not sure how to say this without sounding like an asshole. some of y’all are coupled only because of compulsory heterosexuality. like, you are nobody’s catch, but society is set up so you don’t have to be completely alone for the rest of your life.

and it’s not just the men.

you’re cruel, miserly, boorish, AND you overstate your importance in the lives of everyone you know. you’re quite irritating. but you’re straight, and the social capital that comes along with that gets you farther than you realize. whew. you’re not the prize.

the inner work to be a decent person is not required of the majority of straight ppl because we’re taught to moralize cisgender straightness. it’s automatically more valuable, it’s the pinnacle. especially if you’re on the relationship escalator with your eyes on marriage.

examples:
- “i thought he’d stop cheating once we got married”
- “i can’t be friends with women now that I’m married”
- “we never discussed having kids and now we’re at odds.”

there’s a narrative built into compulsory heterosexuality. the relationship escalator reinforces it.

the amount of self work it takes to explore non-monogamy, be clear about child bearing/ rearing, address your insecurities, etc. is not typically received well. it’s best evidenced, IMO, by what happens when a certain side of the internet gets a hold of certain information.

out in the world, away from your phones, how many times are you looked at sideways when you share certain ideas and info? something as basic and innocuous (to us) as “some people don’t need to be married.”
y’all see where I’m going?

because the prize/ peak/ end goal is to be partnered until one of you dies, it’s not necessarily frowned upon to keep trying. by marrying and marrying and marrying until you “win” the marriage that ends in death. if you’re a man, it’s your death that makes you the winner.

when you’re a woman, it’s different. there’s something wrong with *you* if you can’t be a one and done monogamist. examples: jlo, liz taylor, halle, aretha. all the time, ppl make jokes at the expense of cis women who never publicly explored intentional singlehood *or* queerness.

badu & her kids’ fathers were a big ol argument topic for a while. she had seven in 1997, puma in 2004, and mars in 2009. the jokes and judgments:
- “what’s wrong with her? she can’t hoodoo a man enough for him to stay?”
- “she got all them kids by different men. that’s woke?”

another one, rooted in pure fucking misery and an inability to mind the business that pays you: “lauryn had ALL THEM KIDS with a married man!”
the same kinda married man your ass is with right now? the kind who lies about relationship status? (rohan said it was for citizenship)

she judged herself so hard on her first album and unplugged. SO HARD. because condemnation was inevitable from a public angle, yes? the judgement remains so potent that wyclef wrote a memoir ~20 years later talking about the mess and ppl ATE IT UP. like it was socially relevant.

you don’t hear me, though.
all this default dignity goes away when you aren’t cis, hetero, and invested in the relationship escalator. which undergirds the nuclear family model, which is easiest to exploit under capitalism because both parents have to work to keep shit going.

so you send your kid to school and aftercare where they learn, above all, to never buck the rules. if they do, they face social death of some kind. educational tracking, weaponized SPED diagnoses, etc. all this shit is geared toward making them the default cis hetero person.