#queering relationships

Wired magazine, one of my all time favorite news sources, recently did an entire issue on “Sex in the Digital Age” with a feature piece called “Young, Attractive, and Totally Not Into Having Sex.” (The digital part of this coming from the fact that the asexuality-spectrum is largely a topic and a community that started online.) The piece interviews college students and young adults that identify as asexual and demisexual. It’s well-written, articulate and a positive in portrayal of the community that also acknowledges the difficulties associated with it. The article ends with a “so what?” statement, as your high school English would put it. 

 “If nothing else, demisexuals and their related subgroups show the rest of us, regardless of sexual orientation, that our version of love and relationships is still very limited, very 1.0.”-Young, Attractive and Totally Not Into Having Sex 

This is the article’s strongest point, other than bringing awareness to a wider audience. It brings the idea into question, of what a relationship is. In the public eye, the struggle for queer rights has been a struggle for legitimacy, but that legitimacy has been through recognition by the existing structures. There is nothing revolutionary about saying that all people should have access to the same civil structures. A tenet of democracy is that all people be recognized as equal under the law, in this case in regards to marriage, employment and justice. Legitimacy under existing structures is tolerance and tolerance does not equal acceptance. 

Acceptance does not come from law or higher power, but how people view each other. Accepting diversity in people means accepting diversity in the ways they relate to each other. Allowing a white picket fence and 2.5 kids for everyone is all well and good, but it is also highly normative. A couple living together with kids and without being married is still atypical. A couple being married and not having kids simply because they choose not to is too. Never mind relationships that non-romantic, non-sexual or not between just two people. The definition of these relationships is so narrow, that I almost hesitate to use the word “relationship” due to it’s possibly limiting connotations. 

The standards for happiness in relationships still places sexual and romantic attraction to one person of the opposite binary gender as the norm. Not as one variation in a sea of possibilities, but as the default. The monogamous, sexually and romantically attracted, committed, partnership regardless of gender is still basically the gold standard of a relationship. Sure, we’re more open on who is in that relationship or maybe the legal status of the coupling, but it is still overwhelmingly normative. 

The Wired article hits on an essential point, no matter how much we’ve moved forward on who is in a relationship, we have moved almost no where on the qualities of that relationship.

Relationship escalator: The default set of societal expectations for the proper conduct of intimate relationships. Progressive steps with clearly visible markers and a presumed structural goal of permanently monogamous, cohabitating marriage (legally sanctioned if possible). The social standard by which most people gauge whether a developing intimate relationship is significant, “serious,” good, healthy, committed or worth pursuing or continuing.