{he's my other half: I'm halved when alone/I've learned where my sicknesses lead}

[kaberett]

One of the things I've been half-heartedly (ha) sorting through in the spin-off from The Emotional Labour Thread is the cultural construct of the Other Half. The primacy of the nuclear family in my current cultural context -- which as we know is a relatively recent and decidedly unusual invention -- shores up a system in which maintaining a full-time job and a social life is a massive undertaking:

Yes, life would be easier if I had someone who is always a few yards (or less) away from me when we're not at work and who can provide romance, friendship, emotional support, entertainment, household help, financial assistance, AND hot sex (and maybe eventually co-parenting) without me ever needing to seek out other people or even leave the house. But that's... horrifying.

And it is horrifying, but -- or and? -- humans aren't set up to work solo. We're not good at it: we're social mammals, and we need touch and engagement and interaction to survive.

When I'm living with someone we frequently end up joking that between the two of us, we just about add up to one competent adult -- in terms of executive function, and ability to do chores and care and so on. To some extent this is presumably an artefact of the unavoidable fact that I'm significantly disabled and prone to selecting people-I'll-spend-a-lot-of-time-with for criteria (like "not being shitty about disability") that have substantial overlap with "likely to also experience executive dysfunction" -- but even so and even still, the fact that we end up phrasing it that way makes me look at the concept of An Other Half and go "... huh."

Because when the assumption is that by default you're going to relationship escalate your way up to living with one other adult human, and that anything else is evidence of immaturity or failure or a shocking lack of moral rectitude, despite the fact that we by-and-large work best as interdependent networks with a range of specialisms... well, no wonder we end up feeling inadequate and incomplete, and no wonder that we cling so tight to anyone with a suitably complementary skill set to our own. The problem, as far as I can tell, isn't actually us: it's that we're measuring ourselves against unattainable ideals and finding ourselves wanting.

I don't think it's any surprise that in this frame breaking up turns into The Worst Thing In The World [cached version, because Pervocracy currently appears to be down].

Comments

[kaberett]

(My wariness about the concept of "solo poly" goes here...)

[quartzpebble]

I would be interested in hearing more about this.

[flippac]

So obvious disclaimer: I Am Not Kab, these are my own opinions.

In a similar way to Relationship Anarchy, it can encourage people to lean a bit far towards "I can do whatever I want" and "you shouldn't need stable connections anyway, that means you're Emotionally Insecure and bad and wrong". There's a definite need for some related concepts, but it's very easy for it to get hijacked by the "emotional independence is the only way to be an adult" crowd? And not always overtly - as always, the more insidious stuff tends to cause more net harm.

[kaberett]

Short version: I am really twitchy around people who idealise an unattainable state of independence (particularly people who are doing so by ignoring or minimising all of the ways in which they do depend on people); interdependence is a Big Fucking Deal, you're less likely to fuck it up if you're aware of it and taking it into account, and I am fundamentally not capable of a lot of the things that frequently get swept up under the heading of "solo poly".

This doesn't necessarily mean it's a Wrong Thing To Do, obviously: but I think it is a problem to set it up as The One True Way (because it's always a problem to assert TOTWs, but also because it's a fundamentally inaccessible vision), and it's not a mode of setting up one's life I can interact with with any degree of intimacy, as best I can tell from my understanding of the approach.

[flippac]

Y'ain't the only one. It's definitely not how I should do things, and I'd want to know someone taking that approach pretty well before getting involved tbh. Not that that plays well with current isolation, but hey.

[cosmolinguist]

Yyyyep.

[kaberett]

Like, I recognise that the whole "my better half" has nasty sexist connotations (it's frequently The Fairer Sex misogyny, right?), but... I also think that it signals pretty clearly the feeling of screaming inadequacy that is quite deliberately inculcated in, well, everyone.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, so many people I know (including me, I'm sure) say stuff like "between us we make one functioning adult" that...I start to wonder how we're measuring "one functioning adult" in the first place and if that maybe could use some recalibration!

[redbird]

Part of that may be a confusion between "one functioning adult" and "one functioning and mostly self-sufficient* household." Two or more people need more groceries than one, but may not need more grocery lists, or twice as many shopping trips. A larger household is likely to use more electricity, but the effort in setting it up and paying the bill monthly doesn't change if the household uses more or less electricity.

*for early 21st century values of self-sufficient that don't involve growing our own food, making our own clothes, or needing to know how our electricity is generated.

[alexseanchai]

I second this.

[davidgillon]

Oh, I do like rephrasing it as 'household'.

[syntaxofthings]

I start to wonder how we're measuring "one functioning adult" in the first place and if that maybe could use some recalibration!

LET'S START RECALIBRATING.

