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arrowpunk · 8 months ago

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no I just wanted to show you that trads who aren't homophobic exist.

the fact you are married at all is already a tradition. :)

the fact you seem to have passion for treating your wife with the upmost respect and love is something all spouses do healthily regardless.

if you didn't care about any traditions why bother being married at all? why live together? why care?

I'd love to know genuinely how you think you being lesbian makes your relationship totally different from someone else in love? honestly?

Ok so once again confused as to why you’ve decided to make this a whole Thing, unless you’re looking for validation or something which I’ve already said I’m not gonna give you. I’m not trying to be rude, I’m doing my best here to take what you’re saying/asking in good faith, and I’d like to ask you to do the same for my response here. I’m not trying to be mean, though I’m sure an amount of it is gonna come off that way regardless, because I’m not gonna police my tone here.

Damn there’s so much for me to go into here I don’t even know where to start.

So like in your first ask you referred to yourself as a “catholic trad wife” that already tells me pretty thoroughly that we are incredibly different people and that our respective relationships couldn’t be more different.

I am not speaking from a place of ignorance about Christianity or Catholicism. As a matter of fact, my wife’s maid of honor at our wedding is Catholic. And we were both raised Christian. We were married in a church, actually, the church paid for our wedding. Contrary to what you seem to think I have no hatred for Christians or Christianity, or Catholics or Catholicism. I don’t personally consider myself a Christian anymore but my wife still does, and we do actually attend church pretty regularly (we like the sense of community that regularly attending a decent church brings, our last church before we moved to where we are now was genuinely the only reason I wasn’t homeless for a year).

I know it’s possible for someone to be a Christian and not be homophobic, I know it’s possible for someone to be both Queer and a Christian. But I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, I have no way of knowing what your personal definition of homophobia is. I have no way to tell whether you’re actually affirming of queer love and queer relationships and queer sex, or if you’re ‘Side B’ or ‘Side Y’ or whatever the fuck the middle of the line, trying their hardest to be centrist of all things when it comes to this topic, Christians are calling themselves these days. All I know is that you’re a “Catholic Trad Wife” who claims she isn’t homophobic. You’re on anon so I’m apparently just supposed to take your word on this. Which is kind of weird. I mean literally why the fuck should I, some random queer on the internet, give a shit about whether or not some random internet stranger that I do not interact with is homophobic? It’s a weird thing to show up in someone’s inbox and just say these things. Like do you want a pat on the head? Validation for being ‘one of the good ones’? I’m not gonna give you that. I do not know you. (Ok I’m actually like pretty sure I know who sent me this, but like I do not know you personally, and the time I spent looking at your blog and seeing the people you interact with frequently on here does not give me hope that you’re actually ‘not homophobic’ but I’m not gonna put you publicly on blast like that)

“If you didn't care about any traditions, why bother being married at all? Why live together? Why care?” -Okay see this right here makes it a lot harder for me to take any of this as said in good faith. I’m still going to. But it’s wild to me that you might’ve actually genuinely asked me this. Because I fucking love my wife and enjoy being around her???? And because there are legal protections that come with a marriage license???? Ma’am what the fuck kind of question is ‘Why care?’. Genuinely. What the fuck. Like it feels like I should insert that ‘I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people’ meme here. So like my wife and I love each other very much and we don’t need a marriage license to know that, like the strength of our love and care for each other didn’t change one iota after we said ‘I do’. BUT that marriage license is still really fucking important, there’s a reason queer people fought so fucking hard for the right to be married legally. There’s protections that come from being legally married that you just don’t get without that special piece of paper. And those protections are Really Fucking Important. Some of the big ones we, personally, were concerned about were hospital visitation rights, and legal guardianship. My wife is disabled, my wife’s mother has a history of being incredibly controlling. If she found out we were queer she wouldn’t have wanted my wife to be able to see me anymore. Now, the fact that we are married, and that we have moved many states away across the country from her family, mean that if her mom finds out about us, she likely will not be able to successfully get a conservatorship over my wife. I do not have legal guardianship over my wife, and I don’t want to, she’s an adult, she’s her own person and I should absolutely not have any legal control over her, that’d be really fucked up, but we also want to be absolutely certain nobody else is able to get any legal control over her. My wife is disabled, and I am her primary carer. If she was hospitalized for some reason, and we were not legally married, I might not be able to visit her in the hospital because I wouldn’t be legally considered family. That is a legitimate Safety Risk especially given that I want my wife to be able to get medical care and her mother doesn’t(Her mother is an anti-vaxxer who doesn’t trust doctors and put my wife through years of medical neglect in favor of ‘just praying harder’).

