Of The Toxic Algorithm of Relationships

What happened to star-crossed lovers? What happened to best friends across borders, brothers and sisters across oceans, kindred souls that meet but once? Definitions are important, and so are geography and the many practicalities of life; but so are our instinctive love and compassion, our ability to care deeply for others sans validation, sans benefit, sans labels and rituals and norms. To avoid hurting and being hurt, our species has succeeded in building a web of etiquette, law and jargon behind which to hide our souls. Respectability has taken undue priority: we seek lawful approval from the abstraction that is social norm for our littlest, most innocent loves and hurts and moments and cares. Over the centuries, we have reached a place where lovers are defined by set patterns of shared commercial over-consumption and a complex tangle of descriptive to define who they are to one another; brothers and sisters are limited to deoxyribonucleic acid and/or outdated sexist ritual; and friends are measured in frivolous similarities of aesthetic taste, homework assignments and entertainment preference.

I am a big fan of self-determination, mutual respect and the politically accurate collective determination that follows. However, I still believe that we all need some people in our lives -- be they friends, family, lovers, anything -- with whom the frequency of contact does not affect care and concern, labels don't affect love, etiquette does not bar us from being as bawdy and/or silly and/or unreasonable as we like! Consequently, I believe that when we find such people in our lives, the validation machine should just let us be. If any definitions and norms we choose to place on ourselves do make it outside, we should simply be believed; and unless we explicitly seek approval, it should neither be offered nor refused!

People I find attractive are not, to me, a string of romantic and sexual encounters coupled with expensive food and dim lighting; and that should be okay. Brothers I conjure out of thin air because I genetically have none don't, to me or to them, mean people to tie ritualistic threads and dab ritualistic paste on; and that should be okay. My friends, to me, don't mean a sequence of parties and gifts and food and notes, as long as we are with each other at bad times...

...and that should be okay.