(((I Will Outlive)))

A lot of ppl think that “love” is enough to raise a happy child and that’s not true. It also requires emotional maturity and financial stability but they don’t like hearing that because it changes their idea of a miracle that happens to them into a conscious decision that requires personal responsibility.

They think that having kids is a life phase that they’re required to go through and have no agency in but that’s not true. It’s not puberty, it’s a conscious choice that you make

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.”

More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.

The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway

#my mom’s a historian#does a lot of research#one of the main takeaways from the census data of literally every US census since the beginning#is that the nuclear family has never been the actual norm#nobody really ever lived like that#and a lot don’t now#and it’s clearly artificial and not ideal for most people#every household in the census had at least a grandma#usually a cousin#some rando#someone living in the house who wasn’t mom or dad or kid#always someone#usually several someones#some uncles etc.#unmarried aunties#that sort of person#but often unrelated friends#we’ve never really lived alone#that’s not how families work#that’s not how humans work  

tags by @bomberqueen17

Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.

It’s also super a capitalism thing.

With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.

The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.

Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.

this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity

In addition to the above factors scorning non-nuclear family households, there is a load of racism pointed at living arrangements including more than 2 adults.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and nearly every multi-gen/extended family (who were rarely ever white) in my quiet, uniformly lower-middle-class neighborhood was thought of as “dirty” and “taking advantage” of “the system”. The defacto impression was these households were drug dealing or otherwise out of control.

The amount of surveillance that white folks dedicated to the comings and goings of a BIPOC multi-adult household was disgusting, and this was *before* Next Door. And despite me being white, people often made clear to me that my own multi-gen household wasn’t How It Was Done because that’s what Those People did.

People who use “you’re adopted” as an insult are idiots. 

“Your parents wanted you so badly that they spent thousands of dollars to get you, went through tons of evaluations to make sure they were qualified, waited months or maybe even years for you, and so you’re now in a loving home where you are most definitely wanted and cared for.“ 

So insulting. I can feel the hate. 

Quoth the genius child from a post long back,

"My parents picked me.”