The post All about amatonormativity: the privileging of romantic love appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.
]]>Amatonormativity is a long word which philosopher Elizabeth Brake came up with. It means that, in our culture, it’s seen as normal for people to want romantic love, and to prioritise that kind of love over other kinds. Other kinds of love include things like the love we have in friendships, family relationships, work and play relationships, and relationships with ourselves and with companion animals, our communities, the world around us, and our spiritual beliefs. ‘Amato’ means romantic love and ‘normativity’ means what’s seen as culturally normal.
Amatonormativity is linked to several other kinds of ‘normativity’: heteronormativity (where it’s seen as normal to want relationships with someone of the ‘opposite gender’), cisnormativity (where it’s seen as normal to be one of only two genders – male and female – and to stay in that gender all your life), mononormativity (where it’s seen as normal to only love one person and to want a monogamous relationship with them), and sexual normativity (where it’s seen as normal to want to have sex, generally only with the person you’re in a romantic relationship with).
To make it simpler we could say that the overall ‘norm’ is to be in one gender yourself, to fall in love with someone of the ‘opposite’ gender (perhaps after dating a bit), and to form a monogamous relationship with them where you have sex and get more and more committed over time (the relationship escalator): getting married, having a family, and trying to stay together for life.
Amatonormativity affects everyone: the people who don’t fit into it and the people who do.
The people who don’t fit into amatonormativity include people who are single or solo, people who are aromantic so don’t experience romantic love, people who prioritise other kinds of relationships in their lives, and people who prioritise many relationships rather than just one – like polyamorous people and relationship anarchists. Other people who don’t fit into amatonormativity are people from cultures where marriage and other committed relationships aren’t based on romantic love, which is actually people in many cultures around the world.
Some people don’t fit amatonormativity because they’ve realised it doesn’t work for them. It’s hard for them because the world around them assumes they will want romantic love and may discriminate against them or make them feel weird or isolated for being ‘different’.
The people who do fit amatonormativity often have a hard time too. Because there’s so much cultural pressure – and pressure from friends and family and peers – to want romantic love and to focus on it obsessively, people often miss out on other great things in life like friendships and projects and community.
Also the huge pressure on a romantic partner to be ‘everything’ to you and ‘complete’ you and be your soul mate who meets all your needs means that most romantic love relationships often don’t work out long term. It’s just too much pressure to be someone’s best friend, and their lover, and the person they live with and have kids with, and their cheerleader, and the person who looks after them when they’re sick or struggling.
People can end up staying in really unhappy relationships because they’re scared to be alone in an amatonormative world, and they can end up breaking up with one person after another and getting really hurt by that because they’re so busy searching for someone perfect.
Amatonormativity particularly affects those of us who are trying to do relationships differently because we’ve realised some of the problems with basing relationships on romantic love. While we might try to prioritise the other relationships in our lives, we may still find that our friends prioritise their romantic relationships and drift off as soon as they have a partner, or spend more time on dating than on friendships. Or they might find it weird to talk with us about how we might make commitments in our friendships.
Amatonormativity also affects people with trauma in their backgrounds – which is many of us. Romantic love can be quite risky when we have childhood trauma because it’s very easy to jump into relationships quickly and to try to get the kind of love there which we were missing – or lost – as a kid. Again that’s a lot of pressure to put on one relationship, and we can often end up getting hurt because painful patterns come up in intense romantic relationships and we can become very dependent on them.
Some neurodiverse people can struggle with amatonormativity because romantic love type relationships don’t give us the space we might need, enough solo time, or can just be too intense for us.
Finally, some people would say that amatonormativity – with its focus on one romantic relationship – isn’t so good for disabled people, or people with physical and mental health conditions, or even for parents, where being an isolated unit of just two people can be a lot of pressure. Perhaps community-based models and extended family structures where there are networks of people looking out for each other can work better when we need care and support.
For young people amatonormativity can mean that a lot of your focus goes on love relationships, particularly for girls who are still taught in stories and movies and magazines that love is their big adventure in life. When that message is all around you it can seem to make sense to spend a lot of your time longing for love, talking about the people you fancy, dating or hooking up. That can feel like the most fun and pleasurable thing in life. But what would it be like if we lived in a world where mates were seen as just as important as dates, where we were taught how to enjoy our relationship with ourselves rather than being so hard on ourselves all the time, or where we were expected to get just as excited about the things we’re passionate about as we do about the people we’re into?
If you’re a young person who doesn’t fit into amatonormativity there can be so much pressure to do so. You can end up being bullied for being weird and different if you don’t talk about who you fancy or get off with people, and you can end up feeling like an outsider or like there’s something wrong with you if romantic love isn’t something you’re interested in, or if it doesn’t seem to happen for you.
