0:00 Hi sweet beans. Welcome back to Wild Geese. I'm your host Anna. Today we're talking about the language of love. Speak the language of love like you know what it means. Tina Turner. Anyone? Every time I say the language of love, that's what it makes me think of. What got me thinking about this is that my friend Emma shared a screenshot from All About Love by Bell Hooks. Classic. Read it back in college. Loved it. But they shared this screenshot with me and I was like, "Wow, I don't think I really registered how much I have been thinking about this lately, so we've got to talk about it." The specific line that I read that made me want to talk about this is when Bel Hook says, "Our patterns around love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language." Which, yes, I 100% agree. But then I had to dig into the why. Why do I agree with that? So, we're
0:47 going to talk about that today. But first, remember what I was talking about in the last episode about how our schooling system is not really actually built to help us learn and to help us find our own curiosity, give us good feedback loops, etc. The system is not really set up to help us succeed, but I want to talk about a platform that is. Thank you, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video. Brilliant makes learning fun outside of a classroom environment, which I really appreciate. With thousands of interactive lessons in math, science, programming, and data analysis, Brilliant is a learning app designed to be uniquely effective. Its hands-on methods are proven to be six times more effective than lecture videos. This is especially important for someone like me who cannot just be told how math works. I need to see it and feel it to understand. Brilliant helps build your critical thinking skills through problem solving, not memorizing.
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2:19 alive without an AC in here right now. Okay, but let's get into the language that we use around romantic relationships and some of the specific problems that I have noticed. So, there are two main things that I feel like if we change these things, they can help us change our relationships drastically. Number one is pathizing desire and misusing mental health languaging. And then number two is just generally flawed metaphors that we've been using for centuries about love that actually reinforce pretty harmful narratives about what love is. So number one, pathizing desire, which I am definitely guilty of. I feel like most of us are guilty of this at this point though. like you see one little flaw in
3:04 someone's relationship or in your own relationship and we're so quick to diagnose other people and ourselves. I mean, I feel like a hypocrite even bringing this up because I am queen of watching a reality TV show and seeing the way the dynamics are playing out and being like, "That person is a narcissist." And it's like, "Okay, Anna, you are not a mental health professional. Calm down." But I think in general the dysfunction of relationships is something that people have started to crave labels and diagnosis for so that they can across the board say this is how things are supposed to go and if they're not going that way something is clinically wrong with you. I took a screenshot of a Tik Tok that said it with me. A crush is not lirance. Lying is not gaslighting. A connection formed
3:50 during a bad time is not a trauma bond. Something you enjoy is not a special interest. Confidence is not narcissism. Affection is not lovebombing. Talking less is not going non-verbal. Getting uncomfortable is not over stimulation. Introversion is not avoidance. And I think this is kind of a natural thing that the internet does as a word flies through the internet. It changes definition. But when it comes to psychological terms, I do feel like we need to be a little bit careful throwing these things around. Jamila Bradley has an essay called What the Self-Help Industry Has Wrong About Everything, which I have already quoted at some point in one of my videos. I can't remember which one, but it's coming back around. This is just such a good essay. They say, "When self-help encourages you to diagnose people around you, it's turning your relationships into a
4:35 checklist of disorders rather than encouraging empathy and connection. It also places you in the role to arbitrate another person's mental health status and emotional reality. Even if you are a licensed mental health care professional, I doubt this is the role your friends and loved ones want you to play within your relationships. And it largely serves to objectify others at the expense of meaningful connection. It's also just frankly rude. Pathizing attachment creates a transactional view of relationships where closeness is reduced to a series of acceptable or unacceptable behaviors determined by one party cosplaying objectivity. And I see this all the time, especially with people talking about avoidant attachment styles. people being like, "If you're avoidant, you've caused so much hurt. Like, go lock yourself away until you're not avoidant anymore." As if we don't heal in community with other people. And it feels like people turn to these like
5:21 almost carceral punishments for going outside of the bounds of like a perfectly healed person instead of just accepting where that person is at and saying they can't meet my needs right now and that doesn't mean that I can diagnose them with like mental illness or they're like a morally incomprehensible person. It just means my needs and my wants fall outside of the bounds of this person's capacity. I think these things become an issue when we start to see the people around us as these beings that we can control and like morph into a person that can show up for us in the ways that we need them to show up for us instead of like giving them an opportunity to show us what their capacity is. And as soon as it becomes clear that their capacity cannot meet your needs that you leave. And these like punishments of moral judgments and misinformed diagnosis
