Queer Romance
Image ID: A collage by Margeaux, featuring two white kitten sitting side by side against a backdrop of pink tulips. In front of them are vintage flowers in pink and yellow.
This writing can also be found in my zine Chaotic Love: and other essays on intimacy.
I’ve been finding myself on google, searching for an answer to the question “What is romance?” This hunt for an answer was spurred by an ex-partner of mine sharing that the label of “romantic partnership” has never really resonated with them. Over the past few months, I’ve been on dates with humans who expressed something similar: that they don’t really get crushes or experience swoony feels for humans they date and/or are in non-platonic relationships with. These conversations have made me wonder: What the fuck is romance? What kinds of intimacy might be possible for us if we let go of the toxic cisheteronormative understanding of romance that is tethered to insecure attachment? This essay is my attempt at answering these questions while interrogating the stories I hold about romance that have been shaped by my attachment wounding.
Caught in a Bad Romance
The word “romance” has its roots in chivalrous tales of knights fighting to rescue princesses and dates back to the 1300s. In other words, the concept of romance comes from a bunch of white cishet men wanting to be seen as heros to damsels in distress. From these tales, romance became imbued with this sense that one would do anything for love -- including putting your own life at risk. And this belief is still alive and well.
Joe Duncan describes our contemporary understanding of romance as: “this awesome and overwhelming feeling of power and attraction that takes place completely outside of our control … an overcoming feeling of falling madly in love, wanting sex all the time, and only being able to think about one person, the unsleeping, ever-feeling, powerful drive of being totally in love.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like some bad romance to me.
The more I step into my queerness and learn what secure attachment is, the more troubled I’ve become by the narratives of romantic love that we’ve been given. I, for one, would rather not feel like some out of control, ravenous sex-craved, sleep-deprived human. Nor does it feel desirable or logistically possible for me to only be able to think about one person all the time. In fact, I hope to never be the object of someone’s love in that kinda way because, well, that’s a lot of pressure to put on one person. Esther Perel describes this as merging the love story and the life story: “‘I want, with my partner, I want a best friend, and I want someone who is intellectually stimulating and emotionally available and sexually compatible. And I want all of that with one person, and if I have to go somewhere else, I experience it as a flaw in the relationship.’ And I think that’s a tremendous pressure.”
Queer Southern writer Carson McCullers shares a similar sentiment in her novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: “Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him pain” (216). This description of the relationship between the lover and the beloved was reflected back to me when I posed the question on Instagram: What were you told romance should feel like? The answers to the first question were super telling:
Exhilarating need while at the same time being totally chill
Excitement and spark; butterflies; danger-thrill levels of excitement; fireworks and sunsets all the time
Giving self over entirely; not having any needs of one's own; sacrificing everything
Eternal; obsession; can’t sleep, can’t eat; that it’ll make you feel crazy; all encompassing; can’t live without the other person
Possessiveness; extreme jealousy; monogamy; marriage; make you feel whole
Effortless; magical; little need for direct communication
I see myself in these definitions of romance. Up until recently, I’d defined romance in similar terms. Then I had my first securely attached partnership.
Attachment theory was developed by John Bowlby, a British psychologist. During his time working with young children at Tavistock Institute in London in 1946, Bowlby found a direct correlation between the delinquent behavior of the youths he studied and a separation event from their primary caregivers. Bowlby would go on to argue that when caregivers are absent, emotionally unavailable, abusive, overbearing, or all of the above, children’s core developmental needs for emotional regulation and attunement, safety and security, aren’t met. These absences negatively impact how they will relate to themselves and to the world.
