In the Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz says, “Love is a choice, perhaps a free choosing of our destiny, a sudden discovery of the most secret and faithful part of our being. But choosing of love is impossible in our society. To realize that self-love must violate the laws of the world, it is scandalous and disorderly, a transgression committed by two stars that break out of their predestined orbits and rush together in the midst of space. The romantic conception of love, which implies a breaking away and a catastrophe, is the only one we know today, because everything in our society prevents love from being a free choice.”
society depends on fixed gender roles and moral structures to preserve its function — men and women are expected to perform duties, not to evolve through connection. Real love disrupts that order. It creates a private world between two people that resists control, hierarchy, and tradition. It threatens to make the individual more loyal to the beloved than to the system.
The only place society tolerates love is at the margins, in a place of danger and scandal, with Romeo and Juliet, with tragedy, death, art, with poetry, with myth. It is always something that’s not at the center of society.
Even prostitution is tolerated or even given official blessing and is elevated above love itself.
The greatest form of resistance is to take romance from a place of myth and poetry danger and scandal and place it in the container of ordinary life.
It is within this context that we can understand the persecution of gay marriage. The backlash against marriage equality has never been solely about gender or sexuality or religion. Rather, it reflects a deep cultural anxiety about love itself — especially when that love cannot be explained by obligation, biology, or tradition.
Queer couples do not ask for marriage in order to conform, but to reclaim love as an act of choice and meaning. In doing so, they challenge the assumption that marriage is just a role to fulfill. They expose how little room there is for connection that does not serve an external purpose — economic, religious, or reproductive.
This is why gay relationships that are sexual or casual have been historically tolerated in the margins. But the moment two people demand legal, public recognition of their intimate bond — the moment love dares to stand in the center — it provokes resistance. Because that kind of love asserts itself as sacred. And the sacred is always a threat to systems that survive on control.
SUBLIME COURAGE 
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