it even need to be?
It is difficult to define sex in order to make any such distinction. Penis-in-vagina [PIV] or even penetration of one body by another more generally = too narrow and too hetero. Queer and kinky sex prises the Overton window wide open with both hands. As well as penetration, sex becomes also about generalised acts of physical and emotional intimacy, with self and with other; peak experience; bodyminds feedback looping together to achieve some kind of shared initiatory experience; the pursuit of a pre-egoic state of White Heat; or entering into an ephemeral but eternal present where stories cease and experience fills our perception. Sodomy is not so bound to orgasm, ejaculation, and sperm meeting egg as procreative sex is, though it does not exclude them.
Acts of intimacy that reference or approach sex in some way — such as canoodling, kissing, hand holding, sharing sexual imagery of self or other, sexual conversation, sexual provocation, a playful spank, stroking the hand or the neck, shared nudity, play or real fighting, licking your fingers or your lips —
[I got distracted. Lost track of where that paragraph was going. I think the point is, it’s not as simple as saying ‘sex’. Things that aren’t sex are still sex. Lipstick is sex; pounding the mortar with the pestle is sex; eating a ripe nectarine is sex; etc etc]
I’m just going to abruptly transition out of sex to the final concluding thoughts.
I’m starting to build my own model of relating which is less about learning a repertoire of ill-fitting roles, and more about the explicit and improvised cocreation of bespoke shared landscapes. I’m really enthusiastic about it — it feels good, and is intellectually exciting.
This is a meta layer of intentional relationship sculpting, where relationship is practice, medium and art. When this layer is absent from a relation, I notice and wish it were more present. The ability to observe the relation from an aerial view and to terraform together feels like a form of intimacy in itself.
I am not yet competent at these practices, but at least I don’t feel quite so confused and uncomfortable.
Here are some more thoughts which might show where my relational practice is at right now.
Sex is a form of intimacy. For me, it exists somewhere towards the upper-bounds of intimacy. It is not easily defined — queerness especially has a blurring effect on any rigid categorisations.
Kink and perversion are shadowy but fascinating aspects of human sexuality, and like any shadow, are worth spending some time with. Transgression and breaking taboo can be exciting and pleasurable. Some taboos are worth abiding by.
I desire intimacy in general — I desire intimacy with some specific people more than others — and I desire specific forms of intimacy (including but not limited to sexual intimacy) with some specific people more than others.
Who I feel sexual attraction towards is a function of my subconscious and conscious desires and attractions. My desire or practical interest in consummating this attraction is a function of the cocreated landscape of the relationship between myself and the subject(s) of my attraction.
The forms of sexual intimacy that I desire are a function of desire as well as perversion and kink, the origins of which can be interesting to speculate about but don’t feel important (or possible) to define precisely. Rather, they represent avenues of self-exploration and embodiment.
Who I feel affective love for is a function of my subconscious and conscious desires and attractions, as well as the cocreated landscape of the relationship between myself and the subject of my love. Affective love thrives best under conditions of mutuality and consent.
Who I act with love towards is a function of my desire to act with love towards everyone and anything, and my capacity to do so at any given moment;
the degree and form of intimacy that this act of love implies is a function of my subconscious and conscious desires, my capacity to act, and the cocreated landscape of our relationship — including the degrees of trust, intimacy and affective love present.
All relationships can be described in reality and in aspiration using rough approximations of affective love, enacted love, and intimacy. These variables all share a reflexive relationship with trust. Where we might each place different pre-named relational roles on this spectrum varies between cultures and by person. This fluidity underlying an apparent rigidity requires communication in order to ascertain implications, expectations, boundaries, and parameters of any given relationship type.
The most comfortable, pleasurable, delicious relationships are those where the relationship itself is a subject of shared interest; where there is a layer of meta-awareness and cognition that all parties contribute to and are aware of.
What’s your model? How do you conceptualise relationships?
How do you practice relationships?
Did you/do you find relationships confusing and complex like me?
Did you lack queer models of love like I did?
Do you find roles useful, or do you like to attempt decategorisation?
Do you like performing to scripts, or improvising?
Do you categorise love and intimacy?
How do you distinguish sexual from non-sexual intimacy? Is this a necessary distinction?
Does taboo scare you or does it excite you?
With love and solidarity
great thoughts and questions: thank you for sharing them x