6:07 feels like something that's a byproduct of love and romance being so tied up with possession in our society. And that's something that I've been thinking about a lot as I step into a new relationship, which I'm not going to go into. That is private. But what I will say is that in the past, I feel like I've stepped into relationships with this feeling of ownership and possession sort of tied up in monogamy because I am a monogous person without me being super aware that that was happening. And I really believe that we need to extract this feeling of possession and ownership over other people from our romantic relationships. And I don't necessarily think that that means that we have to all be polyamorous or something. If you
6:53 are polyamorous, I love that for you. But that is not my path. I don't think that that would be a situation that would meet my wants and needs. Still though, even if I am monogamous, I think that I can think critically about possession and the amount of objectification that we put on partners when we look at them in the same ways that we would look at these like static things that we can own, right? Like I even think our relationship with ownership itself should be interrogated a little bit of like I think that there is real value in looking at something that you think is beautiful and experiencing that thing and witnessing that thing and not saying that you need to own it. And I'm right now I'm kind of honestly even talking outside of the bounds of relationships and like human
7:39 beings. I'm talking about even just like things when you see a beautiful little knickknack on the shelf. Interrogating your knee-jerk pulled towards ownership is worthy of doing. Otherwise, what? You're going to take and own every beautiful thing that you see and just have it sitting in your house collecting dust because you're still out there collecting other beautiful things that you see. Okay. Anyway, I'm getting way off topic here. There's a Tik Tok that I came across a while ago with a guy named Insta Georges. I think I will pop a screenshot on the screen and put it in the episode description. But he was talking about relationship anarchy, which I will get to. I'm going to cover that later on in the episode. But right now, I just want to read a little piece of something that
8:24 he said in this TikTok that I thought was so wonderful. He says, "When I think about loving this person, can I give to them in a way that helps them figure out their wants and needs? Can I participate in their wants and needs in a good way that respects their boundaries? Can I help you grow? Can I help you heal? Can I help you prune the things that don't serve you, including me, if I am one of those things? If you are struggling, can I help you survive? If you are surviving, can I help you thrive?" And I think like not to be cheesy, but this is kind of what people are getting at when they say things like sometimes the most loving thing that you can do is let go of another person. Sometimes the most loving thing that you can do is let go of society's view of the only love that's real being the love that lasts forever. And letting go of that impulse towards possession and ownership over this other person in order to ensure that you are getting your needs met and
9:11 this other person is getting their needs met. Because look, if you are with a person that is not getting their wants and needs met and they are unhappy, even if you think that you are getting your wants and needs met, as soon as you know that this other person is not getting their wants and needs met and there's something that they need or want from you that you cannot give, staying with them is self-obnigation and vice versa on their part as well. I feel like I'm getting so ahead of myself right now. It's always really funny making these episodes because I have this whole outline planned out of like the order that I'm going to say things and then as I start speaking I'm like never mind [ __ ] it. But getting back to the core of like the languaging that we're using, the metaphors that we use around love. I think even in the most like innocuous languaging sometimes there is an
9:56 undercurrent of this possession thing. Like the very simple thing of saying like oh he's mine or oh she's mine. It's like, no, actually, I am mine. You are getting to experience me right now, and I am getting to experience you. But at the end of the day, I am mine, and you are yours. I feel like I'm being very preachy right now. I'm sorry. Ew. Anyway, along these same lines, I went to a play that my friend Lizzie is in right now. Shout out Lizzie. Amazing actress. But it was kind of wild how the themes in this play lined up so specifically with this episode. And I went right after I had recorded this episode. And I won't get too deep into the plot of the play, but there was one line that sort of encapsulated the whole message of the play and it was the guy looking at the girl saying, "They love you." And the
