read the puppygirl article. goddess but i understand you, girl. we have dated the puppygirl you describe. note for note. more than once. we saw the hours they took. we left. we left. we left.
we got tired of leaving. we regretted it. we missed them, as bad as those relationships had been, as coercive as they had been. we wondered if maybe, things could've worked out better. if we were too quick to judge our own time as too valuable to spend on them.
we found ourselves dating another disabled racialized trans woman. shey were the one spending sixteen hours a day on labor for sheir tme partner. we got shem out. shey became "the puppygirl", by which i mean, the girl who needed extra emotional and physical labor and care.
we decided not to leave. we decided to do the hard, unpleasant, and often messy work of actually communicating and finding solutions and making things work.
five years later and we are homeless, in the most polluted city in the country, on a border thats about to become a warzone. and we are the happiest we've ever been in our entire lives, because we're with shem.
yeah, things are hard. we communicate. sometimes that means spirals happen, sometimes lasting all day. we work through them, we keep communicating. we find solutions. we make it work. we keep loving, we keep choosing to love, and our life is endlessly better for it.
and things get better. we avoid the problems we faced last time, many of the problems you point out in your article, or we accept them as realities of disability and we talk about it, we communicate and find solutions, and take active steps to prevent resentment from building up.
and we watch shem grow into shemselves, into truly being a person for the first time, given sheir own autonomy. we watch shem find reasons to live, and keep going, and for the first time in longer than you've been alive, shey don't want to end it. we watch shem find joy, and rediscover passions, and relearn to play. and it is the most beautiful and precious thing we've ever seen. and we wouldn't trade it for a million hours gotten back or paid for.
and we get love back. in little ways at first, or in odd ways that shey learned from past partners. we teach shem what love means to us, and learn what it means to shem, and we build love together. and we get taken care of, and labor put back into us, as shey grow and become more capable in the areas shey can. and shey find ways to care for us even through sheir disabilities, finding accomodations and workarounds.
and there is no puppygirl anymore, no development into a sad little thing who needs to be objectified and protected and coddled. there is only us, and the love we have for each other, and the choice to keep loving, to keep choosing, to keep communicating and finding ways through.
love can be hours and labor and time spent unequally, and be the best anyone could ever imagine, because its not about balancing a Goddess-damned spreadsheet. its about choosing, again and again, to make each other's happiness your own, to carry each other's sorrow together, and to pick each other up, no matter how often you fall.
love is about communicating. past the problems. past the spirals. even when its hard, even when it hurts. you communicate, you make mistakes, you hurt each other, and you work through it, you keep communicating, and you come out stronger for it. you dont just leave without trying.
not being willing to find ways to communicate, even through spirals and hurt feelings, and find solutions? skill issue. to imply that the puppygirl's needs are invented because you dont want the guilt of ignoring them? skill issue. to imply that she's not a real woman, compare her to only men, and say she's stolen the woman's position while wearing the woman's clothes? massively transmisogynist skill issue.
to think you can make an accounting of love like a Goddess-damned spreadsheet, as if it can be timed and measured and its quality rated in labor value hours, is a cringe-ass skill issue. love is more than that, and it is not something that can be measured or weighed or fucking accounted.
i just dont know what to tell you tara. we married that girl. we're still together. we cured her suicidality, while homeless in the desert in an internal colony. we're happier with her, and she with us, than we have any right to deserve. git fucking good, bitch.
