{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...)

[cosmolinguist]

Yyyyep.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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'.