10:42 girl responds, "They have me." So then that immediately made me think of this word have. Like how we use the word have in romantic relationships. I mean, when you get married, it's to have and to hold. And then Chelsea Cutler just came out with a song with a really wonderful lyric that says, "Someone will get you, someone will have me." and just the difference between getting a person like understanding them and having a person which is just possession of them. So I don't know it's just interesting how entrenched possession and ownership is in our language about love even in the most like quote unquote normal little things that we say. MuseGuided on sepsac has an essay called love is not enough. I feel like it's so funny. I have referenced newsguided like four weeks in a row. But she says, "Love pulses with
11:28 metaphor. A spark, a flame, a tide, a madness. It invites surrender, not logic. Commitment, by contrast, is sober, measured, and architectural. It is not the kiss under the rain, but the decision to be there when the storm hits. Love writes you sonnets. Commitment signs the lease. And while love is often portrayed as the peak of human experience, it is commitment that reveals our deeper character. Is it about what lifts you off the ground? No, it's what holds you up when gravity resumes. And I really read that quote because I like what she said at the beginning about love having all of these metaphors surrounding it, a spark, a flame, blah blah blah. But now, I think that when people start to talk about commitment, that's when this idea of ownership and possession starts to creep in and freak people out and make people
12:14 feel like, "Oh, I'm not ready to commit because I'm essentially not ready to be owned by you." which is something that most of us don't want to agree to, but also not a ton of us are thinking critically about. So, we step into these commitments and actually look at a commitment not just as the act of deciding in this moment that it looks like our wants and needs are compatible. So, we will commit to each other. And if it becomes clear over time that our wants and needs are not compatible, we don't have ownership over each other and we have each other's best interest in mind to let each other go. And I don't know, I just I think that that is a very big reason why so many people are so afraid of commitment. There's a real fear associated with the power dynamics that come into play in our romantic relationships with other people. And
12:59 it's not helped by the metaphors that we use. Hanife Abdurak, who I talked about in the last episode, too, and they can't kill us until they kill us, has an essay about Carly Ray Json that made me care about Karly Ray Json in a way that I really didn't before. But he says, "From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle, as if there's a graveyard for heartbreak alone. We've run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon. Inside Terminal 5, under the spell of Carly Ray Jepson, love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive. It is something you experience and if you're lucky enough,
13:46 time slows down. But that image of love as a battlefield or a war goes back to Oid and actually might go back even further than that. But oid is an ancient Roman poet that equated love to war in his poem love and war. So this is a deeply deeply ingrained way of thinking which then got me wondering about how our perception of love and the way that we've talked about love has changed over time. And I'm just going to give a very brief sort of flattened overview of history right now. If you are a history buff and you disagree with any of this, feel free to sound off in the comments, just know you guys, when it comes to history, science, blah blah blah. I am not a primary source. I feel like I've said this before, but I want to reiterate it. I am a team of one. I am not a journalist. I am not an expert in these things. These are just things that I have read about. I was not there in
14:32 ancient Greece. I don't know what happened. But I'm just going to give you a very brief overview of things that I have read about other eras. Okay? But like ancient Greece to like the Middle Ages, marriage was not for love. Like love was something that largely happened outside of the contract of marriage. And marriage was really seen as a civic duty and a familial contract. Then the Enlightenment came along and people started to for the first time think like, yeah, people should have the right to choose who they marry and the person that they choose can be somebody that they're in love with. But it's not really until the romantic era that people started to look at it as one of the biggest choices that you can make. Newsguided essay, Love is Not Enough, says that the romantic era turned love into a secular religion. It was no longer enough to find a spouse. One had
15:18 to find a soulmate. And then in the 20th century, Freud comes along and shows us how love can actually be a mirror to our damage and how we're sort of playing out these childhood dynamics within our romantic relationships. I guess maybe this is when pathizing desire really started to happen a bit. But I think the phenomena of people taking on these like psychological terms in order to diagnose everybody around them is a newer thing brought on by the internet. But a little bit later on, love becomes democratized, which NewsGuided says means birth control, divorce laws, civil rights expanded who could love and how. But with that freedom came a new paradox. With choice came volatility. The more we could choose, the more we feared choosing wrongly. And I think like I've said this fear of choosing wrongly is a byproduct of our history in the western
