betterbemeta:

betterbemeta:

maybe I’m just a crusty ass frozen heart but from a young age I felt that a lot of the ‘magic’ in romance and love as served by mainstream straight culture was like a big smokescreen. It’s cynical but I believe far fewer people would feel some kind of big enchantment or drive to experience ‘love’ as they expect it, if women weren’t constantly negged by society and basically made desperate for any unconditional positive experience. Likewise, if men in our society were allowed to find alternative forms of intimacy such that finding a gf wasn’t the only socially acceptable outlet, I feel the magic would fade a little bit. Because we gotta believe in magic when we are made to feel horrible a lot of the time.

Which is not to say passion and feeling the magic are bad. But when that magic is used as the tool to keep otherwise untenable straight couples together, I don’t see how overemphasizing it in relationships, or using it as the yardstick of what legitimizes a relationship, is in any way safe.

Within a lgbt+ community I have seen all forms of love and straight people find elements of a more cerebral love almost as threatening as the genders involved in same-sex relationships. Hell, they see something is ‘off’ between two bisexual people who superficially appear in a different gender relationship. The very idea that your love could be total and reasoned rather than purely passionate, that “it makes sense for me to be with this person,” that “I didn’t need to, but I chose to, and I can choose to leave,” threatens them. Even if passion is vital to most people, the appropriated ‘born this way’ narrative that hits the mainstream depends on lgbt+ love not being a choice that makes sense– even more sense– than participation in straightness. 

The norm deeply fears that. They want passion to be the only narrative to explain why people they don’t understand are together. It leaves them in the position of reason and enfranchisement, and it leaves lgbt+ people as somehow swept up in urges. Progressive people might say it’s a beautiful urge. But the truth is that we’re comprehensible and that scares them.