"No Before Yes" and Amatonormativity

We live in a culture that is in love with a specific version of love. (By “we” and by “culture,” I’m speaking about dominant American/Western culture and those of us influenced by it.) We’re told that everyone is searching for deep, fulfilling romantic love and for lifelong partnership.

Elizabeth Brake calls this amatonormativity:

She writes, “This consists in the assumptions that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types”.

I love how clearly this term lays out assumptions that are so deeply embedded that they can be hard to see. Our cultural elevation of romantic love, monogamy, and long-term partnership has been so normalized that it appears completely natural. And any desire (or lack of desire) that falls outside these norms is evidence of being wrong or dysfunctional. Someone who doesn’t want to be one half of a long-term, committed couple is seen as being closed off or incapable of love. Someone who doesn’t experience romantic or sexual attraction is seen as fundamentally broken.

Of course, so many of our ways of living and loving fall outside these norms.

But amatonormativity makes it hard to even get in touch with our desire for a different way of loving, let alone to find information about different relationship models or other people interested in the same thing. We barely even have the language for it.

I’ve gone through too many phases to count of realizing that my personal understanding and expression of love and connection are different from these norms. And I’ve watched many of my friends do the same. This process of questioning can be stressful and isolating because of our restrictive cultural norms. One of my goals with this newsletter is to create a space where we can normalize asking questions about our own experiences and desires for love and connection. Where we can see that thinking deeply about how we want to love is something that would be helpful for everyone. I want to create a space where this questioning is supported, where there’s room for curiosity and fun.

In my process of coming to terms with my queerness, my desire for non-monogamy, questioning my relationship to romance, etc, etc...all of these questionings have begun with discomfort. A sense of not-fitting in. A sense of distance and difference. I would look at the world around me, the ways my friends were forming relationships, even sometimes the assumptions of the people that I was in relationships with, and feel a sense of wrongness. A sense of “no,” of “not-this”.

When the external world tells you that things are always a certain way–that everyone wants to form exclusive, deep romantic bonds that lead to life partnership, for example–and your internal experience does not match this, which voice do you trust? When we’re early on our journey of trusting our internal experience, our “no” can lead us to believe that there is something wrong with us, something broken.

The sense that your inner world doesn’t match the assumptions of the outer world is a very queer experience. My relationship to my queerness has always felt very close to my relationship to my inner knowing.

And often, our inner knowing might be all we have. Amatonormativity blocks and buries other ways of living and loving, so that the future outside of romantic coupledom can just look like a blank page. Often, our “no” is a first step towards a “yes” that isn’t present yet.

When we don’t know what “yes” looks like–whether we grew up in a place where queerness was barely comprehensible, or aren’t sure what love and care could look like outside of monogamous partnership–saying “no” to the limited options that we’ve been given takes courage. It’s a fall into the unknown, trusting that our inner knowing can carry us to something different and better on the other side.

Making the choice to lean into your “no” requires trusting your inner knowing enough–trusting yourself over the world–to believe that there will be a “yes” somewhere, sometime on the other side. Trusting that you’re not broken or wrong, but that the diversity of love and connection has room for us all.

Next week, we’ll keep talking about what the process of questioning how we want to experience connections and care can look like. Thanks for being here!