That’s why the idea of amatonormativity is really helpful. It reminds us that prioritising romantic love isn’t really the normal, natural, right thing to do. It’s just one thing we can do, and it might not even be a very good idea for all the reasons we’ve talked about.
Online communities can be a lot of help for finding other people who do things differently, and it can be good to see a counsellor if anyone is giving you a hard time. Website like BishUK and Scarleteen both have great advice for young people about relationship diversity.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to be outside amatonormativity, or to resist it if it doesn’t work for us, is because the whole of society is set up like it’s the One True Way to be. People who get married are given lots of legal and financial and health support that people who are in other kinds of relationships don’t get. It’s often much easier to get a house together if you are a romantic couple than if you’re in another kind of relationship with one or more other people. People who have kids together are often not recognised as valid parents unless they’re romantic partners.
Outside of these practical problems, cultural messages are So Strong that we should want romantic love and settle down with a romantic partner. It’s literally the ‘happy ever after’ of most fairy tales, movies, and novels. It’s also the focus of loads of magazines, soap operas, and reality TV shows like Love Island or Love is Blind. This means most people just accept amatonormativity and everyone from our mates to our families are probably assuming we’ll want romantic love and are pressuring us to date, especially around events like proms and weddings, or at times like Valentine’s Day and holiday seasons.
‘Couple privilege’ is a phrase for the many ways in which it’s easier to be in our society as a couple than it is as somebody single or in another kind of relationship. Couples never have to explain why they want to be together or stay together, whereas people who are single are always asked to explain themselves, as are people who leave romantic relationships, or who decide to prioritise other kinds of relationships.
I hope so. In 2012 my book Rewriting the Rules came out, which suggested that we could question the love rules that prioritise romantic love over other kinds of love. Eight years on we now have a word for this: amatonormativity, and people are having these kinds of conversations more widely. There are also more and more words and communities for people who want to do things differently like solo poly people, self-partnered people, relationship anarchists, aromantic people, etc. Popular TV shows like Modern Love have started to portray lots of different kinds of love rather than just romantic love.
However, at the same time, the mainstream media seems increasingly obsessed with people at a young age finding The One and getting married to them. Look at all the massively popular reality TV shows where winning is based on falling in love and making that commitment.
It’s a bit like what’s happening with sex and gender. At the same time that we have asexual communities questioning why there is so much pressure to be sexual, we also have more and more cultural obsession with having ‘great sex’ and ‘experts’ insisting that it’s vital to have sex. At the same time that we have non-binary people questioning why people are divided into men and women, there’s also a lot of cultural pressure to be a manly man and or a girly girl and ‘experts’ insisting that gender is binary.
It is So Hard to step outside of culture so go gently with yourself. If you see the problems with amatonormativity then it’s a great idea to be part of communities of other people who feel similarly in order to get support. Finding online and offline communities of other people who want to do relationships the way you do is a great plan. You might also read some of the books and zines out there which question amatonormativity and offer alternatives. I hope my book Rewriting the Rules is a pretty good place to start, and me and Justin Hancock (from Bish UK) have a podcast where we talk about these things A Lot.
For me one of the answers to how to do things differently has been to slow down all relationships. These days I tell everyone that I want to be friends first. In fact I aim to have a friendship for at least a year before I consider adding anything to it (whether that is sex or romantic love or working together or living together). New Relationship Energy or ‘falling in love’ is a major feature of amatonormativity and I think it’s a great idea to slow that right down, because it generally isn’t a great basis to build a whole relationship on.
Actually all cultures around the world do love differently. More cultures are some form of non-monogamous than are monogamous, and many cultures base marriage or committed relationships on some kind of family and/or financial arrangement, or on choosing a good fit, rather than on romantic love (although that can develop over time in such relationships). If we don’t want to impose one view on the rest of the world – as we have in the past – we need to get on board with relationship diversity.
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Plural tag: This post was primarily written by Fox.
The post All about amatonormativity: the privileging of romantic love appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.
]]>The post ‘Same-sex’ marriage appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.
]]>According to the BBC, the letter states the following:
“There are many reasons why people get married. For most couples, there is an instinctive understanding that the stability of a marriage provides the best context for the flourishing of their relationship and for bringing up their children.”
“Society recognises marriage as an important institution for these same reasons: to enhance stability in society and to respect and support parents in the crucial task of having children and bringing them up as well as possible.”
This law would “gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage.”
“There would be no recognition of the complementarity of male and female or that marriage is intended for the procreation and education of children.”
Catholics have a “duty to do all we can to ensure that the true meaning of marriage is not lost for future generations”.
The government response to this letter was: “The government has made clear its commitment to equality. We believe people should have the option of civil marriage, irrespective of sexual orientation.”
