jesus christ imagine the THX logo coming up but instead of the weird “bwee-oon” it’s the “No” from hotel mario stretched out and played at the biggest volume possible
it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
-Beliving that none of your friends actually want to be your friend and they hate being near you
-Hating normal things because they were used to mock you
-Having to seek constant validation for your existance
-Remembering particular insults you’ve been called for years and will probably never forget them
-Beliving you’re too ugly for anyone to ever love
-Not wanting to go to a new school/further education because you know the same thing will happen there
-Having your parents tell you that you’re only being ‘teased’
-Having people wash their hands in disgust if they accidentally touch you.
Remember, you don’t have to feel all of these to understand
-Having people say you like someone as a way to gross that someone out -Never quite trusting anyone. -Having people ask you out as a dare -”They’re only making fun of you ‘cause they’re jealous!” -”He’s only mean to you ‘cause he’s got a crush on you!” -Having to deal with bullshit ‘zero tolerance’ policies
-”hey, my friend thinks you’re cute!”
This. I dealt with almost all of this bullshit all my life and it still haunts me today…
-being unable to process genuine acceptance and compliments when you finally get them -fear emotional intimacy will result in betrayal
anxiety +100 when you hear a group of people you dont even know laughing with eachother
-having ppl refuse to sit within five feet of u bc “you take up so much space”
-crying during school and all they say is “Wow take a joke, we were only kidding”
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
