A Love Letter to all the Things I Pretend to Hate so much About the Couple Form

I’ve spent the past couple months— the past couple years, really, most of my life, if we’re being honest— in deep, sticky resistance to the couple form and how it manifests in our lives and social structures. And I’ve wasted a lot of energy being angry about this instead of just creating the connections I want instead. It’s made me moralize and judge and act like a bad friend…and a bad writer.

Last week, I hit the end of the road. I got tired of not liking the couple form. So I sat down and wrote it a love letter.

I learned that I’m super in love with the couple form.

Not the parts where all of my desires and connections have to be funneled into one person and one structure in order to be legitimized. Not that, so much. But it turns out I’m ridiculously fascinated with the power and the story of the couple form.

The couple version of love— romantic, singular, all-consuming— is a story and a spell. I don’t really know who came up with it— probably some combination of religious and state authorities over a long time and in different forms— but this story changed the way we think and the way we organize our lives. It’s a story that told us what love should look like.

How many poems and songs and novels and movies have been written about this kind of love? How many people have shaped their lives to follow the arc of this story? Art about the couple form has elevated this one kind of love out of all the possible kinds in the world and made everyone want it. This story has rewritten our desires and taken us on roller coasters of longing and heartbreak and bliss.

I may not like where these stories have taken us—what they’ve made us want— but I admire how they’ve done it, because it’s clearly a damn compelling story.

Now I can see my constant revulsion and obsession with the couple form as curiosity. I want to learn how to get what the couple form has. I want this creative power to change how people think about love, to influence what people see as possible and desirable. I want to be a powerful enough storyteller to create a different reality.

I think it would be more fun—more sensational—if the story wasn’t narrowed to focus on just two people. If the adventure was everywhere. But this focus on story helps me to stop moralizing, to stop feeling pissed off and bitter about the structures around me. It shows me that I have worldbuilding and storytelling power, too. It’s a humbling reminder that telling someone a story is a lot more compelling than guilting them into treating people differently.

I want our new stories to be less top-down, and not just one possible story, but lots of different ones. I want it to be a choose-your-own adventure where we’re all participating in telling the story, picking which beats are most exciting to us and dreaming up where we want it to go next (Say it with me: this is the era where everybody creates!). Our new story and our new structures will come from all of us.

Next time, more on the future of stories.