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It can be difficult to separate what you truly desire from what you’ve been taught to want, particularly when it comes to love. Do you want to get married because you see it as a chance to create a meaningful commitment, or because you feel a societal pressure to? Do you want to have a baby because you long to be a mother, or because you assume it’s a box that has to be ticked in order to be happy? Sometimes, even when we think we are making these decisions from a true place, there are cultural expectations and assumptions and family histories pressed up against our thoughts, which can make it tricky to figure out what we really desire for ourselves.
I thought about this as I read Amelia Abraham’s beautiful book Queer Intentions: A (personal) journey through LGBTQ+ culture. Although her focus is on exploring what life is like for LGBTQ+ people today – via Stockholm, New York, Turkey and a drag convention in L.A – I think she also invites all of us to question the assumptions we grew up with. And perhaps, to write our own scripts in love, with fewer expectations and more possibilities.
When the book begins, Amelia is crying on an easyJet flight over the end of a relationship (“the kind of beak-up misery you experience when you’re not just mourning the loss of an individual, but also the grand narrative of a life together”). But by the end? She realises that her life is full of different forms of love that she had been overlooking, which would always be there, whether she was in a romantic relationship or not.
Credit: Lily Rose Thomas
NL: While researching your book you met people who live outside the traditional, stereotypical structure of relationships. Has interviewing them made you think that when we make fewer assumptions based on gender or sexuality, we can improve relationships? Because rather than assuming roles based on ingrained assumptions, we define them based on who we are?
AA: For sure. In one of the chapters, I went to Stockholm to explore more radical and progressive ideas around sex and gender. There I met someone who was part of a three parent polyamorous family, and also part of a kink scene. They explained that they were trying to create their own structures for living and loving and parenting based on what worked for them. The kink aspect of their life actually informed this – in that the word ‘negotiation’ came up a lot – a big thing in BDSM – and they stressed how important it was when exploring different, new or unchartered possibilities. I wouldn't say I was personally that open-minded in my love or sex life compared to some people, but I liked their idea that you don't always have to listen to received wisdom. For instance, my mum awkwardly said to me about a girlfriend once, "Which one of you is the boy?" And I died inside through embarrassment that she might mean it in a sexual way, but I also felt a bit sad, because it doesn’t have to work like that; there are many possibilities outside of our assumptions.
I’ve learnt that a large part of why love can go wrong is because we forget to ask who each other are. So perhaps once the templates and assumptions are off the table, it means you continually ask who somebody is and what they want?
I think that's a good model for any relationship, whether it's a same-sex relationship or not. Whoever we are, we can get into a relationship and think, Okay, this is it now, forever. And that means you don’t always make space for both of you to evolve inside the relationship. It's not a contract you sign and then that’s it. Love is an experience that continues to unfold.
It was very moving when you described first falling in love with someone who then told you she was straight. You said, "I think shame is contagious. Just when you think you’re rid of it, someone passes it back to you." Loving someone you can’t have when you’re younger is already a tortuous experience, but when women asked you to keep those relationships secret, did it add another level of intensity to the heartbreak for you?
Definitely. I'm lucky, because I never experienced true familial rejection. I've only experienced micro aggressions, like my mum always calling my girlfriends my “friend”. But harder than that growing up was the pain of having feelings for someone, knowing that they have feelings for me too but they're not willing or able to deal with the consequences. When someone doesn’t fancy you back, that hurts, but when you know they do and what’s holding them back is the stigma or shame around same-sex relationships, you feel a mixture of rejection and a bigger sense of unfairness. You also feel that there must be something wrong with you. I have to say, though, most of those women did change their minds. It happened repeatedly: in my late teens I would develop feelings for somebody who identified as straight, they would sleep with me and then they’d say, “I don't think that I can do this, I’m sorry, you’re a girl and I’m into guys. It was just fun to try it.” I'd be secretly devastated, but then years later, in my mid-twenties they would try to rekindle things. That's redeeming I suppose, and hopefully a sign that as society has become a bit more accepting, people can accept their same-sex desires more easily too.
