True Love Is Dead | Long Live True Love
Our binary understanding of gender & sexuality is changing - but what about love?
I was stung by one of my bees on Wednesday. It wasn’t her fault, she flew into the kitchen at dinnertime, got exhausted circling a light and dropped onto my arm without me realizing it. She got pinched in the fold of my elbow when I bent it and that was the end for her, of course.
This happens a couple of times per year and it’s normally not a huge deal, but this one swelled up more than usual. By Friday, when I went to urgent care, I was sick as a dog with cellulitis. My right arm was about three times the size of my left and I couldn’t make a fist or bend my wrist. As is typical with me, it was all very dramatic, including about 24 square inches of tiny blisters!
The steroids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and antihistamines — and hours and hours of Netflix and Hulu with my arm elevated — have done their job and here I am, today, writing a Substack about love and television.
First, a sampling of what I watched from beginning to end, just so you know what you’re getting yourself into here:
Shiny, Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (so good, about much more than the Duggars)
The Secrets of Hillsong on Hulu (also so good, and an interesting compliment to the first one)
The Ultimatum: Queer Love (delightful)
Tales of the City (lovely)
Blue Jay (loved it despite it being in black and white for no reason)
As I emerged from my haze, I couldn’t wait to talk about these series and the one big message I walked away with:
Anyone who says there’s only one way to love and do relationships is not just ridiculous, they’re dangerous.
When you open yourself up to consider the vast array of humanity, you start to realize just how confining our ideas of “normal” truly are. Obviously, it’s clear from the Hillsong and Duggar documentaries that religions often use the idea that there’s only one way to do relationships and sex (courtship, marriage) in order to control people — and even groom them.
Lots of people have said this before me, but my bigger revelation was about this:
Nearly all aspects of love, romance, commitment, attraction, sexuality and attachment exist uniquely within every individual — and most of these parts of ourselves exist on a spectrum.
When you really look at people, when you watch them being honest in relationships and about who they are, you see how confining our relationship standards truly are.
The main source of this revelation came from a reality dating show.
First let me state for the record that I’ve never watched a full season of any dating show. But this one, The Ultimatum: Queer Love, seemed perfectly escapist and silly for me in my state, all while promising literally zero cringey and/or sexist straight guys.
The premise: fed-up queer women give their (woman) partners an ultimatum — propose to me or break up with me.
Somehow, through the logic of reality TV, they end up in pretend marriages with someone else for two weeks before switching back and living with their original partner for two weeks. Then they have to choose. The new partner, their original partner, or breaking up and being alone?
I loved this show. Mostly, I loved the way this group of women invited the viewer into a really vulnerable place — their broken hearts. From an annoying, too-perky attention junkie to a quietly charismatic masc woman with communication struggles (and everyone in between), this show demonstrates the vastly different ways people fall in love, how they develop problems and how they work them out — together and on their own. I know reality tv isn’t the same as reality, but when you watch people digging through their garbage to try to heal and be better partners, it’s moving!
Most of the people on this show don’t fall in love with someone new, in fact almost none of them do. It’s the process of healing that is lovely to witness.
It also got me thinking about how many ways we screw up conversations about love, monogamy, relationships and sexuality. Not just in evangelical or other purity-based religious groups, but also in mainstream society.
I think we can all agree that, by this point, our understanding of gender and sexuality has flipped from a binary of “normal” (straight) vs “aberrant” (anything other than straight) to something of a spectrum. The first version of The Kinsey Scale was published all the way back in 1948, though general understanding of the sliding scale or spectrum of sexual expression took a lot longer to become mainstream, and we’ve been exploring this ever since.
To put it casually, some people are “very gay” and some people are bi/pansexual and some people are totally straight and there are like a million iterations between. All these things are normal. Some people also like different types of sex, from once-weekly missionary position sex with their spouse to kinks of any type you can imagine (or not imagine). All of these things are also normal, as long as they are performed with consenting adults who are making healthy and fully-informed decisions for themselves.
How does this relate to The Ultimatum?
One of the “fake” marriages melted my heart and showed me how being in relationship with other people can be transformative.
This couple, Yoly and Xander, choose each other as their new pretend spouses, both of them being the ones in their original relationships who’d wanted marriage. These two very quickly fell in love — and not, like, reality TV love. The kind of love you can see from a mile away. Aching, tender, sweet, gentle, affirming kind of love.
I tweeted about this couple, how amazing it was to see Xander appreciated and watch Yoly open up when her vulnerability was met with someone who was gentle and present.
I thought everyone would agree with me, but the responses I received were about the fact that it can’t really be love if it developed over a week and a half.
But why? And who says?!
If we accept that people have different sexual orientations, different ways of expressing gender, different degrees to which they’re romantic … why can’t we accept that some people might fall in real, lasting love in just two weeks?
The other thing this show got me thinking about was the possibility of being in love with two people at once. Yoly and Xander are both very clearly capable of being in love with two partners, as both are still in love with the people they came to the show with — particularly Yoly, whose partner, Mal, is gorgeous and sweet and wonderful in nearly all ways, and they are also very clearly in love with one another.
How can this be? One might ask. That’s not how love works!
How do you know?
What if, just like attraction and sexual orientation or gender expression, we all do love differently?
What if monogamy is both an orientation and a choice? What if you are more or less oriented toward monogamy and that’s just part of who you are, at least in a certain phase of your life? What if we were able to reframe that type of orientation so it’s not a reflection upon your character, as if it didn’t mean you were an f-boy or any of the horribly derogatory terms used for women who don’t follow the traditional purity model?
Imagine the heartbreak that could be avoided if, when people met and started falling for one another, they could have a conversation that looked like this:
A: So, how do you feel about monogamy?
B: Honestly, I feel like I’m not naturally oriented toward monogamy, but I really value our relationship and if it were a deal-breaker, I would love to give it a try and see how it works in practice.
A: That’s interesting, I’m extremely monogamous, so I wouldn’t want to force you into something unnatural, but I agree that we have something great. You would let me know if you felt like it wasn’t natural for you?
B: Yes, and I would absolutely be honest with you instead of being sneaky or become resentful or something like that.
Can you imagine how much healthier relationships would be if we could start with honesty? If people didn’t have to feel ashamed for wanting something the other didn’t want, in either direction? If people didn’t have to compartmentalize and keep secrets?
The truth is, the recipe for a successful relationship is different for every person or every couple, and queer communities have been supporting this array of dynamics for a long time. There are long lists of innovative and helpful terms that help people understand and communicate what works for them and what they want. From demisexual to polyamorous to asexual and heteroromantic, there are dozens of terms that can help us understand and explain how we feel.
The time for being prescriptive about relationships has truly passed. Imagine a world where, instead of telling people “You need to date for a few years before becoming engaged” or, worse, “You’ve been dating a few years, you need to get engaged or break up”, we would leave room for all sorts of relationship trajectories.
Imagine what would happen if we stopped expecting people to be married forever, telling them they need to stay even if they’re miserable or low-key encouraging them to cheat and compartmentalize their dishonesty.
This seems so simple, and it’s similar to what I wrote about when I proposed burning marriage to the ground — but what if we could just make room for all sorts of different experiences and orientations? What if we could just be who we are and talk about these feelings openly?
What if we accepted that human beings are always sliding along different spectrums of experience and preferences, and stopped trying to fit humans into tiny, confining molds that seem to end in heartbreak more than bliss?