Intersectionality is not optional. It is not something you can take off and put back on again at will, when you feel like it. An intersectional lens should inform any critical evaluation of a subject, because these connections are key to understanding the web of oppression that weighs down on us all. These interconnections, too, are very weblike in their nature, because when you tweak one string, all the rest vibrate with it. There is no way to separate these things out from each other.

People complain that people keep dragging ‘side issues’ into ‘their movement’ and they don’t understand that these issues are the movement. Because a movement that commits oppression in the name of liberation is not a good movement, to put it bluntly. We are more vocal about these issues because we have learned the cost of shutting up, because we constantly have to remind people, because the minute we stop, everything returns to the way it was, the status quo is reestablished, and the real structural and institutional problems that create inequality go, once again, uninterrogated.

This is all connected. To misquote Patrick Henry for a moment, give me intersectionality, or give me death. This is not hyperbole: The current system, as it stands, is killing me. It is killing my people. It is killing the people I work in solidarity with. It is killing you. If you do not give me intersectionality, if you will not commit to being intersectional in your deeds, your thinking, your doing, all the time, no matter how you identify your politics, you are killing me.

—Intersectionality Is Not Optional

(via KEW)

…many people seem to assume that no one would choose monogamy because they really want it. Lots of people assume that the only reason people are monogamous is because of jealousy, or an attempt to control, or the desire to take an exclusive place in their partner’s life. Interestingly, none of these are reasons that I am monogamous. I am monogamous because I see absolutely no appeal in being poly. … I’m quite happy having one partner. I have no desire for anything more. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything at all. I get a great deal of happiness and fulfillment from my current relationship and I couldn’t ask for anything more. I am built perfectly for monogamy. I am good at focusing on one person and one person alone. I’m bad at managing multiple people’s needs at once. I prefer having one person to fall back on. I really like the consistency of one person. Monogamy is good for me as a person. It has nothing to do with religion, with tradition, with social expectations, and it certainly doesn’t have to do with fear of societal retribution.

–In Defense of Monogamy

(via Ginka Tenko)

These things, yes. My ideal life is built around one person, one relationship, with my closest friends and other loved ones playing strong and tangible roles, but with a home base of partnership with one other person who physically exists in my daily life.

I’m usually a pretty logical/practical person, but sometimes a random monthly horoscope is exactly what you need:

Aquarius: There are things that come easy to you, and things that take work, and it can be easy to get them mixed up. It can be easy to get so impatient for your work to pay off all at once, impatient for the future to become clear right away. This month, try not to worry and try not to rush. There is a whole world full of deserts and oceans and life. There is love on all sides of you, strange and warm and bright. Keep your eyes open. Look around. You’re just where you should be.

(via The Toast)

“It is so easy to see dysfunction between you and me…”

The impermanence of beauty is on my mind. No matter how perfect this feels in any given moment, no matter how full my heart feels when I tell him I love him, this isn’t going to last. He’s not it for me. I’m watching so many people I care about publicly declare that the relationships they’re in are the relationships they want to be in for the rest of their lives, and we’re not that for one another. That is what the relationship existential crisis we’ve been going through this week has made clear. Someday I am going to have to figure out how to be without him, and then how to find someone new and start all over again with that person, trying to build something that mirrors what I have with him now and goes beyond. And that’s…that’s fucking depressing.

But whose first love is their life love? I shouldn’t expect to only have to do this once. That’s not the world we live in. It was illogical of me to ever hope for anything different. When in moments where everything feels right, I catch myself thinking, ‘I could do this forever,’ like I did this morning, after waking up snuggled against him after falling asleep in his arms sweaty after the kind of sex that makes me wish our bodies never had to move separately, I must remind myself that no, I cannot do this forever. That is not an option here.

It’s not even that an overwhelming amount of new information was shared this week. It’s not even that either of us has undergone a fundamental change. We just opened up deeply and honestly about who and what and where we are, how we feel, and what we want, and the breadth and the detail of what we came out of these conversations has left me with an unshakable feeling of hopelessness. I no longer feel like we might be able to work. Which leads me to sit in our living room, staring out at our apartment, tears running down my face as I think about how temporary all of it is. “Ours” is a temporary word. We will separate these things back into “his” and “mine” and bring them to different places. Had I recognized that as truly inevitable, I wouldn’t have suggested we combine in the first place.

People keep congratulating me on us moving in together, saying how big a step it is, how happy they are for us. And that’s how I’ve thought about it too, as a step. But now the direction seems questionable at best. We’re not stepping down any identifiable path. Are we going nowhere?

I want to not be sad anymore, but it’s hard. He says he doesn’t feel like we’ve made a mistake, but I don’t really see how. Maybe it’s a mistake we both wanted to make, but a mistake nonetheless.

What I hope that love is—whether platonic, romantic, familial, or communal—is the sincere wish that another person have what they need to be whole and develop themselves to their best capacity for joy or whatever fulfillment they’re seeking.

–Dean Spade

(via PolyLove Girl’s Blog)

I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.

–Maya Angelou

(via solo amor)