Give a person the freedom to express and love themselves, and they’ll find a partner who loves them for who they are and shares their interests. Then they’ll both find ways to spend as much time as possible with each other and grow old together.
There's a difference between heterosexuality and heteronormativity. There's the orientation, which in itself would be neutral, and there's the cultural practice, which does not care about couples being happy, but about enforcing the class nature of gender as a societally instrumentalized distribution of labor. As queer people, we are used to having to figure things out for ourselves and building our own views on identity, desire and relationships from the ground up. Straight people grow up fitting into a culture that tells them how to be, how to want and how to love, which inevitably leads to failure, because this includes an oppositional sexism that molds men and women into irreconcilable opposites of each other. When men are from Mars and women are from Venus, everybody ends up married to an alien. All working straight relationships i've seen fall outside of this norm, and the partners in them have usually both had to do some thorough self crit in regards to what they want out of a relationship and what they are willing to give, normally after several catastrophically failed attempts in the past. And i don't find it surprising at all that most men in these relationships are closer to lesbians than to other straight guys in what they want in a woman, what they find attractive and how they want things to run in their relationship.
good post. I struggled in earlier relationships and, looking back, feel like most of the conflict was driven by the discrepancy of unspoken buy-in for cultural expectations of our roles, with which we had both been indoctrinated.
”I hate my wife” being such a common boomer joke is just them telling on themselves, because come on, there's no way their wives are supposedly always ”nagging” for no reason at all.
There is a guy at work that exudes this type of bullshit. “My wife is always tracking my commute home and wondering what’s taking so long, the kids are driving her nuts! Funny that whenever they are acting poorly they are MY kids! Har har har har”
Whether he is actually resentful or not, it’s a tired, played out, and dogshit sentiment to have towards your wife and kids. Just ditch em and be a deadbeat, I’m sure they will be better off without their resentment.
this could be fixed with two more panels. the second panel shows his wife's grave, she died 10 years ago, fresh flowers. the third panel is a closeup of his face, with a single tear by his forced smile.