16:04 world. I'm very clearly talking about western society and customs. But I think it makes sense that it's hard for us to extract this idea of love from possession when we've now placed love in this container of marriage that has a history of being actually only possession. So, I by no means have the answer of how to untangle this with all of that history, but I do think that there are people out there that are starting to speak in new and refreshing ways about how we can hold love and romance and commitment without it immediately becoming ownership, possession, power, war. I think if we started to ask ourselves how we can have equal relationships and focus on equality around like the 20th century, I
16:50 think the next step now is to start to think about how we can have equity in our relationships. And the foundation of equity is this understanding that we all have different needs. So we will actually not all be equally cared for if we're trying to care for everyone in the same way. And Jamila Bradley wrote an essay about this a while ago that was really exciting for me to read because they actually coined a couple of new terms for the book that they're writing. And I think that the work they're doing in this space is just transformative. This essay is called Fake Fairness is Killing Our Relationships. And it's everywhere. They say one of the deepest threats to any relationship is the fear of losing oneself in it. Whether it's with a partner, a friend, a parent, or a community. When we feel like caring for someone else will cost us our agency, we start making tiny, dangerous bargains with ourselves. We all want to choose
17:35 and be chosen, not trap and be trapped. Often I hear stories about people who feel like they have to disappear themselves a little in order to stay or keep what they have. Then Jamela introduces this concept of fake fairness and says that there are three patterns that you can use to kind of spot fake fairness. Number one is shrinking yourself. So, for example, if you like love clubbing and you're with somebody who doesn't really like clubbing and you subsequently stop clubbing entirely, that's you shrinking a part of yourself. The second pattern is mutual deprivation. And Jamela gives the example, you want a hug every day after work, but your partner doesn't need daily affection. So, you decide it's unfair to ask for something they don't want themselves. No one is allowed to have more. No one is allowed to need differently. This isn't fairness. This is shared scarcity masquerading as
18:21 compromise. And then the third pattern they outline is ongoing performative restriction. They qualify this as systematically and ongoingly denying ourselves and often others certain wants or needs. Not because we truly don't care about them, but because we think it's the right thing to do. So basically, I think of this as like making a lot of assumptions about what the other person needs or wants. Like you think that you're sort of taking care of them and picking up on unspoken cues, but really you're just making assumptions that are depriving you both of connection. I am 100% guilty of this. They give a couple of examples and say it's the friend who stops inviting you on trips because you once said you were budgeting even though you never asked them to stop. It's the partner who never initiates intimacy again because they've decided you must not like it since you were tired once. It's the parent who
19:07 withholds affection from adult children because they don't want to smother. Performative restriction creates an ongoing choreography where everyone pretends to want less than they actually do. But relationships aren't about mirroring each other's exact wants. They're about generosity, difference, and negotiating real needs. And that sounds really tricky, and I'm sure that that is going to be for most of us. I remember when I first read this essay, seeing so much of myself in my past relationships in it, but then kind of asking myself, you know, like for example, with the example, for example, with the example um with the example of a partner who doesn't need affection every day, but you do, and you're creating mutual deprivation by asking for what you want or need, which would be like a hug every day. But
19:52 then where do you go from there if you're in a relationship with somebody that doesn't want or need physical affection every day? in the same way that you do. How do you reconcile this like feeling of obligation that comes up there? And Jamea basically offers a short solution that I'm excited to read more about in their work. They say, "We begin by asking different questions. Not what would make this equal, but what would make this satisfying for both of us? We have to relearn how to give and ask with intention." And I really love this idea of asking better questions because if you ask me, the best conversations I've ever had in my relationships have started with really thoughtful, intentional questions that bring like a charge to the air that invite both people to be honest. There's it's probably a Tumblr text post that
20:39 I'm thinking of or maybe it's a poem. I don't really know, but it's coming to mind. There's like a quote that says, "I dreamed of someone asking me better questions." And that's so real. I think that there's a real deep loneliness that comes with being in a relationship that lacks curiosity. And I mean that in the most literal sense. Going back to Muse guided essay, love is not enough. She says to love and commit then is to live in full awareness of impermanence and to stay anyway. It is to wake up to yourself and then to another again and again and all your unfinishedness. It is the discipline of continuing to find, not the thrill of being found. That last sentence, the discipline of continuing to find, not the thrill of being found.
