the first poly woman i dated told me, in tears, "i only make friends with people by dating them now" while we were having a conversation about my insecurities, and while it didn't do anything for my insecurities it's stuck with me
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there's some kind of concept of deep friendship that seems to me to be missing in american culture, and i really really don't like the way some queer discourse in particular consistently tries to sexualize historical same-gender intimacy, as if intimacy were necessarily sexual
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not that i particularly have a leg to stand on in my own friendships. i have left behind a lot of friends and i am not happy about it but i also don't know what to do. we weren't meant to try to maintain friendships without periodic *unplanned* physical contact
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there's a kind of intimacy i had with my high school friends, especially the ones who knew me in middle school, that i *cannot* have with anybody else, because nobody else got to see me grow up like that, and grow up with me; similarly with college
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Replying to @liminal_warmth
we normalized moving away from our high school communities to go to college then moving a second time away from our college communities to get a job
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there's also an intimacy i've never had and never will have, which is with a family i felt loved and understood by. as much as i like the "found family" trope there is something legitimately special about your literal actual family, which is that they *can't stop being family*
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we talk a lot about "atomization" here on the birdsite and a big component of what that means is that it's normal to leave behind everyone you love except possibly a romantic partner to move cities for a job. everyone is disposable and we all know that about each other
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i suspect it may be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to form deep friendships under these kinds of disposability conditions. marriage is now the only ritual we have for credibly publicly declaring to other people "this person is not disposable to me anymore"
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i was gonna go somewhere loftier with this but i ran out of steam. the emotional core is just that i'm lonely as shit and don't really know what to do about it. probably some of you are the same and, well, here we are on the birdsite together, hi
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I feel this! I think all the time about this
Epicureanism was all about eschewing romance for bromance and it worked very well
Epicurean communities were hugely successfully in the ancient world
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One theory I have about incels
Sometimes I wonder if they act out not because they aren’t getting laid but because there is not a dignified way of life for unpartnered men anymore
Monasteries once provided one way
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Replying to
i definitely think the incel phenomenon is not about sex per se but about shame and identity and, as you say, dignity. there was a tweet recently about normalizing sex work helping incels and i’ve changed my mind on that, it doesn’t do anything about the shame and identity stuff