[mathemagicalschema]

COSIGNED.

[frayadjacent]

This is so insightful to me. Thank you for sharing it! I beat myself up sometimes for not doing enough to have a broad social network offline, and leaning too much on my relationship with my partner. But this is a really good and useful non-beating-up way to think about it.

[kaberett]

<333 It is super not even a little bit your fault, society under capitalism is just comprehensively fucked.

I am really really glad that pulling this together is a useful framework for you. ♥

[syntaxofthings]

<333 It is super not even a little bit your fault, society under capitalism is just comprehensively fucked.

after this whole post, that was the sentence I wanted to read. Because society under capitalism IS fucked, and this to me seems like another symptom of that.

[ewt]

Yup. Though much of the nuclear family stuff comes from a time when one adultper nuclear unit had a "full time" job (ie home by 6pm) and so seeing friends wwas a little more realistic. Under neo-feudalism we have to be more efficient.

I don't really know how to get around the bit where living in community, while more economically efficient, is also really hard to do. I've lived in a number of house shares and most have gone really difficult at some stage, not through any intentional malice or paeticularly bad/clueless behaviour but simply because living with other people is hard and eventually differences/mistakes/annoyances become too much and it breaks down. Indeed, for me the most terrifying thing about marriage, or even friendship, is the fear that this will inexplicably happen.

[ewt]

Sorry, typing on phone, corrdcting errors is hard.

Like, one of the reasons I find living with otger people hard work is trauma history and stuff but also everyone has these expectations around indoviduality (myself included) that make it really hard to prioritise a household even in situations where there is an intentional, explicit aim of doing so.

This is why monastic communities have a rule, maybe.

[alexseanchai]

And people like my friend S, who do live with another adult human but don't have a romantic/sexual relationship with that person, also feel inadequate and immature and incomplete! (Or anyway S occasionally tells me she still wants to get married someday. I keep telling her a prerequisite is she's got to get out of the house for reasons other than going to work, the store, or choir practice. Let us not discuss, because it would be futile, how inadequate this conversation invariably makes me feel, because on a sexuality level we're not compatible on account of S is straight.)

Can we talk about the ridiculous pressure society requires us to put on potential partners? Like, we expect to find someone to whom we're sexually attracted (ace people: assumed broken), romantically attracted (aro people: assumed broken), sufficiently compatible skills-wise that our mutual household doesn't break for lack of someone who knows how to do laundry or whatever, and sufficiently compatible personality-wise that we can spend hours every day with them being the only other adult in close proximity without our household breaking. It's absurd. I don't wanna.

THESE THINGS.

[syntaxofthings]

I just love how you articulated the pressure on people to follow one prescriptive path for finding "a life partner". (Just one, folks, no more, etc.)

I have so many feelings about this now. Wow.

[syntaxofthings]

The comments on this post were especially elucidating and I want this conversation to go on forever, until we've talked about it so much it's no longer ingrained that Two People Care About Each Other In A Relationship is How Adults Adult.

[untonuggan]

or also: "you are two people who care about each other enough to live with parents and faaaaamily for years, but that is obviously some sort of adulting failure that means you should split up because then you will be more financially viable"

^ thing that I have gotten, implied or explicit, multiple times, including from therapists/professionals

[silveradept]

There's also a bit where everyone gets a very hefty dose of "there is a disturbingly small number of people who are compatible with you in this large world, so if you find someone that even looks like they might vaguely fit the profile, grab them and hold on tight" with the underlying ablism that says outright that those with disabilities or illnesses have the margins of a disturbingly tiny number of people compatible with them.

Having a network of mutual support would make things so much better and relieve pressures all around so as not to be The Other Half all the time.

[vass]

("it's a sad story, how we became lonely two-legged creatures")

I blame evolution. I try to trace back how it happened that we're built this way, that being social mammals who groom each other somehow turned into this thing where allowing ourselves to live in groups like all the other such mammals became so fucking fraught and with so many failure modes... and then I remember how much biology is all a string of kludges kept around because they sort of worked.

Have I talked lately about how great cats are? Cats are really great.

[davidgillon]

I've been thinking recently about the (semi-awful) phrase 'heterosexual life partner', which tends to turn up in reviews of TV shows where the two (invariably male) leads are so close they practically live in each other's pockets, because to a degree this describes the lead protagonists in my writing, even though they're female, and one's married with a child. They call each other the sister they never had and together they each cover the other's weak spots.

It gets a whole lot better if you drop the totally unnecessary 'heterosexual', and better still if you make that partner_s_, to allow in as many people as are needed, and suddenly we're at 'family of choice', and I think that's a whole lot more healthy a construct than the restrictive 'nuclear family'.