My story of love is far from being a ponytail story where the Freudian studies on the Oedipus complex are often represented by a prince looking out for a princess younger enough to replace his mother.
It's also far from following the Western legacy pattern where both male and female couple up to meet their parents' expectations - whether the expectation is ethnicity, income, career, or simply a photocopy of their relationship. It's also far from satisfying who I once called friends. My story of love does not simply fit the definition of love.
Any deodorant brand would want to sponsor this blog if they could see my reaction when people I care for ask me about my partner: resistance is at the top of my mind. That's because I don't tend to express how much I love him. His disappointing confiture breakfast, and he knows it, and that's enough for me. For the rest of my dearest readers, I only express how much I resist when I am with him. Let's picture a beginning where we did not fall in love; we fell in resistance towards a world that did not want us to be together.
It is a world where butterflies, ponies, and any other character featured in your high-standard dreams would all need to have the same nationality and live in the same country where they were born. No one trained Cupido to shoot only at people who didn't need a visa application to live together. After six years, training is rather pointless: what makes my partner more attractive to me? It has been, and it will be, his resistance to a bureaucratic world that wants us to be separated.
You would expect this to be the top line of the story - but can I upset you even more? It turns out that wanting to be with a person remains a limitation in what I assumed was already a globalised social structure. Perhaps I misunderstood globalisation with civilisation: most of us humans have access to the internet, but not all of us have the skill to detach human feelings from cultural constructs of what a same-sex couple means. Some people get stuck in the "same-sex" bit. Some of us decided to navigate the "couple" bit, fighting it back every single day, in the tube, at the office, or with family. That, my darlings, it's our most beautiful act of resistance. We're just a couple. And it means, consequently, I need from his existence to exercise my resistance.
Of course, resisting being "just" a couple has positive connotations, but I would like to touch on the negative one. The negative connotation is the third way our love became resistant. By not wanting to be labelled as a same-sex couple, we do not attempt to erase a long-lasting fight that our LGBTQ+ Community have held with blood and tears to obtain rights from which we benefit today. Our love does take pride in our community and identity. Our love does resist winds from opposite directions and knows how to pilot the identity when they create turbulence.
What does piloting an identity even mean? It means resisting the unnecessary excess of compliments from people who, without even being asked, share how comfortable they are with gay people (as they often reduce LGBTQ+ to Gayness) purely because they have a gay friend or because they listen to Queen -and, of course, they say how sorry they feel about the way Fredy died-. It also resists the winds coming from people sharing how respectful they are of these...(count two to three seconds) people. You know… (another two) gay people, so long as they don't grab each other's hands in front of their children. Oh boy, it's there where my Queer flag waves off without limit.
This story of love does not see an end on the horizon. That's because our love is resistant. It does not see an end in a literal way, either. You would want to think that after spending a day with the partner I love for the common wars we fight out there, family and friends are the only circle where the shields can be put down. It seems like if you decide not to hide from your circles, you are automatically giving them authority to approve, control, or deny your partner, your relationship, and the type of feelings you have and can not have for him.
We, however, resist. Resist not only to them. We resisted to ourselves: our impulse to shut down family ties and friendships that can not see love in a relationship that occupies most of the time in fighting back. I opted into educating, even if I don't get paid for it -and have not received any training either-. I opted to have patience with the people that made me happy. Love is finding deals and agreements with people that you can't deal with and with people you can't agree with.
There have been days when I have been left with no energy to keep up. He and his French way of being brutally honest have been there to pick me up and stand up for us. My Colombian sensitivity and I have been there to slow him down in battles that have long passed the peak points. My friends, I cannot find a better example of authentic love. We pick each other up amid battles that seem to last forever. And then, to honour your expectations on ponytail love stories, there's one moment at the end of the day when we don't need to resist: we can simply love. That's our story of love.
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