#as if that's not a legitimate job women have and is somehow something degrading

[kara-zor-els]

People need to learn the difference between "this comic book character is being (over)sexualized" (aka they are drawn in a way that is misogynistic or objectifing and doesn't fit the story) vs "this comic book character is drawn sexy" (they are an adult with an active sex life and it makes sense for the plot for them to express that/doesn't distract from the story)

[lavenderek]

i have a thought to express, feel free to scroll past.

i’m gonna discuss rape and sexual abuse in this post. it’s also long because i don’t really have a conclusion, it’s just some thoughts. 

so i was looking into that reality show that facilitated shane dawson’s horrible movie “not cool” and i stumbled across a reddit thread posted by someone who was a fan of his as a preteen. the OP alleged that shane’s content contributed to them developing some serious issues including body dysmorphia and the normalization of sexual behavior involving children. 

some of the comments were in support and agreement, but a large amount of them were like, “where were your parents? it’s not shane’s job to police what you see online. it’s not his fault you were too young for his content.” 

now, shane was well aware from the jump that his fans were mostly kids and teens - he talked about it multiple times - but that’s not what this post is about. this post is about that particular argument, which does not sit well with me.

it reminded me of a couple years ago when i made a very critical post about c*ptive prince. 

pause: i want to make it crystal clear that i am not drawing a comparison between people who like cp and shane dawson. i’m not mad anymore, so i am not making this post making a value judgment on cp or fans of it, positive or negative. 

specifically, i was really bothered by the way cp content was posted and shared with no mention of or reference to the actual material. people were calling it a queer romance. it was a little-known series by a little-known author, so there were no synopses anywhere online, only the summary you’d see on the back of the book. so people would seek out cp thinking it was a romance and be blindsided by the fact that, spoilers, the story is set in a fantasy world where child rape is a major tenet of society. the scenes are explicit, detailed, and many. it’s not a thing that happens once or twice and is a major plot point, it’s a thing that happens multiple times in every chapter and is just kind of a thing that’s going on. if you’ve ever read twilight, i would compare the presence of rape in cp to the presence of rain in twilight.

like, that’s how often it happened, that’s how it was treated. sometimes with indifference, sometimes with a negative opinion, sometimes it caused problems, bella talks about it every two pages. it is a very rapey series. 

and people like, did not want to discuss this. they were like, “the characters decide the rape is bad in the end. and that’s not even what the story is about, it just happens in the story. i don’t know what to tell you.” like... people were not receptive to any kind of conversation about this topic lmfao, it was very touchy. they wanted to acknowledge that rape itself is bad, and then they wanted the subject closed. 

now, why is this a problem? i read the books. there were parts i enjoyed, and there were parts i didn’t enjoy. i’m not gonna reread them, but i’m still game to talk about it. ultimately i wanted to be able to talk about books with a friend of mine, and while i was like, “yikes, this is a lot of rape, was not expecting the volume of rape,” it didn’t occur to me this would be a pervasive issue at all until a different friend of mine happened upon it. this other friend was a rape survivor, and i happened to know she would find this content very upsetting. when she said she was thinking of buying the book, i was like, “halt, you know what happens in it, right?” 

nope! she didn’t. she saw cute fanart and a ficlet on her dash, somebody told her it was a queer romance. nowhere was there any indicator in summaries online or the posts she was seeing that the book would describe a person being drugged and sexually abused. she was pretty relieved that i’d warned her and shaken that that’s what happens in the books lmao. she would never have guessed. the cp fandom was made up of people who loved the main pairing, and they’d talk about them being in love and draw them being in love, and it felt like everybody was just acting like the rape wasn’t even present in the books lmao. 

pause: i didn’t go in the tags. this is not representative of the fandom as a whole. this is just my and my friend’s experience of it as passive internetgoers.

people got uncomfortable and a little defensive if i brought it up. they’d agree to tag for cp, but if you don’t know what cp is about, that isn’t helpful information. like that post that’s like, “waterboarding at guantanamo bay sounds like a lot of fun if you don’t know what either of those things are” lmao. if you don’t know what cp is about, tagging for it just tells you what it’s called. and it very clearly ruined everyone’s fun if i talked about this. 

