Critiquing monogamy with historical evidencefrom @glass__museum

Transcript

You love them or do you just wanna control them? As a kid, I found it difficult to differentiate between platonic and romantic love. And as I grew older, I realized it was hard because there's no difference besides intention and choice. This isn't to say that romance doesn't worst, but that our mainstream understanding of what romantic love looks like is flawed. Since birth, we're fed this idea that our romantic partner is this magical person who single handedly fills every single need and desire in our lives. But this expectation of mononormativity, that is the idea of seeing monogamous relationships as the standard we ought to strive towards, is so deeply entrenched in our society that even the most critical people don't bother examining it. Indeed, as authors Easton and Hardy write in The Ethical Slut, how do you dig up and examine a belief that you don't even know you hold? The idea of lifelong monogamy as the only proper goal for relationships is so deeply buried in our culture that it's almost invisible. We operate on these beliefs without even knowing you believe them. But the standard didn't just come out of nowhere. Indeed, like most unquestioned norms that we take for granted, colonial values. Monogamy is institutionalized through marriage, which originates as a capitalist system of a transfer of private property wherein the property is woman. As Friedrich Engels writes in tier origin of private property, family, and the state, in the transfer of ownership from father to husband, the woman becomes the slave of his lust and a mere instrument of his production of children. In other words, marriage is used to secure sex for men and through the requirement of prenuptial chastity, men assured themselves of the legitimacy of their offspring and thus secured their property interest. And while relationships have hopefully progressed since the origins of marriage, what has remained is this prevailing sentiment that monogamous relationships are based not on the mutual loving decision to choose one another over and over again, but upon possession and control. And I see this sentiment everywhere in online discourse about relationships. If your boyfriend gets your friends flowers too, then he's cheating on you. I would never let my girlfriend stay over at a guy friend's house. And while you might think, hey. I'm not that extreme, still, I noticed that even in progressive circles, there's a reluctance to consider anything beyond monogamy. People will be critical of other institutions and systems, yet when it comes to examining the rigid lines between the various relationships in their lives, people just unquestioningly adopt these social scripts. When in reality it's your frickin' life and you can define your relationships in whatever way you see suitable. And so comes the alternative, relationship anarchy. At its core, relationship anarchy rank, what if our relationships weren't governed by social scripts? It's grounded in anarchist values like autonomy and anti hierarchy, and it argues that people should be free to shape their connections however they wish. They can negotiate their own dynamics through open communication and consent rather than pre established tradition. The role of the romantic partner is seen as encompassing every relational need there is better these roles don't have to automatically be given to just one person in your life. Indeed previously a lot of these roles were filled by one's community and so so no wonder there's so much dissatisfaction in modern relationships. We have unrealistic expectations of the ways that our singular partner ought to remedy every social ailment we have. But the beauty of relationship anarchy is that it tells us that we don't have to prescribe to these preset roles. It acknowledges the freedom we have to make intentional choices about what we want our unique relationships to look like. Now I'm not saying that everyone has to go and start kissing their friends, but also, like, who decided you can't? Going on dates or sending flowers or sharing a home doesn't have to be something that we reserve only for a romantic partner. And when we realize this, when we realize that there's no limit to the love we can give to others, we unlock the full potential of our capacity to love.