memes

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.