A love letter to: Queer Platonic Love

To love and to be loved, without rules or hierarchy

Being queer is more than about my sexuality or my gender, it’s become about how I live my life, do my work, and interact with the world. It is a verb far more than an adjective, I queer everything I touch by nature of being me. It is both unintentional and deeply intentional. I want no part in the norms that the colonial west has imparted on expressions of gender, sexuality, and love. I want to love loudly, obnoxiously so. I want to love with my whole heart and body, reach inside the people I love and draw them out, let them reach inside me and draw me out too. I want my heart to swell in my chest til it bends the rib cage that cradles it. I used to be ashamed of the way I loved - the people I found myself loving and the fierceness with which I loved. Now I want to love out loud, tell my 16 year old self that it is ok, to love loudly, to love more.

Growing up in a world where heterosexuality was the assumed, and being cisgender felt like the only option, I couldn’t help but find myself tangled in normative ways of loving those around me. In my Catholic education love held hierarchy: God first, husband second, children third, and everything else in some rag tag pile beneath. I remember a man who preached at my year group about purity and virginity with all sorts of nonsense. He told us that any boy we kissed before we found our husband, was an act of infidelity, against the theoretical future husband. He did not clarify about kissing girls, so I took leeway in this area. My parents modelled to me a different way to love: in separate rooms at first, and then separate houses and still with so much love for each other: but a quiet love, a love that simmered. Still when you grow up in a cis-het world the cis-het norms drown you. The way love is represented is that romantic love is superior to all other forms, and this love, and this love only will lead you forth to sexual love, domestic love, marriage, and children (another ultimate love, only attainable through the aforementioned path, a love that supposedly, will undo all other loves and consume you whole, even if you do not consent to the consuming).

When I came out as queer I began to untangle myself from these comphet notions of what love was, and what value it played in my relationships. When I came out as trans-non-binary, so too did I untangle the role I played in loving relationships, found myself willing and able to love in ways I’d been scared of before. “Before,” being a time when I clung to scraps of womanhood, desperate and sure that if only I could be loved as a woman, I would find love for myself as a woman. It takes a lot of work: to unpack all you know about heteronormativity, romantic love, love hierarchies, monogamy, and concepts of forever and happily ever after. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts, spent a small fortune of my income on therapy, and loved - oh how I have loved. One of the greatest gifts that queerhood has given me is that all love is good love, and that romantic love holds no hierarchy over my chosen family. Us queers are good at this, the fearsome unconditional love of our family members is not always a guarantee (for me, it is, I am yet to find anything I can do that makes my father waver, for even a moment). So without this guarantee of blood bonds holding us, and with the guarantee of legal bonds a relatively new permission for queer people, we find our own bonds. We value our relationships with less hierarchy: the way I love my queer friends is not better, less, or more than I love my queer romances, it’s just different.

I have a very good life. I have a home, it is cold and damp and the rent is too much. But inside is a woodburner where I affirm my masculinity and warm the house for those I love. In this home we have two dogs, one cat, me, and Arlene. Arlene is my partner: in dog parenting, in life, in business, and in cowboys (as in “howdy partner!”). But she’s not my sexual or romantic partner. Which usually leads to one of two responses: the first being, deep confused enquiry about whether our respective romantic/sexual interests get jealous. “No. Why would they?” I often reply. These loves are different. I want to explore my body and it’s edges and the deepest parts of my desires with my sexual partners. I want to treat sex as a scene of intelligence gathering (which I’ve written a whole essay about here), become undone and do the undoing. Why would my romantic partners be jealous that I cook dinner with my best friend and teach her dog to use the cat flap? Of course, it makes total sense if you’re thinking about heterosexual monogamy that they’d be jealous, because they’d see romantic love as the most important love and one that must be all consuming and lead to domesticity, marriage, and children. But I don’t see romantic love that way, and when I’ve had romantic partners with who I do share domestic bliss with, it fits quite fine around my platonic love I have with Arlene. After all there are no rules to our relationship - she’s just arrived in the UK for the next 5 weeks, I won’t wilt or starve or mourn without her (ok I will do a small amount of mourning, who will film my gay history facts!?). Arlene and I kind of get that our lives will ebb and flow, and that probably our lives as they coexist right now are not forever lives, though we will love each other in some capacity forever (I maintain that I love everybody, in some capacity, forever. I have never figured out a way to stop the love from going on once it starts. No matter how much hurt gets splattered about in a relationship unravelling, still my love goes on). With this understanding of our current lives being mortal and temporary ones, there aren’t rules: we communicate effectively and we have full existences outside of each other and we know that how we live right now works, and if it stops working, we’ll talk about it.

Outfits by Arlene, ceramics by Artemis, picnic rug from my car

The second response we get to explaining our domestic platonic partnership is: “oh well you just haven’t realised you’re in love yet.” To which I often respond: “oh but we are in love!” Which really does a number on the person shoving their happily ever after monogamy nonsense onto us. Because we are! We’re in love in the way two best friends at primary school who have just discovered they both have the same favourite dinosaur (a brachiosaurus, duh) are in love. We’re in love in the way that our dogs who are obsessed with each other are in love. I am a mushroom and she is a tree: mycelium tangled in roots, nourishing each other from the same plot of soil. We are in love! In all love’s queerest most platonic and unromantic glory! I love her, I do! She is hard not to love: she is kind and brave and loving and silly. She knows how to knit better than me and patiently explains where and how I’ve done it wrong and often fixes my knitting for me. She has a fierceness for her work and for justice that drives me to want to do better, be better, love better, and we share a vision for a world that is changed and kinder and gayer for everybody. She answers all my questions: and I have a LOT of questions. I want to know what field mice eat for breakfast and if we can destroy capitalism while buying more hats, and if the ghost of my step-nana is sucking all the moisture out of my root vegetables. I answer her questions too: once she asked me if a triceratops or a brontosaurus would win in a fight and I had to explain to her that it was an impossible scenario: they lived in different periods of the mesozoic era.

