#couplehood

[whatwerewemadefor]

just one of those days when i wonder why amatonormativity is a thing to the point that people i love don’t know what to talk about with me, except my hatred of couplehood

[ashleyfableblack]

Following "I don't Feel like Dancing 1-4" -The Sun-drenched Afternoon After "Quite a while"...

In the peace of the Sparkle Family royal diarchy bedchamber the air was aglow with the warmth and pheromones of the most famously loving interspecies couple in the known land. Twilight murred sleepily. Held close to her wife's barrel she was warm, happy, secure. Her eyelids were still too heavy to even flutter open after last nights exertions. She wriggled, nesting into the folded forelimbs of cool ebony chitin and listened to Chrysalis's cricket-like purring. Moments like this, their love, it was blissful. She stifled a groan as the gnawing pang of royal responsibility hit her. She rolled her eyes with the thought of the creatively-worded apology letter she'd need to send... whenever they finally got around to getting up. "Dear Queen Novo~ I must humbly apologize on behalf of The Royal Diarchy of New Equestria for our absence at last night's Kirin cultural festival. Although preparations were made in advance for our timely departure and arrival my wife became unavoidably entangled with matters of intense and immediate importance. Despite my best attempts to curtail our delay my involvement only served to exacerbate the situation." She sighed. She'd discovered that diplomatic communication was roughly 10% polite sincerity and 90% extremely delicate phrasing of things "polite society" wanted to pretend they didn't do. Ugh. The rest could wait until after they got up. She ooched her rump into the enticing creche of her wife's lap, settling in to continue their nap. With a gentle tug she drew Chrysalis's forelimb closer. She nuzzled the rough surface of pitted chitin to her cheek like a security blanket. This was happiness. Novo would get over it.

[thelonguepuree]

The couple is; the couple rarely are: this grammatical technicality would suggest that when we ask “what is a couple?” we are talking about two ones that have become a new one and thus should be addressed as an ontological unity. And yet, as the long history of feminist and queer accounts of the couple teaches us, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, ce couple n’en est pas un. Haunted always by shadowy thirds—the affair, the ex, the second husband, the sister-in-law, the child, the coeditor—the couple, it would seem, far from merging into one, easily multiplies into three or more. Indeed, the very origins of queer theory might be traced to its capacious theorization of the third—whether through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reinterpretation of the erotic triangle of structural anthropology (in which the bond between same-sex rivals is observed to be stronger than that between lover and beloved), or Judith Butler’s reimagining of the oedipal triangle of psychoanalysis (in which the child’s gender and sexual identity arises through a complex interplay of desire and identification with the two parents). These two queer triangles can be seen to converge in one of the most influential, if controversial, texts of recent queer theory, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). What Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” describes the logic according to which the two figures—the Queer and the Child—perform a strange dance around the Couple, oscillating in and out of the position of the Couple’s third to perpetuate its neat symmetry. In No Future, as in much of queer theory, the Queer is a shadowy third that simultaneously troubles and constitutes the Couple. The Queer’s positive antipode, the Child, offers the Couple salvation from the Queer’s negation by promising hope and the restoration of meaning through its positivization of nothing into something. In the following pages, we turn to four integers—one, two, three, and zero—to comprehend the shifting relationship between the Couple and the Queer. Taking cues from Edelman as well as recent Afro-pessimist scholarship, we approach the Couple not as a sociological category, but as a structure of being, and the Queer, not as an identitarian category but as a (non)ontological position. Surveying a series of key moments in the history of queer theory’s often implicit philosophizing about the couple, we construct a queer numerology that attends to the numerical patterns that characterize coupled relationality in different historical moments. As we propose, what feminist and queer theorists have historically taken to be ethically specious about the couple form has concerned its metaphysical tendency to either synthesize into one (thus eliminating the threat of difference) or produce queer thirds upon whose difference its sanctity depends.

from “The Ontology of the Couple, or, What Queer Theory Knows about Numbers” by S. Pearl Brilmyer, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang, GLQ 25:2 (2019)

[dbaydenny]

Arguments aside

spending time sipping coffee

we two become us.

D W Eldred

[vinkunwildflowerqueen]

Extract from Paul Reiser’s 1995 book: Couplehood

[lexena]

Okay, these kids know how to do date night.

Real talk, that cookie looked disgusting.

[dbaydenny]

Sharing my garage, her new car parked beside mine while she sleeps with me. D W Eldred

[thedaveandkimmershow]

Once Upon A Time we were new to each other as a couple. Got all kinds of feels going on. All kinds of tingles. All kinds of adventures. All kinds of hours of talking. 😉

Once Upon A Time we were a pretty focused pair. She had a job. I had a job. We were dating. And that was pretty much it. So we were all about each other. 🥳😎☺️

Once Upon A Time we had our first Valentine's Day. Which was a pretty big deal since it feels like straight up validation that I, in fact, had a girlfriend. That she, in fact, had a boyfriend (which she told me later she wasn't looking for). 🤔🤨

Valentine's Day was a fun sort of approval. An official stamp on our couplehood. I don't know why that would be... that's just how it felt. 😘

Of course later you get married and that. Is the official stamp on your couplehood. Valentine's Day was just the first. 🙂

Nowadays, when I think back on getting married, when I think about our wedding day on each wedding anniversary day... I think about the actual day we got married, the days leading up to it, the days following after it. It's more celebration of this massively intense experience we remember. 😍

Valentine's Day isn't like that, though. There's not an event we celebrate. There's a love we celebrate. Our love. As it grows over days, months, years, and decades. It's a helluva thing. 😁

Once Upon A Time we were a pretty focused pair. She had a job. I had a job. We were dating. That really was it so we could be all kinds of about each other.

Of course we're not those ADHD young adults we used to be, footloose and fancy-free. We're adultier ADHD adults with a mortgage and business licenses. 😐

You know when you're young you say all kinds of things about your love because the future's a blank canvas and you can imagine all kinds of awesomeness that's gonna be painted on that canvas. For us, we've got a lot of our canvas painted. And there are plenty of things I know for a fact. Plenty that I know from actual experience.

So when I say she's the love of my life...

I mean she's the Love.

Of my life.

For real. 

And when I say she's my Rock...

Yeah.

Thirty-one years of living this life together together is all the proof I need.

She's dynamic. She's a passionate beauty. She is off the charts smart and a blindingly fast thinker. She has a multi track mind and a relentlessly creative imagination.

I say she's my Valentine, though, and the word doesn't seem to do her justice even as today it's pretty much the only word at my disposal.

Plus, it's what all the cards and candies say. 😕

Once Upon A Time we celebrated our first Valentine's Day. Today and in the next few days we celebrate maybe our thirty-third, thirty-fourth Valentine's Day. A time during which I get to reflect on how breathtakingly lucky I am to love this one woman for decades and be a better man for it. ❤️❤️❤️

From our very first kiss, our couplehood's been this grand adventure, this edge-of-our-seats expedition, this life together painted on a massive canvas in all the colors we can imagine and a few we'd rather not.

I realize those words conjure a sort of Jackson Pollock vibe but still.

It's a helluva thing.

You know?

☺️