I’m polyamorous (though it doesn’t feel like an identity to me) but whenever I hear a poly person talk about polyamory as this magical key to interpersonal connections and communal child raising and community etc, I wanna roll my eyes. Like… chill. It’s just romance and sex. It’s not magic. You can do all that life-long-support child-raising queer-family without romance or sex. Have you ever even tried building meaningful connnections with friends?
As a relationship anarchist, strongly support this message haha
RELATIONSHIP ANARCHISTS THAT UNDERSTAND THE REAL DEFINITION OF RELATIONSHIP ANARCHISM INSTEAD OF ‘POLYAMORY WITHOUT COMMITMENTS’ FUCKBOY SHIT. YYYEEEEESSSSS.
relationship??????? anarchist?????????????????????
I AM HAPPY TO INTRODUCE YOU TO THIS CONCEPT.
Basically, relationship anarchy applies anarchism to relationships (duh) in the sense that it analyses the focus on the romantic relationship and the nuclear family as something promoted by capitalism to control people:
- by isolating people into two-adult units and preventing more intense community connections
- by tying basic human needs (cohabitation, material support, help in child raising, etc) to sex and romance, which are far more marketable than friendship.
-
By promoting the idea that a paid male producer should be patched up
each night in a household run by an unpaid female care taker - by giving – in most societies – a male wage earner power over female care taker
- by giving two adults almost complete power over children, thus raising every human in a deeply oppressive situation that prepares them to accept authority in an oppressive world
- etc etc
The idea of finding your one romantic and sexual match with whom you share all your most basic needs is an idea that keeps people isolated and easy to control. When we stop prioritizing our romantic/sexual partner(s) as the only ones that we can live with, raise children with, support materially, spend our whole life with, have intense hugs with, etc. we open up a world of opportunities for deeper relationships with our friends and for mutual aid relationships based in friendship.
So I guess you could say that relationship anarchy is mostly about friendship. It is also about
rejects the ‘rules’ of relationships, of enforced heterosexuality,
enforced monogamy, of partners being entitled to sex, of marriage, of
childcare being a two-person job and of the idea that we need a romantic
or sexual relationship to be complete. But that doesn’t mean it is nonmonogamous by default and it is NOT a sub-group of polyamory. That’s a huge misunderstanding that seems to pop up a lot. Relationship anarchy is about doing relationships with community-centric values, not
couple-centric values. It’s about relating to other human
beings without coercive authority.
To quote thethinkingasexual.wordpress.com:
The capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state WANTS you to invest all
of your free time, energy, resources, and emotion into romantic
couplehood, into marriage, into sex. It WANTS you to devalue friendship,
to stay isolated from everyone who isn’t your romantic partner, to be a
self-interested individual with no ties or commitments to anyone but
your spouse. Why? Because friendship could lead to community and
community could lead to collective political action, which could turn
into revolution.
QueerAnarchism 