You’ve written about being made to feel that having kids and a family wasn’t for you. Was it the culture or other people that made you feel that way?
A combination. Same-sex couples have only had the right to adopt since 2002 and same-sex marriage was only made possible in 2014, which is incredibly recent. When I was growing up, these things weren't possible. They weren't represented, either in the media or in my life. I didn't meet a lesbian couple with a baby until I was 26, and if you haven't even seen the model of what your family might look like in person, then how can you envisage it for yourself? Meeting that couple, and recently seeing friends in a same-sex relationship have a baby has allowed me to consider these options in a much more ‘real’ way. Someone might read this and say, why would you need to see two women with a baby to imagine yourself doing it? But I think the need for LGBTQ+ representation, whether in media or life, is that we have to “see it to be it” - visibility shows us what the possibilities are, and more nuanced visibility like hearing people’s experiences shows us the complications within that. So in this case, specific challenges like the ways in which you go about conceiving, or the legal side, for example, or how society treats you as two mums.
The main love story in your book seems to be between you and queer culture, and the community you found inside it. Did finding that change the way you approach your own relationships?
In a roundabout way, yes. Finding an LGBTQ+ community can really help to dissipate your shame because you realise there are other people like you, and you can hopefully see that they have found love in many different places. Your feelings of low self-worth start to slip away, and you think, I'm not going to entertain feelings for a person who doesn’t make me feel good, and if these people can love themselves, so can I.
Going back to that idea of there being many kinds of love, I think that, for different reasons, a lot of gay sex historically has had to be about finding love for an hour or a night, and I don't think we should dismiss that. I believe you can find love for a night. I've had those experiences and I wouldn't want to create a hierarchy between long and short-term love. There are amazing things you get from being in a long-term relationship but there's so much to get out of a positive one-night stand as well.
Part of what I'm trying to unpick are these capitalist ideas of accumulation: the longer you're in a relationship the more valuable it is; the more children you accrue the more valuable a family is. These are ideas we’re fed about “good” and “bad” relationships.
There's a theorist called Gayle Rubin who wrote about this years ago in an essay called Thinking Sex. As an exercise, she puts everything in categories, the same ones society puts them in. For example, porn, gay sex, and sex in a park – bad; straight sex, married sex, monogamy – good. They seem a little dated now but a lot of it still holds true. And so, the journey of the book is me trying to take myself out of that binary way of thinking, that I was brought up with. Most of us are brought up with it. But if you're queer, being conditioned to think in that binary way is just more harmful because your desires don’t necessary fall into the “good” box. But then again, I’m sure a lot people’s desires wouldn’t if we were really honest with ourselves.
You started your journey with a broken heart. How did you feel differently about love by the end?
When a relationship ends your future feels uncertain. You feel completely alone when the person you lived with or have spoken to every day is suddenly not there anymore. But actually, it was amazing to feel that there was another family I could be a part of, if I chose to. So for me, getting over a breakup was about falling in love with queer culture all over again. This trip made me more resilient towards heartbreak because I met amazing queer people, who provided a different type of love, one that I experienced in beautiful moments with people that I barely knew.
I think when a relationship ends it feels like a door is closing, but writing the book, it felt like a lot of others were opening. I saw different models of what life can look like: I met people who had created drag families, people who were in non-monogamous relationships, people who had a traditional marriage – whatever that is – and they all showed me there are different ways of doing things. I think because queer people haven't had these things handed to us, we've created alternate models of family structures and reenvisaged what love is. Like the family I met in Sweden. Ultimately what I learnt is that love – and queerness – is about living by your desire, not worrying too much about right or wrong or good or bad ways of doing things and creating a structure that works for you. That maybe the important thing is to figure out what your desire is, whether that is to marry and have kids or to create a new structure of family, and to stop making decisions based on the boxes that are already there. I think that’s a lesson we can learn from queer culture, whatever our sexuality.
What do you wish you’d known about love?
Just because a relationship didn’t have a happy ending, or didn’t last a lifetime, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great love.
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