I have nothing against ‘traditions’ in general. What I take issue with is the culture surrounding ‘Trad Marriage’ the term ‘Trad Wife’ is a really loaded term, which heavily implies a Complementarian marriage wherein the husband is head over the wife. The whole “Umbrella of Submission” thing, the relationship hierarchy which goes ‘God -> Husband -> Wife -> Children’. I grew up in evangelicalism. I know what the fuck I’m talking about when I get pissed off about evangelical Christianity/conservative Christianity/what have you. You don’t get to performatively tell me ‘well not ALL Christians-’. I was a Christian, I grew up deep in Christianity, I have read the Bible front to back and back again. I went to a Christian University for a time. I still regularly attend church. I have yet to encounter any Complementarian marriage that is actually healthy, where the husband actually fully respects his wife as a fully autonomous human being who gets to have rights and opinions outside of him. I get that you think your relationship is healthy! I get that you think your husband loves you! I don’t know you- I don’t know your husband- I don’t know the ins and outs of your relationship so I cannot speak on the health of your personal marriage.

What I can say is that I know it’s a heterosexual relationship. You said yourself you are a catholic trad wife. “I'd love to know genuinely how you think you being lesbian makes your relationship totally different from someone else in love? Honestly?” I didn’t say it was totally different from ‘someone else in love’ I said “if you are a fundie or conservative christian or evangelical or what have you#and you see my posts about my wife and enjoy them#I NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS IS ABOUT QUEER SAPPHIC GAY GAY HOMOSEXUAL GAY LOVE#I have gay sex with my gay wife I am the homosexual lifestyle incarnate#I am a queer liberal leftest punk etc#my love for my wife is as queer as it gets#you need to know these things#there is nothing straight about this#anyways thank you for coming to my ted talk or whatever#pls do not repurpose my posts about my love for my wife for your trad fundie evangelical marriage it is NOT the same even a little#thank you” So I feel like it’s pretty damn clear here that I’m placing the divide here between my love for my wife, and trad/fundie/evangelical marriage. Because yeah, they aren’t even remotely similar, and since you said you genuinely wanted to know why I think that I’ll give you a whole list of reasons (I’m generalizing here about cishet white Christian/Catholic ‘traditional’ marriages).

My wife and I are on equal footing in this relationship. Neither of us is in charge of the other one. There isn’t a designated person who ‘gets the final say’ in everything that we might disagree on. We don’t have fights, we always approach conflict as the two of us together vs. the problem at hand. There is no “head of the household” here and there absolutely doesn’t need to be.

Now I’m making the bold assumption here that both you and your husband are heterosexual, cisgender, and white. But if I’m right- it was never illegal for you two to get married. You don’t have to worry that your right to exist is ever going to be a topic of debate in your church, in your family, in your friend groups, in the country you live in as a whole. You don’t have to worry that your right to get married might be revoked at some point. There are not any significant societal/cultural barriers in place that would stop or make it more difficult for you and your husband to get married.

