Have You Actually Sat Down and Thought About Why You Want a Romantic Relationship?

I mean, REALLY sat down and thought about it. There’s multiple types of love and companionship, plus ways to split a Costco membership

The Wedding Industrial Complex pushes this messaging onto people from the moment we’re in diapers.

Conservative public policy that emphasizes isolationist nuclear family structure and constantly froths at the mouth about birth rates is also screaming at you from day one to get married.

Women in particular are browbeaten with this idea that your wedding day will be the most important day of your whole life. There’s this interesting duality in that if you’re a woman, you’re told you’re clingy, crazy, and marriage-hungry if you want a relationship and *gasp* DARE want to know where a relationship is going, if not just being happily single. But then the second you say you are happy being single, you’re treated like the antichrist.

We’re pathologized and pitied until we’re eligible for Social Security.

But have you thought about why you want a relationship?

I’m not going to invalidate that desire if you have it! It’s totally valid to want or NOT want a romantic relationship.

But do you truly want one, and you’re not just looking to settle down out of social pressure and expectations? Especially since married women tend to be treated better than single women, and “I have to leave the office early because of my spouse” carries more weight than saying it’s for your fuck buddy, friend, or neighbor?

That you’re not hellbent on getting married just because you feel left out, or left behind, when it seems like each of your friends and professional colleagues has paired off, while you’re spending another night alone watching anime after surveying the replete nuclear holocaust that is modern dating?

You might want romance, yes. It’s not always about companionship and the social benefits it infers, though. You may be seeking different forms of love and validation, but didn’t realize and/or couldn’t vocalize it.

Because there’s other kinds of love.

Romantic love gets all the fanfare in literally every kind of media: songs, movies, books, even video game subplots! But it isn’t the only form of human connection.

We’re told it’s a be-all end-all, and that persistent nuclear family structure makes you put your marriage above virtually everything else in your life even if you don’t have or want kids.

The absolute best explainer I could find on this was The Take’s discussion of the Studio Ghibli classic Ponyo. They brilliantly dove into how this movie portrays the numerous ways humans connect with one another, while patently ignoring romantic love. (I cued it up for you to the exact segment.)

In addition to the familial love characterized by the Greek word storge, there’s love between friends (philia) and caring about a community (agape) that you are deeply entrenched in.

But I came to this realization when I visited the ships I used to see with my grandfather. In a beautiful time when lower Manhattan was not overrun with $20,000 a month apartments near a totally Disney-fied seaport.

I was walking to the ferry back to The Bronx, lamenting that my grandparents were long gone before this novel mode of transportation cropped up that would’ve taken me practically to their door. I looked at those ships, remembering my grandfather’s jokes and stories. How heartbreakingly brief his presence in my life was: he died right before my ninth birthday.

He’d look at those ships and talk about seeing the world if he was more able-bodied. Having seen 36/50 states and a slew of foreign countries, with trips to Ireland and Australia on my horizon for 2022, it dawned on me that perhaps my grandfather’s limited influence in my life had a greater impact on me than I thought. (Even if I do have to credit the Carmen Sandiego games and Leisure Suit Larry 5 heavily.)

But it was right when I saw the sun setting over those ships that were totally unchanged since my childhood, that my heart broke for the life and love I used to know in this city. It dawned on me what kind of love was missing from my life all this time.

I wanted a family. A real, functioning family I could count on.

Where sure, everyone does shit that drives one another crazy, but I longed to have a cousin relationship like Will and Carlton from The Fresh Prince. Aunts and uncles who’d come around often, who I could actually confide in. More siblings even, opposed to my significantly older sister who was like a 50-year-old church mom in a 22-year-old’s body.

And that I could’ve had more time with my grandparents plus all my great-aunts and uncles who would always dote on me whenever I saw them at the few family gatherings my abusive mother didn’t cut us off from.

There’s this deep, visceral flesh wound that is simply never going to be healed no matter how many great friends, community members, and a wonderful partner may enter my life. I can fix the lack of philia in my life by moving to a new city. But I’m never going to have the storge love that I wanted all my life and didn’t receive from an abusive mother, and a father who wasn’t there enough until she died. Ditto for the totally anemic displays of familial affection I got from the sole aunt and uncle I did have.

Even if I found my dream husband and we had our family of toads and giant lizards with a strong friend circle where we live, it will provide a new kind of chosen family and I’ll happily embrace it. But it’s simply not going to patch up the gaping hole in my heart I’ll always have from being ruthlessly torn from my extended family, city, and culture as a child. Being made to live in this hateful hellhole across the Hudson that fomented nothing but trauma and misery to pretty much everyone except my father.

It was this very trauma that made me adamant I would never move for a job. Then when the economy significantly changed when I came of age, and only worsened since, I was still resentful of the idea of employment determining where I go. Refusal to move for a job that probably wouldn’t last ensured that I kept my rent stabilization, which is what enabled me to pursue self-employment full-time. But even if I had been spared that trauma, I didn’t want to leave the greatest city in the world for some devoid suburb on Long Island or New Jersey that would separate me from my friends and the punk scene. I wasn’t exactly being offered desirable relocation spots when I was still a professional resume submitter.

But I can only blame my parents so much. I attempted to make up for lost time once I was 18, away from that poisonous environment, and back where I belonged. Most of those older relatives were too far from where I built my life, and not as able to see me often as they tired out easily. I had nothing in common with the very distant cousins I once thought I might have a relationship with. Most of my mother’s relatives were dead save for my uncle in Queens and we did successfully make up for some lost time, until he proved to be not much different than his sister and just stopped talking to us.

I hadn’t properly grieved for all of this until the enormity fully hit under the first COVID lockdown.

Yes, I would like a romantic relationship. But I cannot expect a partner to provide what I missed out on.

It’s a completely different dynamic and I’ve had to separate the two.

Because people don’t separate how much of that social conditioning prioritizes eros over other kinds of love and human connection, it’s what makes them have unreasonable expectations for their spouses.

Now don’t misconstrue that statement: your spouse IS supposed to care about you and your wellbeing! And it’s important for you to have time and space of your own in addition to what you do and how you live as a couple. It’s also a given you’ll be huge parts of each other’s lives, you need not be platonic roommates who just file taxes together unless that’s an arrangement you mutually agreed to. (Hey, people have to do drastic things to get health coverage in the US.) But your spouse cannot be your coach, therapist, BFF, and all those loving aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins who are gone or who you never got to know.

You have to break away from that social conditioning that vaunts nuclear family structure and marriage, even childfree people and leftists who are all for family abolition end up falling for this shit. You can make a friend someone you significantly factor into your life the way one would with a spouse, making huge plans together without the eros aspects. You know, driving each other to the airport when needed. Joining each other for minute things, like I’ll accompany you to the DMV while you help me hold down my lizard as she gets her nails trimmed.

It’s valid to want a romantic partner. But it doesn’t hurt to think harder about the types of human connection you may be lacking in your life, or trauma you haven’t healed from. A good partner should add to your life in new ways, but they can’t substitute a friend circle you sorely miss or coming from a shitty abusive family like I did, and longing for a better one.