so that’s what i was mad about, i was mad that i felt as though there was no recourse here, and i was mad because i felt like the cp fandom was the emperor’s new clothes. nobody was acting like it even existed and everybody got uncomfortable if i brought it up, like, i legitimately wondered at some point if i had somehow accidentally read a kinky rewrite of it, that the real version did not have rape in it and nobody knew what i was talking about. i felt like i was going crazy and i got shitty in the middle of the night one time, and wrote that post. 

i ultimately deleted it, so i do not remember how it was worded; but i do recall that it was a venting post, it was not intended to reach a wider audience. i was not trying to convince anyone in that moment, i was just talking shit. so i can bet that it probably came across as very judgmental and unkind. 

i made a bunch of people very angry with that post. somebody got thousands of notes by reblogging with an impassioned smackdown saying basically what those redditors were saying about shane - it’s not their job to police what people see online. it’s not their fault you were unprepared for cp. 

i do not think this is a nuanced enough argument because i do not think it acknowledges that not all content is created equal. 

i even got an anon ask in good faith saying, well, a huge trigger for me is body horror, and people will draw or reblog stuff with body horror in it, and i can’t hold that against them. 

and like, no, you can’t, but body horror is not the same as rape or child sexual abuse. body horror isn’t the same as sex trafficking. right? like those things aren’t comparable in the way that i think the anon was wanting them to be. they were saying that both of these are common triggers that people would want tagged and be unable to move past in media, you know? and i get that, i got what they were saying. 

kind of like that cartoonist who wrote a spooky horror comic a while ago and somebody sent them an ask being like, “that was really scary, you usually post fun comics, this was damaging, unfollowed :/” like obviously a stranger’s fear of spooky things is not something he should be expected to take on on his own blog lmao. i am deeply afraid of ghosts, by the way. 

but according to rainn.org, 1 in 5 women experience rape in their lifetime. 1 in 5 women are not frightened by literal ghosts in their lifetime. 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys aren’t body horrored. body horror and ghosts aren’t used on a global scale as tools to control and abuse people and they do not have the same connotations of shame, degradation, and control. the things are not the same. 

i don’t have an easy answer. i can’t wave my magic wand and make people not enjoy the rape erotica, nor was that my goal in the first place. i wasn’t clutching my pearls like, “how dare you! do not draw this art! think of the children!” and i don’t know how else i would have solved the problem, aside from having a weird disclaimer under your art of two dudes cuddling that says “warning, these dudes are from a book that’s got several thousand words of explicit rape in it, and i know that, you’re not the only one seeing that,” like that’s a lot and i get it. 

i don’t have an easy answer because there isn’t one. i felt like “well, that’s not my problem” was an easy answer. 

as i get older, the more responsibility i have as an adult online to maintain boundaries between me and minors, for example. i am not responsible for their internet experience and they can’t get mad at me for cussing or writing about gay werewolves on my blog, but i do have to be mindful of that context if i’m interacting with someone online. that’s where the complexity comes in. you can’t wash your hands of the context of the things you say and do online. 

just how to solve these problems, i did not know then and i do not know now. i guess we take it on a case by case basis. 

if you’re curious about shane dawson and his horrible movie, by the way, this guy did a few funny videos about the horrible movie and this guy did a not funny but comprehensive breakdown of shane and his career. 

and i tried to tint my eyebrows for the first time the other day, i have red hair and my eyebrows are darker than my hair for some reason, so i tried to use an eyebrow tint to lift my brows just like, a shade, so be closer to my hair? but in doing this i discovered that my eyebrows are a mixture of red and brown? 

so the red hairs lifted to a sunny orange, and the brown hairs stayed brown. so my eyebrows are fully like, calico right now. boom, orange juice, that’s life

[thatishogwash]

Of Smugglers and Soldiers

Bokuro Week Prompt 3 April 3rd: Moon and Stars

AO3

Kuroo wasn’t sure how he got himself into these situations.

