quizzical pussy

Sometimes… okay, often, I get this nagging feeling that I’m most likely Not Awesome. I’ll tally my list of accomplishments and it’s just so damn short, with this dearth of recent entries. I’ll look in the mirror and I won’t even see myself, just an unqualified failure to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel. Or, easiest of all, I’ll just listen to the people who tell me I’m a walking suckgasm and deserve nothing good out of life.

But then I look around me and see all these amazing people I have in my life. I have friends who are more interesting, brilliant, accepting, and tolerant of my flakiness than I ever dreamed possible. Some of these friends, shockingly, even find me attractive and want to play together: an outcome far beyond my loftiest fantasies. And my boyfriend? He challenges everything I used to believe about relationships, after years of making stupid, harmful-to-everyone-involved decisions in my love life, just by being himself. I didn’t know what it felt like to be loved and respected by a partner until Laramy showed me. Did I mention he’s awesome? And he picks me.

Even on the most superficial level possible: I, Quizzical Pussy, mere mortal, have gotten to have sex with some of the most exquisite, intriguing, and frankly hottest people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. Not bad for a cripple who sucks at flirting and can’t tell whether people are into her or not.

So with all this evidence in front of me I have good reason to wonder if maybe I’m just a little awesome after all. Otherwise wouldn’t these seriously cool people shun me? I mean, even allowing for the fact that they’re also kind, wouldn’t they at least try to keep some distance?

Of course it doesn’t do to base my entire self-worth on the fact that people of excellence want to know and possibly even fuck me. But it’s good to remember that maybe I have some good points I’m not seeing, that they might. And I love these people; I trust them. Maybe they have a point.

And even if I’m seriously Not Awesome in any way, shape, or form, which I accept as a distinct possibility, life is making up for that by being boundlessly awesome in some of the ways that matter most.

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Things people seem to like to compare same-sex marriage to:

• Pedophilia
• Zoophilia
• A Slippery Slope
• Counterfeit Money
• Incest
• Drug Abuse
• Polygamy
• Forbidden Clock Love
• Slavery
• Nazi. Fucking. Germany

With a couple exceptions (because I will never tire of Forbidden Clock Love), I think these chestnuts are getting a bit old. Yeah, yeah, marrying a consenting adult of the same sex is exactly like marrying a horse, sure*. But where’s the impact? And frankly, when we’re comparing it to polygamy, which even has a strong Biblical basis for the Christians to enjoy, not to mention a robust history of past acceptance, the argument conspicuously lacks teeth.

So I, being a humanitarian at my core, decided to come up with some exciting new suggestions for gay marriage comparisons.

If I don’t see these proliferate throughout the news media soon, I’ll be disappointed. Try to forge new territory, people. Being cutting-edge gets hard when your belief system is older than your numeral system, I know. But that’s why you have to pay attention to the little things.

Now, I honestly don’t know why any of the following suggestions are like same-sex marriage, but I don’t really know why the old, cliched ones are either. I trust the pundits to figure out tenuous-but-alarming links for me. That’s pretty much their job anyway, right? So, without further ado…

Gay marriage is really like:

• Wearing sunglasses indoors.
• Letting Michael Bay marry explosions!
• The part in The Labyrinth when David Bowie turns into an owl.
• Impaling babies on narwhal tusks.
• Kicking the tires of a new car just because you’ve seen other people do it, but not really knowing what anyone gets out of it.
• Marrying cancer.
• Buzkashi, the cut-throat game of goat dragging.
• Riding a fixed-gear bicycle.
• Destroying all the cookies in the world.
• Licking doorknobs when you’ve got a cold and you know you’re still contagious.
• Throwing monkeys into turbine jet engines.
• Being in love with just, you know, being in love, man.
• Giving America AIDS.

I hope this gives the anti-gay marriage activists some new material to work with. You really need to flood the airwaves with as many of these comparisons as possible or people will start conflating gay marriage with marriage marriage, possibly at some point dropping the “gay” qualifier. That would obviously be disastrous to someone. I’m just not positive whom.

But I don’t want to see that tired bestiality thing trotted out yet again, okay guys? You’re better than that.

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* No.

Steak and Blowjob Day

Let it be known: I like steak. I like blowjobs. There can be no bad here, right?

Kinda.

The thing that gets me about Steak and Blowjob Day is the connection to Valentine’s day, the suggestion that “Welp, last month you ladies got yours, so pay up!”