In 1950, Bowlby returned as the director of the children’s ward at Tavistock, and began work with Mary Ainsworth. By 1978, Ainsworth would define three attachment styles: secure attachment, avoidant/dismissive, and anxious/preoccupied. Jessica Fern, author of Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy explains how those with an avoidant/dismissive style tended to have caregivers who were “mostly unavailable, neglectful or absent,” with a parenting style that is “cold, distant, critical or highly focused on achievement and appearance” (30). The child in this environment learns that it’s best to not depend on others to meet their needs. When these children become adults, they pride themselves on being self-sufficient and will tend to distance themselves from others. On the other hand, those who’re anxious-preoccupied may have had caregivers who expressed love but were inconsistent. They thus come to fear abandonment. As adults, this fear results in “a disconnection or loss of self through over-functioning and over-adapting in the relationship in an attempt to maintain and preserve the connection” (Fern 39). Self-sacrifice and disavowal of needs are the terrain of the anxious/preoccupied.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Mary Main and Judith Solomon would define a fourth category: disorganized/fearful-avoidant attachment. Children who develop disorganized attachment vacillate between anxious and avoidant because they learnt that their caregivers were not safe. Main termed this response “fright without solution.” Fern explains:
The disorganized attachment style is most commonly associated with trauma and it typically arises when a child experiences their attachment figure as scary, threatening or dangerous. When we are afraid, our attachment system gets activated to seek proximity to and comfort from our attachment figure, but what happens when our attachment figure is the person causing the threat? This puts the child in a paradoxical situation where their caretaker, who is supposed to be the source of their comfort and the solution to their fears, is actually the source of their fear instead. (43)
Janina Fisher describes how, as these children grow into adults, the result is “the yearning for proximity and closeness and the animal defenses of fight, flight, freeze, and submission. ‘Too much’ closeness feels dangerous, but so does ‘too much’ distance” (106).
Secure attachment, on the other hand, looks quite different. Fern offers this definition:
“People with a secure attachment style experience a healthy sense of self and see themselves and their partners in a positive light. Their interpersonal experiences are deeply informed by their knowledge that they can ask for what they need and people will typically listen and willingly respond … A child with a secure attachment style will likely grow up into an adult who feels worthy of love and seeks to create meaningful, healthy relationships with people who are physically and emotionally available. [They’re] comfortable with intimacy, closeness and their need or desire for others. They don’t fear losing their sense of self or being engulfed by the relationship … securely attached people experience relational object constancy, which is the ability to trust in and maintain an emotional bond with people even during physical and emotional separation.” (19-21)
Drawing on the work of Mary Ainsworth and Silvia Bell, Joanna Chambers summarizes the differences between secure and insecure attachment as follows: “Secure attachment was defined as the ability to carry a representational model of attachment figures as being available, responsive, and helpful. Insecure attachment was defined as not seeking out the attachment figure when distressed or having difficulty moving away from the attachment figure, likely due to having an unresponsive, rejecting, inconsistent, or insensitive caretaker” (544).
Our experiences with our caregivers impact us at a neurobiological level and shape when and how our reward circuits release dopamine and oxytocin. Katherine Wu explains: “Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us” and comes into play when we’re attracted to another person. Alongside the release of dopamine is norepinephrine, which “may sound familiar because it plays a large role in the fight or flight response, which kicks into high gear when we’re stressed and keeps us alert.” These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia – which means you actually can be so ‘in love’ that you can’t eat and can’t sleep.” Dopamine releases oxytocin aka “the love drug” and both of these chemicals can push us towards humans who will not give us the love that we actually so desire.
Attachment shapes attraction, romance, and love. “Kids who are securely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, most likely attach securely to their romantic partners, and kids who are insecurely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, mostly likely attach insecurely to their romantic partners,” writes Emily Nagoski in Come As You Are (116). If we grew up experiencing insecure attachment, then our reward circuit is hardwired to release dopamine and oxytocin when we receive the hard-earned rewards of insecure relationships. If you’re anxiously attached, the reward is your partner turning towards you. If you’re avoidantly attached, the reward is distance from your partner. And if you have disorganized attachment, proximity and distance can each be their own rewards. For us insecurely attached humans, secure attachment will not feel as good to us because of how our reward circuit is oriented. We may find ourselves thinking “This can’t be love because I’m not feeling all of these intense emotions” that usually release these reward chemicals that make me feel good while also paradoxically making me feel bad.
I know this feeling all too well. When David and I first started dating four years ago, I’d never experienced secure attachment in a romantic relationship. As an anxiously attached child, I was forever chasing my avoidantly attached father. I was searching for that missing experience: that somehow, I could help him open up and heal his attachment wounding. And once he’d healed, he could love me fully.
All of my romantic relationships followed suit: I was always falling for boys who couldn’t fully commit; who were scared of intimacy; and who withheld their depths of their emotional landscape from me. This chase, and the brief moments of intimacy I’d sometimes obtain, produced dopamine hits that were tethered to the insecure forms of attachment I grew up with.
