Relationships. What Gives?

It’s funny how after all the soul searching, character finding experiences we can have in one lifetime, there is always one thing that we constantly search for: someone to fall in love with who will love us back. We spend our lives searching for that one person who will “make us complete”. That’s right people, I’m taking on relationships.

Whether you are part of the LGBTQ community or straight as a pole, we (as humans) tend to have this need to be in a relationship. Even the most independent of individuals have those moments where they wake up in the morning, are alone in the car, or had some sort of experience where they think to themselves: ‘I wish I had someone who I could share this with’ (and we aren’t talking friends here). This dependency is something that can be considered a nature and nurture issue. Biologically, we are born to mate/survive (plus, we are all a bunch of horny motherfuckers) and therefore we want that someone so that we can experience life with. Socially, we are brought up to believe that we are worth nothing if we don’t fall in to the norm of having a partner.

Members of the LGBTQ community are constantly drawn into this hetero-normative social structure in which they should settle down with one partner and try to fit the gender binary that would apply to the 1950’s ‘straight heterosexual happily married couple with 3-4 kids and a dog’. Truth be told, we are all guilt of wanting to somehow fit into a state of ‘normality’ within society. We all want to be happy and we (deep deep down – yes even you liberated ones) all have a passing thought every couple of days that being in a relationship will somehow help us reach content. This dependency has to stop. We should encourage people to be happy whether they are single or taken. One’s relationship status does not and should not define their self worth. Let us all try to look at our lives through a new sort of looking glass, the kind that does not place such a pressure on others simply because of their relationship status. And who said relationships were that great anyways?