Actually, that was a lie.  He knew exactly how he got into this particular situation.  That reason was standing next to his pilot chair, checking over his guns and looking fiercely determined and focuses.  It was a good look for Lieutenant Colonel Bokuto Koutarou.  He was out of uniform, dressed in civvies but he looked good in both uniform and regular clothes.  They were clean and fit his tall, broad frame well.

Kuroo figured since they were about to die he might as well look his fill.

“I’m sorry,” Kuroo said, managing to get that intense look aimed at him.  Kuroo’s organs were mostly synthetic or mechanical so they didn’t fluke by his heart skipping a beat or his stomach twisting oddly, but he imagined if he were capable of those things then he’d be feeling all the warm and fuzzies about now.

“For what?  How were you to know they had a Seven K?”  Bokuto asked, leaning a hip against the control panels that were usually light up with various lights but were now completely dark, just like Kuroo’s entire ship.

“I made you come.”  Kuroo slumped a little lower in his chair, letting his long legs rest up on the dead control panel.  He did it mostly because Yaku wasn’t around to yell about his dirty boots on the panel that controlled the ship, but a little because they were about to die so it no longer mattered if his ship was clean.

“Oh ho ho?  What is this?  I thought you were a cut throat smuggler.”  Bokuto was grinning, it was a little manic and Kuroo liked it just a little too much.

Kuroo had come to rest in a port town, he had thought the moon the town was on was far enough away that he wouldn’t be bothered by the Alliance, the military force that thought they ruled the galaxy.  He had parked his ship, the Yokai, right next to the Crow just to annoy his favorite grumpy captain a little.  As much as Sawamura Daichi might pretend otherwise, Kuroo knew he had a little place in the Karasuno native heart, it wasn’t saying much since those from that region of the galaxy tended to have two hearts but that’s semantics.  They had gone out to eat to swap stories and trade advice on jobs.

Kuroo ran a legitimate business, most of the time, but he wasn’t above smuggling to pad his pockets.  The Alliance didn’t have anything on him or his ship, though they were aware that he wasn’t as clean as he pretended to be but he stayed to the backwater colonies, those lawless places the Alliance had forgotten about or purposely abandoned.  The Yokai was known for being fast, efficient, and cunning.

The Crow on the other hand, well they were most well known for having their previous crew and captain slaughtered because they stole the products they were meant to smuggle and sell.  Kuroo had no idea why Sawamura had decided to captain that sinking ship, it really was an ugly beast, but he didn’t mind giving Sawamura the jobs his crew was too busy to handle, or the ones that were a little more dangerous.  The crew of the Crow had a tendency to go against giants and manage to slip out with their skin intact.

The Alliance had found them in their favorite hole in the wall, or really one Colonel Oikawa Tooru and Lieutenant Colonel Bokuto Koutarou had found them in their favorite hole in the wall.  They had taken both the crew of the Yokai and the Crow and thrown them in the hold on their Alliance ship, an impenetrable castle.  Then they had been ordered to go rescue the surviving colonist that had been kidnapped by the Reapers.

No one really knew where the Reapers came from or what they were.  They swooped into backwater colonies, killed most, raided everything they had, and then took a few to slowly torture and eat.  The Alliance had a sure fire way of dealing with a group of Reapers when found, they blew them away and without mercy.

It’s exactly what the Alliance planned to do in a little over an hour, the 50 or so men, women, and children an “unfortunate casualty”.  Except Oikawa and Bokuto didn’t see it that way.  They had taken the ship Oikawa commanded and come to the little moon port to commandeer the Yokai and the Crow to save the people before the Alliance army got to the Reapers and opened fire.

Kuroo had spent almost his entire adult life perfecting his horrible reputations as someone not to mess with, as someone who has very little to lose and doesn’t care about the consequences.  How Oikawa or Bokuto managed to realize he was a bleeding heart was beyond him.  He had helped a couple colonies, saved a town a time or two, there was that one time he protected an entire planet but he left before anyone could question him.