This assumes a great deal about Valentine’s Day. Hell, before it even gets that far it assumes that relationships are heterosexual male/female dyads where the male has a penis. And likes blowjobs. And thinks romance is poppycock.

Valentine’s Day, therefore, is for the ladies. Women like to feel appreciated through expensive gifts, sappy poetry, and portable music players held aloft. Men, on the other hand, like to feel appreciated through sexual favors and red meat.

If people spend Valentine’s Day making small, appreciative gestures and fucking one another’s brains out, or ignoring it entirely, I’m not sure if the system breaks down or what. All I know is that it’s definitely not manly to crave or enjoy romance. A warm mouth and a bloody steak? That’s manly.

(I hope I don’t have to point out here that lots of guys– manly guys– want to feel romanced from time to time, lots of women prefer sexual attention, and the love of a good steak knows no gender.)

See where things get a little creepy? I hope? Of course it’s all in good fun, but it’s also operating on some stereotypes that I wouldn’t mind killing dead. I mean, if you want to have a steak and give and/or receive a blowjob today, that’s awesome, but don’t fall prey to the idea that it’s any sort of payment for romantic services rendered, or that all women prefer candy and a bear dressed up like a gynecologist to oral sex. Also don’t cook the steak well done. That kinda ruins it.

Pi Day

Is the winner. Full stop.

I can find no logical fallacy contained therein. Pie is delicious, and it goes well with everything with the possible exception of diabetes. Including steak, blowjobs, cunnilingus, and other pie.

Anyway, you know how if you make a special day for something how it can actually end up happening less throughout the year because it’s already been assigned, completed, and taken care of? Kind of like those people who go to church just on Easter?

That’s certainly never going to happen to pie.

Happy Pi Day!

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Happy Valentine’s day, everyone. May those currently with a partner be ecstatic with your choice, and may those currently without one flirt your little asses off. Above all, may there be orgasms aplenty for everyone!*

I have a feeling I’m going to be spending the evening in bed.**

*If you’re into that sort of thing. Otherwise I just hope you or someone else is treating you very, very well today.
**Sadly, probably not in the fun way. But I’ll make up for it later, trust me.

I don’t give it much thought anymore, not in the present tense. It’s always “Oh, that wacky Reginald Sleeth used to do the craziest (evil) things!” in my head. My conscious mind has moved on from all that, put it in the past. Unfortunately, the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

I’m still a beaten girlfriend somewhere deep down.

I’m realizing how profoundly affected I really am by it all, to this day. My self-esteem was never great to begin with, but staying in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for years trained even that scant confidence out of me. And while, believe it or not, I’ve scraped a fair amount back for myself, if we’re making comparisons, I can’t escape the learned worthlessness that was my liturgy for so long.

I wonder if I’ll ever let myself feel like an equal in a relationship. If I’ll ever feel entitled to ask for things or even make demands. If I’ll ever believe that I was chosen, that my partner is with me out of desire and not just kindness.

Will there ever be a time when, after I’ve said something stupid and made someone I care about angry, I won’t slip into that old numbness and terror? The cold tingle that comes when the mind spins in a loop of self-loathing and the body feels heavy and wrapped in moss.

This might be one of those things that’s hard to understand unless you’ve lived it, and I hope you haven’t lived it.

I’m afraid that the legacy of a really poorly chosen first relationship will be that I can never behave like a truly healthy partner. And with the amount of hate I have and show for myself, can anyone reasonably be expected to not develop contempt for me?

I want a do-over. I want my first boyfriend to be that nice Mormon boy who hugged me like I was made of lava.

On a lighter note, Bangable Dudes (and Dames) in History: for when the living just aren’t cutting it, but the undead have inexplicably turned sparkly.

A Fuquerton family acquaintance recently gushed to Laramy’s mum about what a very very good person he must be to be with a handicapped girl.*

Behold the lowly cripple: a creature who can only experience human love through the selflessness of others! See her hobble pathetically around, tragically seeking connection, all for naught, until a benevolent man finds it in his heart to condescend to touch her. The saint! The philanthropist! He must be a really, really good person.

Make no mistake, Laramy really is an amazingly good person. He’s sweet and generous and affectionate (to those on his good side). Watching him with his pets would melt you. It’s indisputable that I’m lucky to have him in my life, but anyone would be. Not just cripples.

It’s not surprising, though. Truth is, there are times when I think and sound a lot like that batty broad. I wonder what an able-bodied person is doing with me. I feel guilty that I’m spending yet another hour in bed, flaking on another commitment. How kind of him to keep me around even though I’m not functioning at his level, when we all know he could do so much better.