Responding directly to the Archbishops’ letter risks giving it more credibility than it deserves. Often simply presenting a counter-argument suggests that there is some merit to the original argument, which clearly – in this case – there isn’t. Hopefully by now people are familiar with the wealth of research finding that ‘same-sex’ couples are just as good parents as ‘opposite-sex’ ones, and that there is no evidence that their relationships are any less ‘stable’. If not then the reviews of the research produced by the American Psychological Association on same-sex parenting and same-sex marriage should prove helpful. Hopefully also the principle of equal rights to people of all sexual identities is embraced by the vast majority of people, as reflected in the government statement.
Here, then, I want to move the discussion in a slightly different direction. First I’ll present a brief argument that flexibility in the laws and rules around relationships might be something to embrace, rather than resist, and secondly I’ll suggest some further questions around the kinds of relationships which might be included in such a flexible approach.
In these discussions reference is often made to tradition. Archbishop Peter Smith, one of the authors of the letter, frequently justifies his position with the argument that the current form of marriage has been present since ‘time immemorial’.
However, looking to history we can see that marriage has changed markedly both in terms of who has access to it, and what it is for. The current form of ‘opposite-sex’ marriage can be regarded as a relatively recent invention, as argued by historian Stephanie Coontz in her history of marriage. Marital laws’ assumptions about the age, kinship relationship, and race of partners; the number of partners a person can marry; and the rights of partners to own property and to bring legal actions against one another have all changed over time, and there is no reason to regard the gender of those involved as any more intrinsic than those aspects. The historical Christian ceremony uniting people of the ‘same-sex’ is also interesting to reflect upon in this context.
Many scholars have argued that the nature of intimate relationships and the family have changed radically, again, in the past fifty years or so. It seems telling that the Catholic Church have chosen to focus on ‘same-sex’ relationships rather than other shifts such as: rates of separation and divorce, cohabiting before – or instead of – marriage, the increase in numbers of people living alone, shifts in gender roles in relationships, or rates of infidelity and increases in forms of open non-monogamy. Perhaps these should all be reasons to regard such relationships as in a constant state of process, rather than as something static, and to embrace regular reflections on whether the policy and practices surrounding them needs to shift accordingly.
Of course there is a wider debate to be had over whether the state should have a role in intimate relationships at all. However, if we proceed on the basis that it currently does have a role, for example in determining who is supported in adopting, or bringing up, children, and who is recognised as a legitimate partner in the case of medical emergencies or in relation to shared money and property ownership, then such rights and responsibilities clearly need to be extended beyond the married ‘opposite-sex’ couple, and any two-tier system (such as marriage and civil partnerships) is problematic since it still gives the message that some relationships are more legitimate than others. This is clearly linked to heterosexism and prejudice towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people.
Whilst religious organisations remain free to celebrate specific events in a person’s life in the ways that they wish to (which differs from group to group), any civil recognition needs to be available to all. One example of the ridiculousness of the current situation is in the case of married couples who have to go through annulment and civil partnership if one person changes gender such that they become a ‘same-sex’ couple.
Another important point, regarding equality, is made by The Bisexual Index. Talk of ‘gay marriage’ in many media reports of these debates is problematic because, of course, many of those in ‘same-sex’ relationships are bisexual rather than gay. Furthermore, at the same time as extending marriage to ‘same-sex’ relationships, it is important to extend civil partnerships to ‘opposite-sex’ relationships such that all people would have access to either of these (there being political reasons, relating to the gendered baggage of marriage for example, why some would prefer a different form of relationship recognition). The Bisexual Index concludes that “the way the law is currently written does not mention sexuality, but instead the genders of the people. Why can’t the people campaigning for equality understand that the way to amend the law isn’t to talk about ‘gay vs. straight’ but instead to address the genders – remove the genders from the law and it’s not just gay and straight men and women who’ll have equal love, but all of us.” Making the gender of those involved irrelevant to the right to marriage/civil partnership would also end the need for the unwieldy ‘same-sex’, ‘opposite-sex’ terminology which doesn’t represent all experiences of gender either.
Moving on from this we might want to explore, more broadly, the kinds of relationships which should be possible to recognise in these ways. For example, in order to be co-parents, or committed co-habitees, people do not necessarily need to be in a sexual, or a romantic, relationship. Close friendships and asexual and aromantic relationships challenge these assumptions. Similarly, it is possible for more than two people to co-parent, to co-habit in a committed way and/or to be romantically and/or sexually involved so we should certainly consider extending relationship recognition beyond the ‘couple’.
Given that intimate relationships, and the social norms surrounding them, are in process rather than static, it is important, and necessary, that policy and practice relating to them is also flexible and fluid, rather than rigid and restrictive.
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