It was even more of a shock to learn that Sawamura Daichi, the guy voted Most Likely to Blow up an Alliance Ship, had been apart of the Alliance.  Sawamura didn’t have the reputation Kuroo had, he was known as strong and tough but fair.

Kuroo and Sawamura had agreed to go after the colonist, as long as Oikawa went aboard the Crow and Bokuto came with Kuroo.  They agreed readily and it was a telling sign about how much those 20 or so strangers meant to the two Alliance soldiers.

“Why aren’t they coming in?”  Bokuto asked, peering out the window in front of the control panel.  Inky blackness spilled out as far as the eye could see, light up by tiny speckled stars.  They were close to an unoccupied moon that overtook the whole left half of the windows.

“They are big in psychological torture, waiting to see if we’ll kill ourselves to avoid the actual torture they are going to inflict on us.”  Kuroo answered easily, eyes travelling over the large craters in the moon's surface before turning back to something much more interesting to look at, which was Bokuto.  “You planning to shoot your way out?”  They were dead in the water surrounded by five Reaper ships on all sides.

“Well I’m not going to go quietly.”  Bokuto leaned over Kuroo, pressing close into his space but Kuroo could only smirk in answer.  He was some Avian species, Kuroo could see that much but he was surprised at the broadness of Bokuto.  Most Avian-types were tall and slender, regal looking without even trying.  Bokuto was tall but there was nothing delicate about him.  His eyes were a sharp gold, which should have appeared cold or frightening but they were teeming with life.  Kuroo could see feathers in Bokuto’s two-toned hair and he wanted to run his fingers through it.

“We could rig the door to explode when they try to force entry.”  Kuroo offered, glad when Bokuto’s face broke out into that manic grin as he laughed, warm and inviting.  Kuroo’s never been interested in sex, but he would very much like to press his lips against Bokuto’s throat and feel that laugh against his skin.

“What else you got?”  Bokuto pulled Kuroo up to his feet as they both trudged out of the control room.  Kuroo didn’t let himself think about his dead ship, how it was the only home he had ever known.  He was mostly synthetic and mechanical bits and pieces put roughly together to resemble the human he once had been before an explosion nearly took his life.  He looked close enough to an android that people instinctively shied away from him.  It worked well in his line of  business, most people thought he couldn’t feel any pain so they didn’t bother to try and fight him but it meant he never had a home.  The Yokai had been his first, the money pulled together from hours of strenuous and sometimes degrading work.

His crew was safe and that’s all that really mattered.

They had used the Yokai as a distraction because it had a hook engine.  Hook engines were rare, they were expensive and temperamental but it meant that his ship could go faster and farther than most other ships.  Most didn’t bother with them because jump drives meant ships could almost instantly travelling hundreds of light years away, but jump drives had a small shelf life and they took a while to warm up.  The Yokai had a jump drive, of course it did, but other ships could follow when you jumped so the plan was to distract the Reapers with the Yokai, use the jump drive and then the hook engine to get away while the Crow grabbed the prisoner cube.  The Repears always kept their kidnapped in a small prisoner cube that was left outside the main ship.

The Crow had managed to get the cube and the Yokai had made the jump but the Repears were on their tail.  They shot them with the Seven K, which was a one time powerful weapon that made ships go dark.

Kuroo had reported the use to the weapon to Sawamura, who had contacted him via radio wondering where they were.  It had been a short conversation, there wasn’t really much to say.  Kuroo knew Sawamura would make sure the crew of Yokai was taken care of, they were the only family Kuroo had.

“Kuroo?  Still alive?”  Sawamura’s staticky voice came from the com Kuroo had shoved into his pocket.  Kuroo pulled it out as he kicked open a smuggler hole, smirking as explosives were revealed.  Bokuto whistled appreciatively as they both carefully pulled the boxes out.

“For the time being.”  Kuroo answered back.

“Do you still have that land rover?”  Kuroo glanced over at said land rover, tethered to the cargo’s floor.

