Letting Go of the Couple Form...and Greeting What Comes Next

It’s time for the world to have space for different ways of loving. 

It’s time for us to stop organizing our legal protections, social structure, and social privilege around the form of the couple. 

It’s time to make space to imagine new forms of relating, and to see what these new forms will unfold.

Structuring our world to privilege romantic monogamous couples and nuclear families has harmed so many of us. It has enabled the exploitation of women’s labor and been a key part of the destruction of indigenous care structures and traditions. It’s led to high rates of domestic violence and childhood sexual abuse. The legal protections afforded to families have left queer people and others kicked out of the family unable to access care. 

Changing the social structures that shape our close, loving relationships would be better for so many of us. It would give us more options instead of a few narrow boxes to try to squeeze ourselves into. It would help us build social support networks and help make us less dependent on conformity in a way that would encourage more freedom and safety.

But I know that I can’t want this different world just because I think it will be better. This kind of wanting only makes me angry at the people who I perceive as blocking it, or oblivious to it, or disinterested. It means I only want things to be different out of my pain and my fears that there isn’t a place for me in our current world. I don’t think that’s a great place to create change from.

And I also know that people are people, and whatever new structures we create, people will find ways to use them for harm. They won’t work for everyone. And the original vision for this different world will get twisted and shifted as it comes down to Earth. Believing something else could be perfect is a pain response, too.

When I’m able to sit with my own pain and fear– to tend to it and see beyond it– the deeper reason that I want things to be different is just because: it’s time.

All things move in cycles. All things come into the world for a time and then wither and die, nourishing and birthing something new from their remains. The couple form is dying. Not because it’s bad or because it’s wrong, but just because it’s time. It’s wrong for now. For the present we’re moving into. I can feel it in my body and my bones and my dreams, and in the itch I sense in myself and in others for something new. A new way to stretch and organize and move our bodies, like we’ve been sitting in one position for too long.

Wouldn’t it feel good to move.

From here, I can stop fighting and hating and resisting all that’s wrapped up in the couple form. There’s nothing to fight anymore. It will be gone soon, and in the meantime I can sit with it as it goes. Tell it that everything will be okay on the other side. Get ready to greet what comes next and know that one day, it will change and be gone too.

In the weeks/months to come in this space, we’ll be having a funeral for the couple form. We’ll look at what it’s brought to us, and use this perspective to help us think about what we want next. We’ll thank it, and then we’ll let it go.