But isn’t there even the slightest possibility that it’s not all about health, despite what armchair evolutionary psychologists would have us believe? Isn’t it possible that someone might be with me because of my internal encyclopedia of useless knowledge? Because he likes the silly pictures I draw? Because my eyes look like sunflowers? Because I’m a huge dork, or because I once played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Hell, because I carry the coolest cane ever, when I need it. Plus, I get the absolute best parking spaces.

I don’t know. I’m just throwing things against the wall here. But I have to be open to the idea that maybe I have actual, non good-deeds-deductible selling points. There are a lot of details about me, and the fact that I probably won’t be trying out for a roller derby team any time soon is just one of them. It really doesn’t need to be the most important one all the time.

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*This, to my knowledge, isn’t the opinion of any of the Fuquertons: just one batty broad they happen to know, and don’t particularly like.

There are several reasons you might not be getting sex at any given time. Right now I’m not having sex because my boyfriend lives several towns over and I haven’t yet organized an elite, round-the-clock Fuck Quizzical Pussy Squad yet. YET. Historically, various other reasons have come into play. Some of these have included, but were never limited to:

1. Just had sex. Mumbledamn refractory periodumble.
2. No one likes me; eating worms instead.
3. I am eleven.
4. Hell, I’m seventeen.
5. Long-distance, monogamous relationships For The Lose.
6. I’m too sore. (This has happened. Twice.)
7. I’m more-or-less oblivious to flirting, declarations of interest, and outright propositions, so I’m often unaware that I have actual offers on the table.
8. Someone wants to fuck me, and I know about it, but it’s an icky someone.
9. I’m saving myself for marriage. (This one never really happened.)
10. The person I’m trying to fuck foolishly wants to do other things, like “going to work”, “eating”, and “living a healthy, balanced life”.

I could go on, but you’re with me, right? There’s never-had-sex, long-term not-having-sex, short-term not-having-sex, and extremely short-term not-having-sex (my favorite of these options, also known as taking-pants-off time).

But one could argue that there’s a particular torture inherent to being in a serious romantic relationship and still not getting any. Like, ever. Laramy would chime in here to say that there’s a word for this phenomenon and it’s called “marriage”, but I can’t see my way to being quite so cynical or quite so hopeful. Involuntarily sexless relationships can arise whether you’re married or not, whether you’re straight, gay, or queer, and whether you see it coming or not.

I’d say that sexless relationships (I’ll be concentrating on the ones where at least one of the partners does have an issue with it. If two people are enjoying the hell out of not fucking each other, well, there’s no issue to speak of, now is there?) fall into two categories: in the first, sex used to happen much more frequently. Something that used to work is no longer working. In the second, lack of sex has always been an issue, perhaps even to the point where the relationship is unconsummated.

The first usually has a cause-and-effect reason, even if it’s hard to admit and/or suss out. The most cut-and-dried example would be a physiological issue: one partner’s hormones go out of whack, sex drive plummets, and the sex dies. This can be the result of a medical condition, a medication, stress, menopause, andropause, or a whole host of other things you can talk to your doctor about. Sometimes the reason is emotional or attraction-based. People fall out of lust, or out of love. Sometimes the reason your partner isn’t sleeping with you is because he or she doesn’t want to anymore.

But for me it’s the second that’s a little harder to grok. I can imagine having a medical condition that affects my sex drive (because it’s happened) and I can imagine having a sex life that runs purely on lust take a nosedive when I realize I don’t really like the other person (also happened), but I can’t realistically imagine starting a relationship with someone I’m unwilling to bone.

And yet, even though I personally don’t get it, somehow it happens! And that is shocking. To me.

People will sometimes try to force themselves to be less shallow, and date someone they’re not really attracted to in the first place, and so might very simply not ever get interested in having sex with them. Some people physically cannot have intercourse for any of a wide variety of reasons.

But what about people who have literally never experienced, or only felt very low levels of sexual attraction for anyone, ever? At that point, although as far as I know it’s a self-identification so I’m not sure it’s 100% accurate, we need to start thinking about asexuality.

This subject is not my area of expertise, so I went to an expert. Well, a website.

An asexual, according to the Asexual Visability and Education Network (AVEN), is a person who doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Asexuals may or may not have an interest in romantic relationships. Asexuals may or may not experience sexual arousal; they may or may not masturbate. Asexuality seems to me just about as diverse as sexuality. And if your partner doesn’t seem to respond to you or anyone else sexually, it might be helpful to think about your relationship dynamic in terms of being an asexual/sexual union.