“Uh yeah.”  Kuroo had won it in a game of poker that had somehow ended with Sawamura and him being naked in the middle of the desert on some backwater planet.  After that Yaku and Sugawara had banded together to forbid Sawamura and Kuroo from drinking.  With all his non-human parts people assumed Kuroo couldn’t really get drunk, those people would be wrong.  Even the smallest amount of alcohol knocked Kuroo off his seat, though Sawamura was a bit of a lightweight himself too.

“First I need your exact coordinates, then I need you to tell me which way your ship is facing, and then I need you and Bokuto to get into that land rover and drive it out your cargo doors when I say so.”  Sawamura said in a tone of voice Kuroo knew all too well.  It sounded calm and collected but Kuroo knew better, knew it was Sawamura’s ‘I’ve got a crazy idea that might get us killed but it might just work.’

“Daichi, they’ll shoot you out of the sky before you even make it to us.”  Kuroo answered back.

“Not if they are busy with the Alliance.”  Sawamura said quickly, voice a little more low pitched than normal.  It was his ‘Kuroo we’ve all gotta die sometime’ voice.  “We’ve already dropped off the colonist, what do you say Tetsu?  Scared?”

“Fuck you and fuck this, fuck- sky above Daichi!”  Kuroo laughed, a panicked cackle before he grabbed a computer to give Sawamura his exact coordinates and tell him which way his cargo door was facing.

“We’re really going to drive this vehicle, not meant for the pressure of space, out of your cargo door, which isn’t meant to open unless it’s on land, into empty space and try to land in another ship?”  Bokuto asked but he was already untethering the land rover as Kuroo helped.

“Want to back out?  I would not recommend going against Daichi, he is terrifying when mad and he’ll be real pissed if he has to come onboard this ship to drag us out, which he will. No matter if the Alliance is firing at us.”  Kuroo hopped into the rover, flicking it on and booting up the system.  Bokuto followed with an easy grace as he taped the thin layer of glass that surrounded them.

“If we survive this I’m going to marry you.”  Bokuto pulled on his seat belt before reaching over to do up Kuroo’s.  Kuroo smirked down at him.

“No kiss first?”  Kuroo asked, only realizing how serious he was after he said it.  Bokuto tilted his face, golden eyes staring into Kuroo’s own before he leaned forward and pressed their lips together in a chaste and soft kiss.  “Good.”

“Good?”  Bokuto laughed.

“I thought Avians didn’t have marriage.”  Kuroo backed up the rover as far is he could in the cargo hold.

“I’ve always liked the look of them.”  Bokuto answered honestly and Kuroo nodded as he held the remote for the cargo hold, waiting for Sawamura’s signal.

“Okay but you have to wear your uniform.”  Kuroo said and Bokuto laughed.

Their laughter stopped as they heard the distinct sound of weapons being fired.  The Yokai shook and shuddered.

“Now!”  Oikawa’s voice yelled over the coms.  Kuroo hit the button to open the cargo hold before pushing the land rover to full speed, bursting out of his ship and into the inky blackness of space.  The stars looked further away, the moon so much more massive.  The thin glass started to crystalize, cracks appeared as the machines started to freeze and stop working.

Suddenly the Crow appeared in front of them, medium-sized vessel painted fully black.  The land rover slammed into the Crows own cargo hold, flipping and landing upside down, throwing its two passengers around.

“If you two are alive, hold on.”  The ship shook and turned, tossing the land rover around like it was nothing.  Kuroo cringed, tasted metallic blood in his mouth.

“Bo?”  Kuroo wheezed out, hanging upside down and fighting with his seatbelt.  It finally released him and he cracked down onto the hood of the land rover.

“That was-” Bokuto released his own seat belt, there was a cut on his forehead that was gushing blood.  “Wild.  Awesome?  Horrible?  I don’t know, what’s my name again?”  Kuroo laughed and leaned forward, kissing Bokuto softly despite the blood.

“Give me some sign you are alive down there.”  Sawamura’s strained voice came over the coms.  Kuroo grabbed his radio from his pocket.

“That was some nice flying captain.”  Kuroo said and he heard Sawamura’s bark of relieved laughter.  “We’re going to borrow your med bay.”

