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, 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.As a polyamorous person, I’ve only ever seen relationship anarchy described as ‘polyamory without a structure’ – i.e. no division into primary and secondary partners etc.
What you describe above sounds very close to my values and beliefs and makes me want to use relationship anarchy as a label, but I fear that it’s so widely misunderstood it might be counterproductive.
Either way, thank you for the explanation, I learned something today. 😊
Yeah, relationship anarchism as a word was coined to mean the above and more but sadly some polyamorous edge-lords looked at the word, thought it sounded like the next ‘radical’ thing to make them feel superior, didn’t bother to learn what it means and just started using it to mean ‘polyamory without labels’ or ‘polyamory without rules or commitments’ or some other boring variation on polyamory that is so so far from what relationship anarchy actually means. I HATE THAT.
See also:
Relationship Anarchy is not for fuckboys (or polyamorists) http://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/154716922828/relationship-anarchy-is-not-for-fuckboys-orThank you for that. I have done a little bit of research and found some reading I’ll get around to when I have the time (starting with Andy Nordgren) but for now I find one thing confusing.
Above all, it’s about relating to other human beings without coercive authority in play and without hierarchy in your group of relationships or in any relationship itself.
Clearly non-hierarchical polyamory doesn’t equal relationship anarchy but would you say that if a polyamorous person were to consider themselves a relationship anarchist, they would need to engage in non-hierarchical polyamory only? This was quite a mouthful to put into a sentence but I hope you get what I’m trying to say.
Well, this is just me… personally, I have never translated the ‘without hierarchy in your group of relationships’ to ‘you should be equally intimate with all your lovers and friends. That just doesn’t seem remotely realistic to me and it feels like forcing myself to feel something to fit an ideology of what I should feel. Obviously I am closer to one friend than to another. That just happens.
So I translate ‘without hierarchy in your group of relationships’ to ‘without hierarchy based on lover vs friend status’, which translates to things like:
- Having sex and romance with me is not a requirement to raise children with me and if you are in a sexual and romantic relationship wth me for years that doesn’t mean I’ll one day chose you as a co-parent.
- If my friend moves to a different country, I might choose to come with them. If my romantic partner moves, I might not.
- I do not prioritize my romantic partners over my friends just because they are my romantic partners.
None of that means that all my relationships are equally intimate or intense.
I should probably also add that I’m not striving to be the perfect relationship anarchist as a form of personality manicuring and I’m not trying to follow the ‘rules’ of relationship anarchy. I’m just using it as a tool to have better relationships and better communities, not a law. (duh, it’s anarchism).
My current reality is that a lot of my friends are not relationship anarchists and have no desire to enter into friendships with me that are deeper than what our society considers normal. As a result I often end up having my most intense relationship with a romantic partner regardless of my dreams about a future of relationship anarchism.
So, I have no idea if this is what you mean, because I’m mostly just ranting out of my own frustration here. But.
Relationships get organized into hierarchies that don’t always reflect the true nature of your feelings. Strangers are less than acquaintances, which are less than friends, which are less than lovers and family. That’s the common organization. If you have a friend who is more important than lovers or family, people just assume that you want that friend to be your lover.
So, as someone who had a friend that was, by far, more important than any member of my family or any lover I’ve ever had…. That’s stressful and obnoxious and part of the reason I’m using the past tense.
This was someone that I could talk to at 4AM when I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore, because it really wasn’t me talking, it was my scars and disorders spilling out all over everything. This was someone who would listen, without judgment, and try to understand. This was someone who would calm me down, help me reorganize my thoughts, and send me to bed, then come back to check on me the next day. There are several horrible things I learned from my family of origin that this person set straight, or at least nudged towards a more healthy direction. Needless to say, I got rather emotionally attached. Seeing as helping me counteracted a lot of the BS he got from his family of origin, it was a pretty mutual thing.
But any time I talked about this person, the reaction I got was, “Ooooo~ You have a crush~!” And no, no, I don’t. I never did. There were exactly zero romantic or sexual elements to our relationship. But everyone I knew was so sure, so insistent, that a relationship of that depth must be romantic or sexual that I never got a chance to breathe and figure it out myself.
I was 14. My family was a mess of fluctuating emotional neglect and psychological enmeshment. If I tried to describe this friend as “my brother” to explain the depth of our relationship, when my brother alternated between ignoring and molesting me, what was I actually saying about my friend? And his situation wasn’t much better, so he wouldn’t have used that term either.
But “we’re just friends” is so inadequate. “We’re just friends” means “our relationship isn’t that deep or important,” because it’s implicitly downgrading to “friends” from something else. Something supposedly higher. And if I want to say that he and I were “more than friends,” because the relationship was more intimate and important than any relationship (platonic, romantic, sexual, or familial) either of us had ever had….. People will immediately assume he was my boyfriend.
And that’s stressful. Very stressful. People constantly telling you that you don’t understand your own feelings, that you’ve misunderstood your own relationships, that the thing you think you have doesn’t exist, can’t exist, isn’t something that people do…? Especially when that thing is the most important and helpful thing you have?
He broke one of the bathroom mirrors at school, because he got so frustrated by people questioning it. Like. He outright punched a mirror, and it shattered. He got into physical fights over this. I just got caught in an awful whirlwind of having absolutely no idea what I felt about anyone, because clearly I didn’t even understand the most important relationship in my life.
Eventually, that sort of thing gets not just to you, but to the relationship itself. And you can’t talk about it, because “brother” isn’t more than “friend,” and “lover” isn’t even in the right direction, and yet you both know that “friend” isn’t the right word, because everyone is constantly telling you that you’re not “just friends.”
So yeah. That’s my rant. It felt related. Sorry if it wasn’t.
I feel like it definitely is and no need at all to apologize for sharing your story.
For me, a groundbreaking point was a few years ago when a very important friend in my life died. He had no spouse, no parents and no children, so according to how society conceptualized a hierarchy of relationships, his closed relationships was his sister. As a result, she would be in charge of the funeral, of finding a new place for his belongings, of all those little rituals that happen when someone dies. Except, ya know, his friends were his closest family in reality and THANK GOD his sister actually recognized this and pushed me and his other friends forward as the people who should be doing these little rituals. We ended up organizing a funeral for him that did justice to who he was and that was a very important healing ritual for us. If his sister had claimed ‘the right’ to take center stage there, I think all of us would have had a very difficult time saying goodbye to our friend.
Intuitively I suspect that relationship anarchy is many ways also
breaks out of this pattern that most of us have where our deepest
friendships are very one-on-one and larger numbers of friends can only
‘hang out’ in a more casual way but do not have truly intimate
vulnerable
connections in a group setting. (our societies fucked up relationship to
vulnerability is that other reason why we’re so unconnected, but that’s
a story for another day).
But it makes sense that when we
analyze what is missing in how society shaped friendships, we start with
that one friend that was really special to us.
QueerAnarchism 