i'm all twisted up about a conversation i had recently and needed to write to think more about the matter.
i think i'm finally articulating that i'm just not really excited about the whole "being in love" frame. it happens. it's exhilarating when it does. but it also is a lot, in my experience, reliant on some types of blinders. i like: love, loving kindness, beloved community, justice as the public practice of love, revolutionary, unconditional love, liberatory love, respect, dignity, as some other kinds of love, as practice and as concepts. i like the kind of love that comes from knowing and seeing clearly another person or organizations strengths and faults and inconsistencies and contradictions and accepting that's how they are and deciding to continue to be in love and struggle and relationship with them anyway. and i'm interested in happiness, connection, inspiration, cooperation, mutually supportive and respecting relationships that may become interdependent without becoming co-dependent, over time, "in love" and even romantic love in the U.S. popular cultural context, without having been excavated and reclaimed, hold lots of patriarchal and hetero and colonial/imperial relationship structures and expectations, including when between two queer women of color. and i think fundamentally i'm not interested in that project or that practice. and this love i'm writing about can be between friends, lovers, comrades, colleagues, students and teachers, familial relationships, neighbors, and even, occasionally, strangers. do you have a theory of love?* * * * *"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." -- Rumi
i think i'm finally articulating that i'm just not really excited about the whole "being in love" frame. it happens. it's exhilarating when it does. but it also is a lot, in my experience, reliant on some types of blinders. i like: love, loving kindness, beloved community, justice as the public practice of love, revolutionary, unconditional love, liberatory love, respect, dignity, as some other kinds of love, as practice and as concepts. i like the kind of love that comes from knowing and seeing clearly another person or organizations strengths and faults and inconsistencies and contradictions and accepting that's how they are and deciding to continue to be in love and struggle and relationship with them anyway. and i'm interested in happiness, connection, inspiration, cooperation, mutually supportive and respecting relationships that may become interdependent without becoming co-dependent, over time, "in love" and even romantic love in the U.S. popular cultural context, without having been excavated and reclaimed, hold lots of patriarchal and hetero and colonial/imperial relationship structures and expectations, including when between two queer women of color. and i think fundamentally i'm not interested in that project or that practice. and this love i'm writing about can be between friends, lovers, comrades, colleagues, students and teachers, familial relationships, neighbors, and even, occasionally, strangers. do you have a theory of love?* * * * *
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