In a recent therapy session, my therapist shared with me that our understanding of intimacy and love can be shaped by a negative or positive valence. With a negative valence, we come to understand that safety – which is really one of the core principles of secure attachment – is dangerous, because that’s what we experienced growing up. With a positive valence, we learn that safe connection is pleasurable, not painful.
I see this positive valence in the responses I received to the second question I posed on Instagram: “What have you learnt romance feels like to you”?
Simple comforts; feels like a roasted squash on a Wednesday; being comfortable; comforted and secure; safety; peace; freedom; trust; ease; soft, gentle, unassuming
Being myself; joy and acceptance; honesty
Slowly getting closer to someone to wants to hold me and be held by me; shared vulnerability; collaboration; sharing the task of creating joy and pleasure; excitement about collaboratively building a flexible, loving, evolving relationship together; supporting each other’s growth
Clarity and communication; asking each other the right questions patience; quiet thoughtfulness; gratitude; calm
These definitions of romance stand in stark contrast to the ones we’ve inherited. Instead of overwhelming intensity of feeling, we experience calm, ease, peacefulness. Instead of sacrificing yourself to the other in the name of love, we get to exist and grow as our own autonomous being. Instead of fastly falling in love, we move slowly and easefully into love that is collaborative. Romance, in this way, might feel a whole lot more boring; in fact, it might not feel like romance if we’re still holding onto these old definitions.
One of my besties recently described her experience unlearning these toxic definitions to me in a text: “No one is like ‘when you meet the right person your body will scream to get away, will experience waves of terror, and your mind will desperately cling to your last toxic relationship where your needs weren’t met and you feel small and helpless in the fact of the possibility that someone may actually try and be capable of meeting your needs and being safe and healthy.”
When we finally experience our first taste of secure attachment, our nervous system freaks the fuck out. It will scream at us “We’re not safe!” and our nervous system will decide how to respond. Do we fight? Do we flee? Do we freeze? Do we submit? While all of those options will feel very appealing, we actually need to do the scariest thing possible and complete the stress cycle. We need to open ourselves up to the experience of safety. Which is a lot easier said than done when our survival physiology is oriented towards protection and away from connection. But I know that it’s possible, because I’ve experienced it.
David’s ability to be present with my anxiety, to not freak out when I shared my feelings, absolutely terrified me. I kept wondering “When’s the other shoe gonna drop? When will I eventually be ‘too much’ for him to handle?” What was even more terrifying for me was that I could share these fears with him and he’d respond with compassion and care. He never took my fears personally, and was always willing to offer me the affirmation I needed. In other words, he was physically and emotionally available. While his Scorpio sun did make him a bit cagier about sharing his feelings with me, he continually demonstrated his commitment to showing up to build and deepen our intimacy. It took me about a year into our relationship before those spiraling questions of anxious attachment eased and eventually went away. With David, I was able to complete the stress cycle and recognize that I was safe. It didn’t feel as “sexy” or “exciting” as my previous relationships. But eventually it became the kind of connection that my nervous system wanted to orient towards: a kind of easeful intimacy.
Easing Into Love: A Queer Reimagining of Romance
I think I’m done with falling in love. This is not to say that I’m done with being in love. But I want a different process, one that feels full of agency, one that isn’t overwhelming to my nervous system. I want to ease into love, the way one slowly lowers themselves into a hot bath.
The word “ease” comes from the Old French aise, meaning both elbow room and opportunity. There is a spaciousness to ease, room for oneself to move and expand into the space. Ease is full of potentiality. I can’t help but think of José Esteban Muñoz’s proclamation, in Cruising Utopia, that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope. That is to say that queerness is always in the horizon” (11). In one of my favourite passages from the book, Muñoz proclaims: “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is the thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing [...] Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). Given all of the definitions of romance we’ve inherited, it makes sense that those of us who’re queer wish to let go of the “romances of the negative” that tell us to accept whatever we have “here and now” as though that’s the best we’re ever going to get. We believe that so much more is possible if we chose to reimagine what romance might mean.
