My good people, I give you: Amatonormativity.
Transcript (with spaces added for accessibility):
“You and this perfect person, who you’ve never met before, to come out of nowhere, fit into your life perfectly, complete you, and make you whole for the first time in your life, like your mother did for me.”
And even though what he said sounds sweet and whatever, the way it manifested to my seven-year-old self is, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.”
And that’s not just something that my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society for the last 40 years has made every single child feel. Every Disney prince has a princess, every princess has a prince, and every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But guess what, by the end of the series? They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, the fucking idiot!
It’s all to do with love. Everyone needs someone. And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when you become an adult for the first time in your late teens and early 20’s, we’re so terrified.
We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw, and force them into our jigsaws anyway. I’m going to force this fucking person into our lives because it’s much better to have something than nothing.
Then five years later, you’re stood looking at this jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this!” And in that moment, you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Do I waste the rest of my life?
My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they give up the one that they’re currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than they are with the person they are with. The worst thing you can do with your life is to spend it with the wrong human being.