“Need help?”  Sawamura asked and Kuroo looked over Bokuto.

“No, just some scrapes is all.”  Kuroo took a deep breath but put the com away before he said anything more.  He would speak to Sawamura later, thank the man properly, probably bribe or blackmail him into going to another planet so Kuroo could barter for another ship to replace his old home.  Kuroo didn’t let himself think too hard about the Yokai, he was alive and while the Yokai was much more than just a ship, he knew it had served him well.

Kuroo and Bokuto crawled out of the broken land rover.

“We are hiding out on a frozen planet while the jump drive boots back up, it’ll probably be a couple hours.”  Sawamura’s steady voice came over the coms once more as Bokuto followed Kuroo to the medbay.

Kuroo helped Bokuto patch up the couple scrapes he had gotten when they had been thrown around in the land rover.  The cut on his forehead wasn’t deep, just bled a lot, and his pinky had been dislocated but just small injuries.

“Ah- you don’t have to- most people don’t like-” Kuroo stuttered as Bokuto went to help Kuroo with his injuries.  Bokuto tilted his head to the side, confused.  “I’m not really pretty under the clothes.”  Kuroo admitted quietly.

“If it bothers you I won’t look, but I like what I’ve seen so far.”  Kuroo wasn’t use to that sort of honesty, those kind of compliments that don’t expect anything in return.

Kuroo took off his vest and shirt in response, trying not to cringe at the metal bits embedded in his skin.  The job was rough, he looked like a jigsaw puzzle put together a little wrong, but it worked.  Kuroo had the money to fix himself up but he never really saw the point, there were always repairs and other more important seeming things to spend the money on than to make himself pretty.

“So, what are you planning to wear to our wedding if I’m to be in my officer robes?”  Bokuto asked, not even flinching at how Kuroo looked as he went about patching up the long, thin wound on his shoulder.  Kuroo couldn’t help the smile that came over his face.

After Bokuto was done Kuroo put his shirt and vest back on.  Bokuto reached up, slowly and carefully cupping the back of Kuroo's neck and drew their faces together until their foreheads were touching.  A soft, comforting pressure that made Kuroo’s tense body relax.  Kuroo knew this was a custom amongst Bokuto’s people, something shared only between family and close friends to bring comfort, to show love.

“Better?”  Bokuto asked, opening his luminous eyes as he leaned back.  Kuroo nodded before walking out of the medbay, Bokuto walking to his right.

They walked into the command deck of the Crow and instantly regretted it.

“Colonel!”  Bokuto sputtered out.

“Get some Daichi.”  Kuroo cheered as Bokuto pulled him out to the sound of Oikawa’s swearing and Sawamura’s laughter.  “Hopefully they wash that chair afterwards, but I guess Oikawa was the one who was naked-”

“Sky above Kuroo.”  Bokuto groaned, covering his eyes and Kuroo cackled loudly.  The picture of a naked Oikawa Tooru straddling a mostly clothed Sawamura Daichi in the pilot's chair would probably haunt Bokuto for a while.  “Does he do that a lot?”

“No?”  Kuroo said, unsure.

“I thought the Colonel hated him!”  Bokuto wouldn’t uncover his eyes so Kuroo had to guide him around the ship.  Oikawa had tried to pick a couple fights with Sawamura, needling him constantly but Sawamura handled Oikawa the way he handled everyone, with a warm smile that made people want to lean against him and trust him with their lives.

“I guess we’ll be seeing much more of each other.”  Kuroo said with a grin as Bokuto finally uncovered his eyes, looking over at Kuroo.  Sawamura wasn’t the type to do anything casually, and Oikawa seemed the same way.  Oikawa might pretend to dislike Sawamura but Kuroo had seen the way Oikawa had looked when he volunteered to go on the Crow instead of the Yokai.

“That’s not such a bad thing, right?  Even though you hate the Alliance.”  Bokuto sounded unsure of himself.

“I don’t hate everything about the Alliance.”  Kuroo answered honestly, palm sliding against Bokuto’s before entwining their fingers together with a smile that Bokuto mimicked back at him.