AVEN has a great FAQ about relationships and asexual people here, but even more compelling are the AVEN community forums, which have a section for Sexual Partners, Friends, and Allies. This section is invaluable because you can read accounts of people in relationships that may be hauntingly similar to yours. Observe:

We do have a sex life. A very boring one but we get each other off once in awhile. Maybe twice a month is it. Always initiated by me. And all he will do to me is finger me and sometimes perform oral sex. He lets me jerk him off and sometimes perform oral sex on him and I have to admit, if he didn’t ‘cum’, I would never know he did! He NEVER makes a noise, a moan, a sigh, nothing. I have never been with a man who is so quiet when he has an orgasm. Not that he has to be noisy, but a little enthusiasm would be nice. At least let me know!! – bluegal

Initially in our marriage we had sex on average 4 times a month. Once every Saturday or Sunday. Over the years adding two children into the equation it has gotten worse. Now we have sex twice a month. She has recently come to the conclusion that she’s asexual…I truly feel like I’m in a no win position. She doesn’t want me looking at porn (and I can honestly live without porn), but she won’t have sex with me, so I don’t have a sexual outlet. – mrroper

I noticed immediately that sex was awkward for him. He would do what he thought he should do, but, it was very clinical. There was no passion, no “I want to devour you” moments. He was not comfortable having sex. I knew this from the get go. He admitted to me that sex was not his “thing”. He told me that he was not very sexual. He said that he the mind was much more alluring to him. Okay… go figure. – kazzpurr

If you’re in a situation like any of these, go read those and other threads. The feedback from AVEN’s asexual members may be especially illuminating.

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Find Part One of the Fuck-crossed series here. There will be a Part Three, unless I get distracted by squirrels or blinky lights.

I think a lot of us live in fear that the sex will dry up for us, and we’ll be left horny, frustrated, and humping furniture. Or maybe it’s just me. My first relationship set a precedent for that: at some point Reginald Sleeth just stopped wanting to touch me, and that damaged our longevity and my self-esteem almost as much as all the abuse did, if indeed in our case one can completely separate the two.

I still don’t understand how it happened. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that everything Reginald found challenging and attractive in my personality had withered away by that point. Maybe he’d mentally moved on to his next victim. Maybe he’d been faking everything sexual with me and got tired of humoring me. Maybe finally having vaginal intercourse was too great a turn-off to recover from. Whatever made the sex die, I’m glad now that it did because it made it easier to walk away, but it was devastating at the time.

But my second relationship wasn’t exactly validating either, and brought up the question of whether it’s worse for the sex to dry up, or to have to keep wondering why it never got around to getting damp in the first place.

Perhaps Aldo Melastophilus and I shouldn’t have started dating. We were so great as friends. Our conversations popped with absurdity and hilarity in ample and equal parts. We could spend hours doing art projects together like six-year-olds, or have super serious time discussions about the sociopolitical wisdom that Opeth songs held for dinosaurs, if dinosaurs were to still exist and like death metal. We got along famously. It didn’t bother me that he was also very good looking. I’m open minded like that.

Then one day he walked me to my car after an evening together, and lunged forward to kiss me. Which was very surprising indeed, but I regrouped eventually and we kissed a little more.

Eventually we evolved into regular making out, but not significantly fewer art projects. After our early progress, it seemed like I was doing all the escalating. I was the one to introduce his hands to the concept of potentially interesting things being present under my shirt. Eventually I removed my shirt, and then later my bra. I put my hands down his pants. I put his hands down my pants. I may have given him his first blow job, and I could tell– like some kind of disappointed sixth sense– that I was the first girl he tried giving oral sex to. He didn’t seem to dislike any of these activities, but damned if they weren’t always my idea.

This sexually forward person I’m telling you about really doesn’t sound like me, does it?

The first time we tried having penis-in-vagina sex (on my initiative, naturally) it was awkward. His bed was lofted and he’s almost a foot taller than I am. Add inexperience squared to those key facts, and there was no immediately obvious solution as to how to configure our bodies to make our genitals match up correctly. I think we just ended up on the floor, or possibly his computer chair, which I remember us breaking somehow either then or on another attempt. He got inside me, but went soft soon after.

