Turning outward
There is a dangerous narcissism and self-involvement when our concept of love is only applied at an individual level.
On most days, if you ask me what makes a good life, I would say a home big enough to make art and host dinner parties, a backyard with enough space and sunlight to grow a garden, a place with easy access to the outdoors, and always being walking or biking distance to friends.
Distilled, it’s more elemental: art, food, sun, nature, connection, friendship.
The psychologist John Gottman talks about how important it is for couples to turn toward rather than turn away from each other in moments of conflict. But this framing suggests that couples are a unit outside of context and community. What about how couples turn toward the rest of the world or away from it?
I once ended a relationship with someone I loved deeply because we loved differently, and in an incompatible way. I wanted to turn outward in love, she inward.
The love I hope for myself is at its core about turning outward. Building deep and intimate relationships with neighbors, friends, colleagues, and comrades rather than shutting ourselves into the privacy of a small home. Festering. Shriveling.
Our culture feeds us an idea of romantic love that is rooted in scarcity and fear. “Just you and me against the world.” On the surface, it sounds romantic. Enviable, even. The first time I ever really fell in love, I remember thinking to myself, “I could move into a treehouse in the middle of the woods away from everything and be happy for the rest of my life with this person.” Boy, was I wrong.
I don’t want to be against the world. I am of this world.
I want to breathe in its complexities and incongruencies; I want to exercise agency and shape our reality into something better. Sometimes this feels Sisyphean when there’s a genocide happening, when the state is killing people, when there is so much suffering. It means living as a queer and trans person, dating and befriending queer and trans people, in a society that at best tolerates us and at worst wants to, and sometimes succeeds at, eradicating us. And still showing up to love the world.
Queer love is at its core revolutionary and expansive. Turning outward in that love invites couplehood to be situated within a larger community. This is what we mean when we say “chosen family.”
The purpose of life is friendship. Of this, I am sure. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to find a romantic partner to build a long-term life with, but it does mean that I desire deep commitments to more people than one. Not in a polyamory vs monogamy way, but much bigger than that. I feel a deep commitment towards my friends, towards my community, and towards all people. The queerest way of organizing our everyday lives is to choose the people we care about, regardless of blood or genes or romantic interest. It is to choose to love people in general.
There is a dangerous narcissism and self-involvement when our concept of love is only applied at an individual level. It leaves a lot on the table.
I want to raise children as a collective project. I want to be deeply involved in helping to raise my friends’ children, and I want to interrogate how I’ve internalized the normalcy of unpaid feminized care work, the impossibility of raising children with just two adults, the taboo of bringing more people into your relationship or your home for life-building and child-rearing, the state abandoning its responsibility to care. My friend Maz says “nothing radicalized me more than becoming a parent.”
The spiritual hunger that most of us feel can only be satiated by interdependency. “The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible,” Erich Fromm wrote in 1956 urging us that there is no division of labor between loving strangers and loving our own.
This is why I became an organizer as a young person hungry for meaning and purpose. Organizing allowed me to experience unconditional love for people I’d never met before and to imagine—and eventually to start building—a life that felt expansive.
These feelings are not just given or directed at another person. They are active practices of loving have the potential to lead us into a more connected existence, away from domination and oppression. These are practices with depth and interiority, they are physical and tangible, and they compel us to stretch outward.
"Most people are on the world, not in it - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate." - John Muir (and that was back in 1938).
Dizzy, I couldn't agree more. Community is such an important and enriching aspect of life. I don't understand why anyone would want to abandon that deep feeling of belonging for the sake of a romantic relationship.