" Refusing to allow the Couple to wrap its wires around your life means refusing to extricate your relationships with those you fuck or fall in love with from your spiderweb of friends and accomplices; it means making a commitment to honor and prioritize the unique feelings and trust in each and all of your relations. […]
I have been experimenting with these frameworks for several years. In a certain sense, nothing changed — I was sucked into a deeply codependent, and in some moments abusive, relationship wherein a dear friend distorted their love for me into a fixation they could use to avoid confronting their past. My love for them was in turn twisted with bitter resentment for the trap they spoke so vehemently against and then continued to step right into. I had been through this before, it was an old, painful story. In another sense, everything changed — I had a clear vision of what I wanted in our friendship that made none of the exceptions to our shared values of individual and collective freedom and non-domination that are usually made in the context of Couples. When our friendship strayed from these values I was able to recognize that and intervene, even if only by refusing to engage, something that is often unheard of within the Couple. When my own hurt turned into resentment, I was able to be self-aware and critical of my actions in their own right, apologize when I felt I had acted wrongly and change behaviors that did not reflect my principles, instead of justifying my behavior based on how they were treating me. I was able to recognize harm without normalizing it as a part of being in love. And when, tragically, I felt that their fear of me leaving them ultimately eclipsed their love for me, I was able to walk away. Instead of living under the weight of an ultimatum — being either together or apart; instead of internalizing their terror of being abandoned and making their healing my responsibility, blaming myself for their suffering, I was able to trust them and our friends enough to leave. I was able to see my own needs and desires autonomously from theirs and act on them. "
RE: The Danger Of Falling For Someone’s Potential