Because I love her, all of her, even the weird bits, I know that I don’t feel romantically toward her. People assuming we must forever be on the cusp of falling into romantic love also underestimate how thorough and pragmatic the queers are: when we first started hanging out and doing work together I tabled with my therapist whether I was at risk of falling in romantic love with Arlene. I was very concerned about this possibility because I was very clear that Arlene and I would need to go into business together and change the world together: falling in romantic love would be horrendously inconvenient and I didn’t have time for that. I was still battling with my own preconceived, hetnorm assumptions about what it meant to choose to build a life with somebody. My assumptions still rested in a hierarchical ideal of love that meant that by merging our lives, we were contractually obliged to become romantic partners. The discussion with my therapist led me to table it with Arlene: the conclusion was no, not really, it just didn’t come up as a feeling for either of us, it wasn’t what our relationship was about. We’ve also discussed at length how fucking annoying it would be to fall in romantic love with each other: it would be way too much, our business and domestic lives are entirely enmeshed and frankly, we both savour our alone time from each other, I couldn’t imagine anything more stressful than also adding romantic feelings and considerations to the mix.

I am in love: with my life as it exists right now, and that means I am in love with this queer platonic domesticity that sees no hierarchy in the way I love those most important to me. Sometimes I put Arlene first, and sometimes I put myself first, and sometimes I put my romantic/sexual partners first. It depends on the day and the needs at hand. Say for example, you’ve forgotten to apply for your transit visa and your flight takes off in two hours, that person’s (purely hypothetical) needs would come first. It’s not all perfect and sunshine and rainbows either: we disagree and get annoyed by each other and one time we even had what I might consider a fight (getting a new puppy 4 months into your queer platonic relationship is a lot). We are both messy and imperfect and that messiness spills out sometimes in ways that hurt each other. But we work on it, we rupture and repair. While our relationship works because it is in many ways easy - we get each other and see each other and that makes doing life together quite simple - we also do work hard. We both go to therapy, we have systems in place to divide our work lives from our home lives, we have good boundaries that we’re constantly renegotiating, we have scheduled time to check in with each other and table concerns. We put conscious and mindful effort into making our coexistence a nurturing one. I loathe narratives that say that committed relationships either “shouldn’t feel hard,” or “should be hard work,” lord how we know I loathe absolutes. Loving relationships should feel easy - and sometimes they need hard work to keep them feeling easy. I wonder how much braver and richer all our friendships would be if we committed to working on them the same way married couples commit to working on their relationships?

We are both imperfect, and the imperfection makes it worth working at: a safe place to call home and to be imperfect makes me a better human in all parts of my life (probably to do with attachment theory or something?). And while we work at it, and learn and grow together I get to do life with somebody who knows me: who’ll pop on a head torch and peer between my legs when I think my vulva looks weird, who’ll remember my coffee order and do the dishes after I cook and tell me I’m wrong when I’m wrong, and tell me I’m being passive aggressive when I’m being passive aggressive, and who’ll send me their favourite dog memes, and let me get in their bed when I’m sad and feeling needy.

Queerness gave me this, queerness gave me the permission to love and live in ways that don’t get seen by Hollywood displays of what counts as a good and full life. Arlene is not my only queer platonic love: we each have a whole ocean of them: a troop of mushrooms nourishing a forest of trees. I love them all with great enthusiasm. I love the ones that guide my research and my work, the ones that guide my art and writing, the ones who model to me what great queer romantic love looks like with their partners. I love them all and am so grateful for them all. One day I will probably want a baby, and I am not particularly bothered about whether the co-parent/s of that child are my romantic partner/s, domestic/platonic partner/s, or if I do it mostly by myself, with an extended queer whanau supporting me. I know however that Arlene’s model of how she wants to have kids is quite different to mine, and so our lives will blossom from the soil that is our current home, outward and onward into bigger and different versions of how we live and love now. This life and this love is temporary: of course it is. While that might make some people scared: that one day our lives will look very different and we may be streets, cities, or countries apart, for now it makes me brave - to go on loving in the temporary.

I love this life. I love it so much. I love that I have the freedom to navigate all different versions of love and romance and sexuality, and each night I come home to a stable place to lay my head, with a friend who loves me: just one, damp, mouldy, thin wall away. I could not ask for a better existence, and the fact that it is platonic and domestic and entirely unromantic makes it quite wonderful. How we live together and love together doesn’t work because it’s some second-rate fall back option of safety, it works because it is brave and different and because we prioritise making it work. If I were waiting for romantic love, to make big decisions and start my life’s work and build my home, I’d still be waiting.

I don’t believe in happily ever after’s, I don’t believe in “the one,” or even much in monogamy. I don’t believe that love has hierarchy. I just believe in loving the people you love, how you love them, with the utmost enthusiasm. I am very enthusiastic about those I have in my life at present, and I rate my queer platonic loves 10/10.