A word on losing your boner: it’s really, really not a big deal. Until it is. First time pressure to perform is just too great? Understandable. Stressed lately? These things happen. You swear this never happens to you? Let’s just cuddle. It’s really not the end of the world, although I would respectfully like to remind you that you still have fingers and I still have needs. But when it happens every time there’s a problem, and that problem is my ego.

Turned out, Aldo could keep wood all the way to orgasm when I gave him oral sex, but not so much when my vagina came into the picture. We just failed at having vaginal intercourse every damn time. I don’t think we ever rode that pony for more than a minute or two, tops, before his erection faded. And he never, ever came when we were fucking. After many failures I quite naturally concluded, as any reasonable person might do, that my pussy was repulsive and that I was probably also disgusting in every other way that matters. I slipped into a sadly resigned stone approach: forgetting about being touched; just trying to give him orgasms and abandoning any idea of my own.

Of course we were doomed. I’m not saying that stone/pillow queen relationships can’t work, but when I am part of us and that’s what we’re doing, we’re doomed. So very doomed. Doomed doomed doomed. He was embarrassed, I was frustrated, and eventually we just stopped calling each other. Much later he told me that he’d been slipping into a clinical depression at the time.

“It wasn’t you; it was me,” he confided.

“I can not believe you just retroactively it’s-not-you-it’s-me-ed me,” I disclosed. It was truly a time of healing.

Maybe it was just depression. Maybe I wasn’t repulsive. I really don’t know. Maybe Aldo just isn’t a very sexual person. For all the conversations we’ve had while and after we were dating, he has never once mentioned dating anyone other than me. Manifold nuances and forces could have conspired to keep his penis out of my vagina. All I know is that I’m still much, much less aggressive than I was back before Aldo and I became fuck-crossed lovers.

Fuck-crossed (Pt. 2)

The very week my website features confessions from married people and Auntie Gibbon’s guest post about keeping sex alive within long-term relationships, the marriage issue explodes all over the internet and TV news programs like my pussy on a date with the njoy Pure Wand. You’re welcome, Zeitgeist. Always a pleasure doing business with you.

The newest news fad of the week is apparently proclaiming the Death of Marriage. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the most blatant admission of a slow news week since CNN did an exposé on the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest. Why the fuck should anyone care about a survey where 40% of people said they think marriage is obsolete? Why is this news when it feels so much like… not news.

Let’s be clear about something. It’s something you probably already know, but it needs to be stated: There is absolutely no purpose a married couple fulfills in society that an unmarried couple can’t. Close your eyes and imagine… wait. You’re probably reading this with your eyes. Don’t close your eyes, just imagine a world where marriage no longer exists: where pair bonds form, break, shift, and last, all without a legal document or religious ritual. Try to visualize that. Does it look very, very close to the world we live in today? It should, because relationships are going to function in more or less the exact same way. Some people will mate for life, others will have a string of committed relationships, and still others will play the field indefinitely. People will be monogamous and polyamorous. Couples will switch partners. People will love and fuck and fight and breed and raise their children. Taking rings and vows out of it won’t change that.

Does that mean I agree that marriage is obsolete? Not at all. I just think the question is uninteresting. It isn’t a breaking story that the concept of matrimony has drastically changed over time. Romance, partnership, and parity within marriage are comparatively new ideas in the Western world. The latest great evolution in marriage, I believe, is the removal of the stigma of divorce. Sure, divorce sucks and most people don’t like doing it, but instead of being anathema to polite society, it’s now more or less a break up smothered in legal hassles. A failed marriage is no longer the mark of Cain (in the mainstream and the vast majority of subcultures, at least). Since there’s less risk of becoming a shunned outcast when you get around to leaving a shitty situation, being married no longer forces a couple to stay together the way it used to. That and the increasing mainstream acceptance of premarital sex and the whole “living in sin” thing make marriage less and less necessary in the grand scheme of things. But they don’t sap its potential to be important to individuals, whether society needs it or not.

If it’s important to you in a religious or cultural way, or will ensure that your family or circle accepts your partnership, marriage is probably a good idea. If you find personal, romantic meaning in the institution, then have that wedding, you crazy kids! If you’ve chosen your life partner and being married makes sense for home ownership, insurance, legal, financial, or child-rearing purposes, much joy to you. If you want a free stand mixer, have at it. If it’s important to you to define your relationship that way for any other reason, I support your decision 100%. I don’t think your relationship is automatically more valid and special than everyone else’s just because you chose (and were able) to opt into matrimony, mind, but I also get that making that gesture of lifelong commitment is a big damn deal.

