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.I don’t see any evidence that romantic couplehood/marriage leads to isolation from everyone else and having no ties to anyone but your spouse. I don’t know a single romantic couple/marriage in which the partners have no friends, no outside interests, and no other significant and enriching associations. Everyone I know, queer romantic couples included, have deep friendships and important community connections. Many involve their extended families in the raising of their children, if they have them. I mean, if the capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state wants to eradicate friendships and community so that we have no collective political action, they’ve failed horribly.
It’s not that people in romantic couples don’t have any friends, it’s that most people have less friends and less intense friendships once they do the ‘life-partner-with-kids’ thing and the most intense moments in life (childbirth, mourning, waiting for the call from the doctor after your cancer screening) are shared with a partner more often than with a friend.
It’s not that our society doesn’t have any meaningful friendships, it’s that those friendships rarely reach the point of intensity where you would move to a different country because your friend is moving, or would buy a house together, or would become someone’s fulltime caretaker in times of illness. Things most people would do with a romantic/sexual life partner. Some forms of connection and support have been reserved for romantic partners only.
It’s not that most people don’t do any shared child raising with family and friends, it’s that two people are considered the ‘actual’ parents with the final power to decide vital things in the life of a child like where the child lives, whether they get a pet, when they’re old enough to go on a vacation without adults, etc.
The deeper you go into very heteronormative, gendernormative areas, the more obvious this sidelining of friendship as a less important form of connection becomes, but you find it in more subtle forms everywhere.
@queeranarchism
it’s also that the State sanctions and privileges these intimate
relationships through neoliberal policies that reproduce a
heteropatriarchy / homonormativity wherein the State can retract welfare
/ exclude non-normative relationships from its distribution of life
chances
Oh, absolutely true. But for the most part, the State doesn’t even need to do much in that regard to make the system work. There isn’t all that much stopping us from playing the system, marrying friends while not marrying lovers, shaping our financial and parenting relationships in ways that better fit our needs. But for the most part people never even consider this. The system dishes out benefits to those who follow the rules, but it mostly maintains itself by making the act of breaking the rules so alien to us that it becomes hard to imagine.
QueerAnarchism 