21:25 I think so many people are approaching romantic relationships with that expectation of being found. Like you're a little shiny, beautiful trinket on the shelf that someone wants to own. Instead of this excitement to keep finding and keep asking questions, I think that if we can be honest with each other and stop punishing each other for honesty, we'll see that love and commitment is not a prison. It's not something to trap or be trapped in. Which brings me to this idea of relationship anarchy, which I am very new to hearing and understanding more about. So, don't look at me as an expert on this by any means. I heard one person on TikTok talking about it, but when I hear the
22:10 term relationship anarchy, it makes me a little bit excited to learn more because like we've been talking about, so much of what we think about romantic love is so wrapped up in institutions and ideals that center ownership. So, relationship anarchy is not the same as polyamory. I will point you again towards the Instagram of Insta Georges Insta. I don't know why I'm having such a hard time saying this username, Insta Georgus, I think, but they speak very eloquently about relationship anarchy, how it differs from polyamory, etc. But to give a quick overview of what relationship anarchy is, relationship anarchy has no hierarchy. So a lot of the times with polyamorous relationships, people will have like a primary partner and then like secondary partners, which does create a hierarchy. It has individual
22:56 definitions. So every relationship is defined by the people in it, not by society's like expectations. They have fluid boundaries. So again, this would be like determined by each relationship and each person's wants and needs within that relationship. They value authentic connection. So it's more about letting a relationship unfold naturally instead of trying to force it into a traditional relationship framework. And within relationship anarchy, there's a big emphasis on personal autonomy and individual freedom. I will let you look into that further because I'm still learning about it myself. But even though I don't fully understand relationship anarchy right now, I do want to share a resource that Insta George shared called the relationship anarchy smorgesborg. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but they say this tool is designed to give us power. The power to name our wants and needs with
23:42 clarity, the power to communicate with care and precision, and the power to step towards the life we're drawn to even when it doesn't resemble what we've been taught to want. When George talks about creating boundaries within a relationship, they put a big emphasis on making sure that the wants and needs that you are communicating to your partner are actually your wants and needs and not wants and needs that have been like placed on you by your society. They say, "If those agreements weren't made by us, weren't forged by us, then we're being miserable because of somebody else's rules. I refuse to be peerressured by dead people or police state autocrats." But basically, the smartest word is just a bunch of different sort of categories that you can go through and take time to intentionally think, do I want this? And then not only do I want this, but when do I want it? Is it something that I
24:28 always want, sometimes want, never want, do I need this to thrive? When does this fit into the relationship? You know, how much trust needs to be built up? And is exclusivity required in order for me to experience this want or need? So I think George said that they added a couple of things to the traditional relationship anarchy smorgesborg. One of which is political elements and the other I believe is spiritual intimacy. So if you are in a relationship you can use this as a tool to open up dialogue about things that maybe you've never really talked about. And if you're not in a relationship you can use this to go through and for yourself become more acquainted with what your wants and needs are. And having that information is going to help you understand as people come in and out of your life what the level of compatibility between your wants and needs are. You know, George
25:13 kind of put it as this vin diagram of wants and needs. Like sometimes the wants and needs are completely separate. And in those situations, you probably don't mess with that person at all. Sometimes there's a slight overlap in wants and needs. And in that situation, you know, that can be a conversation of like our wants and needs overlap in this one little place. Can we relate to each other just in that one little section? For example, if your wants and needs overlap with someone, but they only overlap on like political elements and sexual interaction, then okay, maybe you found a person that you go to protests with and you have sex with and you don't really have a relationship outside of that. And if this is very clearly communicated by both people, then that can ultimately be a nice situation to work out with a person. I don't know. It's just fun to think like if we all
25:59 became much more clear and adept at communicating these things, what the possibilities could be with how we relate to each other and how our romantic relationships might change from there. I don't know. Fun to think about. And then of course if the vin diagram of your needs and wants really overlap with another person that's when you start to ask yourself like okay do we also have the attraction element the chemistry element things that take it something that's perfect on paper and make it like a real life relationship play out you know is this a person that you really enjoy talking to or is it just a person that you feel like you should really enjoy talking to. And if you're unsure how to use the relationship anarchy smorgesborgishborg I can't say that word. George has a really good post on their Patreon about it, and they ended off by saying, "After
26:45 answering the questions about any relationship element, you might find yourself able to write a personal statement like the ones provided at the end of the tool. These aren't meant to be fill-in-the-blank templates. This isn't a game of copying or performance. Instead, the goal is expression to help you reflect, name, and share what is real for you. The example statements may include references to trauma, uncertainty boundaries or communication needs. Because relationships are messy and layered, there's richness not only in what we want or don't want, but also in the context behind those desires, our fears, our healing, our boundaries, and our dreams. Let this tool be a mirror, a map, or a megaphone, whatever you need it to be. And let your relationships begin to reflect you. So, with that being said, I don't know that I would qualify or label myself as a relationship anarchist. I simply don't know enough about it. But I do think
27:30 that this is a really lovely tool that anyone can use to become more well acquainted with their wants and their needs, which is something that I think all of us need to actually take time to think about because how many of our wants and needs are actually things that are just customs that have been placed on top of us and we don't actually want or need those things. That is all I have for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you did, like, comment, subscribe, and I will see you in two weeks.