My point here is that if marriage is important to you, it obviously isn’t obsolete. No, society wouldn’t crumble without it, but it can indeed hold beauty, meaning, and practical advantages. If marriage were viewed in a more realistic, personalized way, maybe we wouldn’t have so many people deciding that others should be excluded from what should really boil down to a personal choice rather than a public virtue.

And yes, I absolutely did just write an entire blog post about how I don’t care about a news story. What of it?

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I was excited to be in the first real romantic relationship of my life. The guy I’d had a crush on for years wanted me, we were “in love” and having fun, and I was sharing orgasms with someone for the first time. If I’d known the telltale signs to watch for that belie the bliss and give an ugly whiff of future abusive behavior I’d have run away screaming, but at the time I thought that things were going pretty well.

Not so Reginald. To him it was a persistent and serious problem that I wasn’t Lily. Almost as unbearable was the fact that he wasn’t, and never would be, Jack.

To me, Legend was a mediocre ’80s fantasy movie that I’d never heard of until the cute Mormon boy I had tentatively, hugs-only dated a couple years earlier had eagerly showed it to me. It was less dazzling than Willow, less imaginative than The Labyrinth and less captivating than The Princess Bride, I thought. But it seemed to have some sort of power over these two guys. It was Reginald’s favorite movie.

The protagonists, Jack and Lily, despite being portrayed (in my opinion) with all the personality of a sprouted mung bean and a pile of toenail clippings respectively, are fabulously happy together and can party with unicorns because of their unsullied innocence. Then things go awry because Lily decides to ignore Jack’s warnings about touching the unicorns, and then Tim Curry is awesome for a while. Then stuff happens and the boring people win, as they very often do in stories of this type. And there’s something about True Love™ conquering all at the end, I think. To be honest, it’s been a while.

To be really honest, I would like the movie more if it hadn’t been such a source of drama. As it was, their love, informed in the movie rather than shown, was a cynosure to him. It must’ve hit him in the exact right way at exactly the right point in his psychosocial development, because everything was compared to Jack and Lily. When things were going well, they were never going well enough because there were no unicorns asking Reginald and me to hang out with them. When we were fighting or he was bored, Reginald would literally cry because we didn’t have anything like the True Love™ featured in that Ridley Scott movie. Whatever we were doing, if it wasn’t accompanied by an original score by Tangerine Dream, it would always fall short.

In an essay entitled “This is Emo”, Chuck Klosterman basically says that he once had this girlfriend, until John Cusack stole her. Not even John Cusack, but Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character in Say Anything. It seemed at first that Chuck had the edge, being both real and present. This girl was very likely never going to meet John and was absolutely fucking not going to meet Lloyd Dobler. But the fact was that he was never going to measure up to a movie, and she was never going to forgive him for it.

Love exists. It’s a beautiful, transformative force. It can inspire words and deeds and works of art. It can drive you insane or make you feel finally still for once in your life. It’s powerful, but it’s never perfect. It doesn’t look like the manufactured, scripted love you see on screens and read about in fiction. Real love is never True Love™.

When you’re in True Love™, exciting shit is happening all around. conflicting forces are in play, destiny is invoked, and everyone involved is a very special snowflake– not just to each other, but probably on a much grander scale. In a True Love™ universe, everyone gets one [1] soulmate. Or if everyone doesn’t, at least you sure do, you special snowflake.

Because that’s how stories work. In a story, everything is significant. Even throwaway details are symbolic of something important. People aren’t shown showering, or driving to work, or doing anything at all unless it advances the plot. There’s no filler, no tedium, no silences that aren’t meaningful and no dialogue that hasn’t been reviewed and tweaked and edited. A story, like True Love™, is an escape from reality, not an example of what reality would be like if all the slags around us would just cooperate.

Real love isn’t always breathtaking and spine-quivering. It won’t be all heady declarations and grand gestures. True Love™ would get exhausting; real love is comfortable and secure. There’s time for lingering in bed and cuddling because the fate of your world isn’t threatened all the time. You’re allowed to have problems individually or as a couple without it meaning that the relationship has failed. It’s okay that real love is imperfect because it’s between people, not ideals.

Having some kind of fantasy of what love is supposed to look like is responsible for more than just hurting one’s own relationships. It’s also part of the impulse to “protect marriage” from frightening homosexuals. It leads us to obsess about people we barely know rather than pursuing healthy partnerships. It makes you less adventurous, less interesting, less loving. In short, it makes your story duller and it makes you less of a hero in it.