"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.
And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?
But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.
Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?
What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."
Pulled this from this guy Preston Rakovsky's Instagram (@prestonrack) because it is a beautiful perspective on love, marriage, and relationships in general.
very funny that literally just riffing on a common tumblr joke about women, but with an especially marginalized group of women, has people months later coming to me like "oh yeah well what about what THIS trans woman you've never met did?" and the answer is still I don't care lol
As time goes on the idea of a "transtrender" gets funnier and funnier. At what point in time has there ever been a trend or clout to gain from being trans?
when i say “aros can still date” i mean that as in “aros can do whatever the fuck they want and it doesn’t have to make sense to you”
but some of y’all say “aros can still date” to mean “aros are still able to fit your standards of an acceptable person despite their abnormality” and i do not fuck with that
if you're confused about all the pumpkins and ghosts and stuff, it's actually a sort of seasonal harvest festival in parts of the northern hemisphere. yeah, it's kinda weird to think about how it's autumn down there when up here it's spring, haha yeah imagine them all, upside down, and getting colder in october when it's just starting to warm up
and can you imagine, down there it's COLD at christmas, crazy right?
that's nonsense, why would it be cold at christmas, it doesn't even make sense? that's a festival about the birth of something??? obviously that happens in summer.
#CAN’T BELIEVE THE SHOW SUCKER PUNCHED ME LIKE THIS
#GOING FROM OBI-WAN’S KINDA HILARIOUS FUCK UP
#HE SPENDS THE ENTIRE LAST TEN MINUTES TELLING LEIA NOT TO TALK
#AND THEN HE’S THE ONE TO FUCK UP
#AND I’M KIND OF CRYING ALREADY BECAUSE HE RECOVERS FAIRLY SMOOTHLY
#LIKE YEAH OBI-WAN’S RUSTY BUT YOU CAN SEE THE SMOOTHNESS COMING BACK TO HIM
#EVERY STEP HE TAKES ON THIS JOURNEY HE’S A LITTLE MORE HIMSELF AGAIN
#EVEN IN SMALL WAYS LIKE COMING UP WITH A GOOD COVER ON THE SPOT
#AND THEN THE SHOW HAS ME IN AN ALMOST UPBEAT MOOD
#AND IT GOES FOR THE WHAMMY
#‘SOMETIMES WHEN I LOOK AT HER I SEE HER MOTHER’S FACE’
#’WE ALL MISS HER VERY MUCH’
#I FEEL LIKE I JUST GOT SOCKED IN THE STOMACH WITH A STEEL CHAIR
#HOW DARE THIS SHOW DO THIS TO ME I’M SOBBING
Think tanks explicitly founded to "abolish transgenderism" will publish a report that's like "there's no evidence that trans healthcare works if you ignore all the evidence" and be taken seriously, meanwhile actual researchers go "there's seriously NO evidence that gatekeeping helps" and get ignored
Like on the one hand there's new papers each year going "So it turns out that there's literally no fucking reason to restrict transition access based on these arbitrary criteria, and in fact, they were explicitly made up by some Danish fuck because he was personally obsessed with the idea that trans people were demons, and as it turns out the only measurable impacts of this policy are to increase risks to the patient" that have no impact on the healthcare systems they're criticizing whatsoever.
And then, on the other hand, you've got "Shockingly, this life-altering treatment that massively impacts how the patient is perceived by others in all facets of life is primarily supported by observational studies, as opposed to the enormous violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity necessary to perform a true randomized control trial. We recommend that treatment ceases immediately because you don't understand how evidence-based medicine works." And that becomes a linchpin of the politics of multiple European countries' trans healthcare politics for the next several years.
It's fucking clown world. Nobody who enabled this should be in a position of any power whatsoever.
Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
Recipient of a third-degree burn in front of witnesses. IE, "I won't take that shit from a man dressed like a ghostbuster"= "Gostbuster" or "Buster"
A distinctive personal feature or quirk. IE, "Have you noticed how that new guy is always eating bell peppers?" = "Peppers", or "That chick has a massive forehead" = "Forehead".
An embarrassing thing you said or did. IE, "Did you seriously call Dale "Dad"?" = "Junior", "Baby boy", "Sport"
A game of name-mutation telephone. IE, "Donny Clyde" = "Bonnie 'n' Clyde" = "Bonnie" = "Bon-bon".
Irony. IE, calling a tall person "short stack" or a particularly dour person "sunshine".
A 'wrong place wrong time' one-off incident. IE, "He spilled oil on his pants and had to borrow a pair that were way too big and Jim saw him with the waistband pulled up to his nipples and called him 'Parachute'"
A batman-style origin story but not in a cool way: "One time she hit a deer with the company car and when she called the boss to tell her she was crying so hard we thought she was dying" = "Bambi"
The incredibly rare 'admiration' nickname, bourne only once a millennia under the light of the blood moon: "We saw him lift a truck once so now we call him 'iron man'"
This reminds me of an article about how callsigns in movies are inaccurate because they're too cool. Generally your callsign in the military is like "Bepis" because you once pronounced "Pepsi" wrong.
My sister-in-law (husband’s sister) was supposed to get married this fall but due to some immature/concerning behavior by her fiancé, the wedding and engagement were called off. (I don’t want to be too specific, but there were sudden red flags, followed by his sudden decision that he wanted to postpone the wedding months or years despite the fact that most of it was paid for already).
I explained the delicate situation to my mom, as my sister-in-law is letting the news get out by word-of-mouth from the immediate family rather than an awkward “unsave-the-date”. My mom obviously told my own family.
Apparently my dad was so angry by the behavior of this guy that in the lunchroom at work he made everybody listen to the whole story (censoring names and identifying details) and said “I’m not crazy, right? This guy sucks!” And then reported back to me all his different coworkers that agreed this guy sucks, as well as their variety of ages/genders to indicate widespread consensus.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.