Partnership is an escape strategy

I think love is about walking each other out of the prison of shame that is the system of imperfect love that we are born into. Thus, partnership, and marriage in its most powerful form is an exit strategy from oppression, whether in the form of capitalism and/or abusive structures. The problem with the failing forms of partnership and marriage that we see in the form of trad wives, divine feminine and masculine roles, submission to masculine provider roles and women trying to become high-value in order to capture a wealthy husband, men choosing partners to further their social status, and people using the marriage market as exactly that, a market where value is assigned, bidders negotiate for the highest value, each person is assessed on exterior merits, is that these are all strategies of entry deeper into capitalist values, and so deeper into the system of abuse, instead of a strategy to escape it. On a micro-level we compete with the target potential or actual partner to measure ourselves to them. We keep track of how many women flirted with them, or potential other suitors they have so we can have more. We keep track of who wins or loses a breakup, who glowed up more, who was ‘the problem.’ As if any of this truly matters, and will matter one day, when we meet ‘the one’ and we will be validated and crowned the ‘winner’ of capitalist society. As if anyone can win at capitalism and be the one that’s objectively happier than everyone else. One day we will win, if we stay focused on winning this latest situationship. One day this will all add up. So we keep score. 

It’s as if the love we are actually searching for and are able to provide doesn’t feel like safety, consistency, non-judgement. The non-judgement that is the opposite of perfectionism, the core of abuse, the non-judgement that melts shame and acts as the opposite to everything that holds us down from our own self-compassion. The non-judgement that allows us to stop picking at our acne, that allows us to take a nap instead of frying our nervous system with excruciating workouts, that lets us rest and lower cortisol and inflammation from the systems of oppression trapping our bodies in image-slavery. The expectation that we should be lovable and so we are responsible for our own uncomfortable healing, that we process frozen and congealed shame to make ourselves emotionally accessible to the other, that we start to become true adults, who rescue ourselves from what our families and society failed to do for us. And when we become adults we can finally truly contribute to society, and lead with our values, the values we chose and not those chosen for us by those who do not have our best interests at heart. The values that lead us not only into independence and sovereignty, but moral authority over the expression of morals that is each person’s unique soul. This could not be further from the tenants of capitalism and the roman catholic church, which above all, requires conformity of morals.

A system that requires moral conformity in order to be moral is not operating under true moralism. This is not ethics, but administrative discipline disguised as ethics. It is a system that has succeeded in one thing above all, the creation of narcissistic psychosis, the fantasy that anything and everything can be masqueraded as ethics. A life of opulence and reward with no sacrifice. The winner has the most ethical claims with the least amount of sacrifice. It is a system that creates false heroes more than anything else, that worships the individual hero. A system bragging that it creates one hero in a million is a system intending to create 999,999 villains.

An exit of love does not produce any heroes, it produces ordinariness. It then turns around and asks why, being ordinary was never enough. If being a human is not enough, and why are we designing a system where being human is not enough if being human is all we are and will ever be. Why are we designing a system that excludes the beings that it needs to contain?