A queer reimagining of romance is, for me, one rooted in ease. Which is different from the cisheteronormative valorization of “easy.” So many of us were told that romance, love, and intimacy should “be easy.” And I honestly have no idea what that even means. All relationships require work on the self and on the relationship – and that work isn’t easy. Because, as the authors of The Comprehensive Resource Model: Effective therapeutic techniques for the healing of complex trauma note, for those of us living with attachment trauma: “The harsh reality is that the experience of a chronic, visceral state of fear blocks the capacity for love, which is the very thing that is needed to heal” (1). In other words: we must open ourselves up to the thing we fear that most.
Love, romance, intimacy, all become a practice that we commit ourselves to again and again. In Annika Hansteen-Izora describes practice in Muñoz-esque terms when they write:
“Practice is a portal: it’s full of unknowns, there is no certainty in the outcome, but in that uncertainty, so much is eagerly awaiting us with open arms. Practice is trust: it’s confidence that I can meet the unknown with compassion. That I can be fluid, that I can be water … Practice is betting on myself: It’s being brave enough to be a beginner at something, and loving enough that I let go of the shame, rushedness and defeatism that makes practice unsustainable … Practice is wonder: it’s confidence in the endless depths of myself and the world.”
Practice might sound like the unsexiest, most unromantic thing ever. But it’s queer as fuck. Because the more we practice, the more ease we welcome in.
Ease, in the landscape of romance, is that feeling of “wow, my nervous system isn’t freaking out all the time” (and I’m not freaking out about not freaking out). It’s the feeling of “this doesn’t always have to feel hard or intense.” It’s the opposite of the butterflies in the stomach, can’t-stop-thinking-about-you-all-the-time-feels. When I think about ease, it’s those little nice moments when a loved one pops into your mind and you smile to yourself, and then continue on with your day.
Ease, for me, is secure attachment. Ease is the “oh wow you’re not gonna have some horrible reaction when I tell you how I’m feeling?” and then learning that you always should have been met with love, compassion, celebration. This kind of romance might not feel easeful at first. Secure attachment in romantic partnership might be a totally new terrain for you and is therefore terrifying for your nervous system. If we’re lucky, we’ll find ourselves with humans who will meet our fear with love. Humans who will practice secure attachment with us.
In Polysecure, Jessica Fern argues that the recipe for secure attachment can be captured in the acronym HEARTS. H stands for “here and now”: our capacity to be present with the person we love. We put down our phones when we tell each other about our days. E is for “expressed delight”: our capacity to celebrate the human we love, to take delight in the things that make them who they are. A is short for “attunement”: the practice of tuning in and connecting with our loved ones, of trying to understand their experiences, and offer them what they need (not what we think they need). R represents routines and rituals: the mundane, quotidian acts that we commit ourselves to with each other, and that we do so intentionally. T stands for “turning towards after conflict”: how do we orient ourselves towards connection rather than protection, knowing that conflict is an inevitable part of being in relationship with another. And, finally, S is for secure attachment with self: our capacity to offer ourselves all of the elements of HEART even, and especially, when our loved ones are unable to do so. Guess what? Building secure attachment is a practice. Many, if not all of these elements, may not come naturally to those of us living with insecure attachment. But they are certainly potentialities on the horizon.
We can get stuck in the paradoxical easiness of insecure attachment (easy because it’s familiar). “Oh, it’s just so easy to be with them,” we say, even when we’re not fully happy. No potentiality. No elbow room for expansion. Ease, on the other hand, is something that flows. When I told David that I needed to end our partnership because it no longer fit who I was, he didn’t fight me. In fact, he celebrated me. Because he wants me to the fullest, most expansion version of myself. And I can’t think of a better definition of love than that. In this way, our breakup was easeful. Which is not to say that there wasn’t and isn’t deep grief and heartache for both of us. But secure attachment, and easeful relationality, means that we give each other space to flow, even if that means we need to flow away from each other and shift the container that holds our relationship. It’s not a “til death do us part” way of being in relation. Queer romance is saying to one another “til this container of love no longer fits us.”
Newly single, I want to orient myself towards queer romance. I want to let go of the mythologies of fireworks and butterflies. I want to practice easing into love. I want to continue to choose secure attachment, even when it terrifies me to open myself up to another. Because I know that there are so many more possibilities than what we’ve been given.
Thank you so much for reading my blog. If you’d like to support me in the work that I do, and make it possible for me to continue to share my writing with the world, you can subscribe to my patreon or you can leave me a tip my paypal.