[isabellestillman]

Strong (In)Dependent Woman

From an evolutionary perspective, humans are not meant to be alone. Darwin and our seventh-grade science teachers would have us recall that the foremost objective of any living thing is to procreate. Our species requires the meeting of two distinct individuals to do so: we need a second human to survive.

From the perspective of my elite, liberal, feminist upbringing, a young woman ought to survive on her own. In my world, engagements before age 25 are met with shock if not opprobrium, breaking up with him is encouraged in favor of “doing you,” career-based choices are lauded over those that prioritize relationships. ‘Survival,’ in my case, often seems synonymous with ‘self-reliance.’

Run fast, be smart, get dirty, eat what you want—and don’t ever think you need a man to make you whole: it’s a crucial set of tips, an education in womanhood of which too many girls and women are deprived. It’s one that I’ve taken seriously throughout my adolescence. But having internalized its expectations of autonomy, I’ve begun to scold myself for longing, for loneliness, for the slightest whiff of dependence.

It is this capacity to scold that I now question.

Will was my blind date to a wine-and-cheese dorm party my junior year of college: an unfamiliar face with mountain-man hair, his gangly frame swimming in a sport coat, paired perfectly with beat-up trail running shoes. It was a first sight thing. That night we didn’t leave our corner of the room once. We traded thoughts on the Green Mountains and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, privilege and justice, the scenes at the tables where we’d grown up eating dinner.

The next week, we went for burgers and beers in town. Four days later, I wrote in my journal, “Something I know for sure: I am falling in love.” From then on, we saw each other every day. We’d drive down dirt roads to catch sunsets and eat pancakes in bed and try to figure out how to be good in the world.

We were so different; that was what drew me in. I craved something other, something to shatter the carefully sculpted perspectives I’d held for the first two decades of my life. Will challenged me, his mind full of questions I’d never wondered and convictions I’d never entertained. I was spellbound by his way of seeing the world, hungry for the way he made me eat away at my own beliefs. For a while, I thought that was what it meant to find a partner.  

But over time, our differences began to wear, revealing themselves not just as day-to-day misunderstandings but as existential crises. Little things at first: Will was a minimalist, the owner of roughly five shirts, a couple pairs of shorts, and a laptop from 2007. I like clothes (whatever!), enjoy dinner out, spent $30 on Amazon for a poster to hang in my dorm. The first winter of our relationship, I bought a new sweater. I wore it to his house and waited in his bathroom, talking to him through the curtain as he finished showering with his simple bar of soap. I caught my reflection in the mirror—the sweater suddenly egregiously bright—and felt immediately sick to my stomach: You don’t need this sweater, or any of the countless things you have. You’re wasteful and spoiled. Your priorities are all off. What is wrong with you?

Maybe you know the feeling–when minor lifestyle choices bear the weight of character traits, criteria for judgment. Will managed to keep his world view consistent down to the last detail—living only on bread and peanut butter, listening only to music with ‘real’ messages, keeping as much distance from his phone as possible. And, in contrast, I was shallow, asinine, silly, out of touch with the systems and structures of the world.

It was more than just wardrobe choices. It was Big Ideas About How To Live: my drive to change the world and his fear of unbridled ambition; my need for light-hearted frivolity, his reading of my laid-backness as a failure to scrutinize my surroundings; my trusting of certain ideas, his only constant being skepticism.

As these chasms grew, my strength depleted. And the same person who made me question my worth was the one I turned to for affirmation. If Will couldn’t spend the afternoon with me, I wondered what it meant and begged him to assure me it was nothing. When I felt unseen or inferior, I would escape to his dorm room to feel his hands in my hair, the band-aid of physical touch. I could never hear the words “I love you” enough. I needed him to say I was smart, insightful, vibrant: that he loved me even with my flaws. I needed him to tell me I was good.

It ended almost as suddenly as it started. A phone call three months after graduation. And soon, I began to wonder if my ‘flaws’ had really been flaws at all.

That summer, I moved to Boston to get my Masters in Education, knowing that what I needed to work on was being good enough for myself.

And it worked.

I became the strong independent woman my upbringing had enshrined. I got a 4.0 GPA at Harvard, took on double the required teaching load, created a new social circle, read and wrote more than I had in years. I got drinks and kissed by the Charles and met people’s friends and sometimes stayed the night. I dated around.

In the midst of all this, my best friend broke up with her long-term boyfriend. It was a long time coming, but nonetheless sad, difficult and dark. It was also, as our group of girlfriends agreed, a great time for Zoey to “work on herself.” “Time to do you,” we said. “Time to become the strong independent woman you envisioned when you made this decision.” Plant a garden, we suggested. Make a scrapbook, join a soccer league, play poker, paint. Make yourself happy. Be independent.

It was funny, hearing myself counsel Zooey. So convinced that I knew what she needed—to do things that ‘made her independent’—advising her with ostensible confidence, but never quite sure how, exactly, I’d arrived at my own self-discovery. I’d certainly tried to learn to cook, to train for a half marathon, to finish the Sunday crossword, to skateboard. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t these things that had gotten me where I was.

I was afraid, when Daniel came along that February, that I hadn’t yet solidified my independence, that I was still vulnerable to other people’s ideas of what would make me ‘good.’ But as we spent more time together, that fear sort of dropped away. Eventually it stopped occurring to me at all, because with Daniel I never felt like there were expectations. I felt like my own self, at my very best. The most perceptive observer, eagerest listener, funniest banterer, caringest ally, cleverest referencer, insightfulest reflector, outgoingest adventurer, sweetest lover: peak Isabeller. Not because I was trying. Because Daniel somehow brought it out.

In the spring of 2017, I got a job teaching at a school I believed in, in Denver, which I knew would suit me better than Boston. I didn’t want to leave Daniel, but in my strong independent heart I knew better than to base a career choice on some guy I’d been dating a few months. Even if I did suspect, as I still do, that he might be the guy. As my friends, family, and culture had taught me, I sided with my strong independent woman self.

It was a tearful (sobful, really) sunrise parting, imbued with the understanding that staying together would be essentially impossible. He was a third-year medical student, I a first-year teacher, the number of three-day weekends sub-three, the distance a seven-hour, two-thousand-mile journey.

I pushed. I said, “Let’s leave the option open,” and, “It might be worth a try.” He smiled noncommittally, saying it didn’t make sense, that it would be more pain-inducing than joyful. The rational side of me saw his reasoning as legitimate. The strong independent side of me saw single life as ‘the right thing’ for me. But the feeling side of me still believed that it was possible. That when something makes you feel like the best you, holding on makes the most sense.

Now, lying on the floor of my new, empty apartment, my mind rings, “I need you.” And in some ways, I do. I need people in my life who inspire me. I need to laugh often, which we did. I need places where I know my best self comes standard. Just like I need these things from my friends. Why is it that different to need from a partner? Why is it that different to need from a man, a lover?

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If you have a minute, Google “strong independent woman”: the how-to’s are endless, not to mention simple, degrading, sexist, and frankly absurd. (My personal favorite: lovepanky.com’s “How to be a Strong Independent Woman that Men Love.”)

Our society puts so much value on independence: make your own choices, discover your own happiness. Look in the mirror and say, “I look fly in this sweater, and I’m keeping it!” It sounds empowering. But it’s just another “women should ____.” A sexist expectation. A pigeonhole that’s exhausting at best, inhuman at worst. Being human means at least sometimes reveling in relying on others, in the beauty of finding your best self with other people—in a dependence that secures your survival, rather than threatens it.

I’m working on a theory of two kinds of dependence: in type one dependence, we rely on others to make ourselves believe we are good and worthy. In type two dependence, we rely on others because with them, we simply are that way. The fine line between the two gets lost easily in the fog of romantic feelings.  

It’s only a hypothesis, with a mere 23 years of evidence behind it, but it passes the common sense test. A woman’s choice of whether and how to depend should be just that: hers.