You don’t have to hide your marriage from your parents or your in-laws out of fear of your personal safety. You don’t have to worry that if your family found out about your relationship you might be disowned or disinherited. You don’t have to worry that if your family found out about your marriage your parents might no longer let you talk to your younger siblings. You don’t have to worry about whether or not your brother would physically harm you or your husband, if he found out about your marriage. You didn’t have to take all of these factors into account and then decide that it’s all worth the risk anyway because you love your partner just too damn much not to.

You don’t have to be constantly aware while existing as a couple in public spaces that there are people who are disgusted by the fact that you even EXIST. You don’t have to worry about the possibility of corrective rape. You don’t have to worry that you might be attacked because you decided to exist in the vicinity of someone who doesn’t think you should. You don’t have to worry that someone might straight up try to kill you because of who you’ve chosen to marry.

You didn’t have to pack up your entire life and move across the country, just to be sure that if your partner’s parents found out about your relationship, that members of their church wouldn’t show up at your door and shoot you. You didn’t have to sit through an entire sermon at that church, pretending you and your partner weren’t a couple, because your family was visiting and they couldn’t know you went to a church that was okay with the existence of queer people. And sit through the entire sermon about how f*gs will never see the light of heaven, while the man at the pulpit made direct eye contact with you Every. Single. Time. He brought up queer people. As if to let you know he knew what you were. You didn’t have to meticulously plan out where you would stop for gas on your 20+ hour long road trip to make sure none of those places would be somewhere with a higher likelihood that you and your partner would get hate-crimed. Two weeks after your wedding.

You don’t have to worry that your sexuality might get you fired from your job or make it more difficult to get a job in general.

You don’t have to know that you cannot ever safely spend any holidays with your parents because they live in a place that is so incredibly hostile to queer people.

You haven’t had to deal with friends trying to be so so teeth-grindingly polite as they let you know that they really just can’t agree with your personal choices and think that what you’re doing is sinful when they find out you’ve become affirming and decided to get married. They still love you though! They just really feel the need to make sure you know that they don’t approve of your life choices and think that you’re sinning- solely based on the gender of your partner. Of course they can’t stop you from doing anything, but they feel it’s only right to let you know they disapprove. It doesn’t matter that your relationship is healthier than most cishet relationships you know, all that matters is that they think it’s sinful. Even if it’s not hurting anyone.

So I’m saying it’s different because the very foundations of our relationships are different. The risk factors of our relationships are different. Of course ‘Love is Love’ but there is something transgressive and subversive about queer love that just isn’t there in cishet white Christian/Catholic trad marriages. My wife and I are married and love each other deeply and devotedly in spite of all of these many many genuine dangers and obstacles. I’m not trying to say that you and your husband don’t love each other. I’m not trying to say you and your husband wouldn’t ‘risk it all’ for each other if you had to, that you wouldn’t also overcome the same obstacles my wife and I have faced, but you haven’t had to, you obviously haven’t even had to consider it if you’re genuinely asking me these things. I’m not trying to say that my love for my wife is somehow ‘better’ than whatever is going on in your marriage. But it is inherently different. I’m not saying it’s totally and completely separate and different. Apples and Oranges are both still fruits, but they’re not the same. And I hope you can understand why I, a very very queer human being, who has suffered much abuse at the hands of the church, would prefer if my posts about how much I love my wife weren't co-opted by cishet Christians to meme about their own relationships.

I’m not trying to be mean or rude. But I do genuinely hope you can understand how you speak from a place of privilege and that what you’ve said is, at best, in poor taste.

#ramblings of an arrow #arrows asks #I swear I'm not trying to be a dick #but you did come into my house and ask #you wanted an answer and you got an answer #all the stuff in here that was said about my wife or her family are things she gave me permission to say #I didn't just put stuff about her less than wonderful relationship with her mother out on the internet without running it by her first #I don't know what you want from me ma'am #but if it's validation you aren't gonna get it #I know what I said wasn't 'nice'#but it's how I feel #if you've followed my blog for any amount of time you really should know that I'm not a 'nice' person #I have tried giving you as much benefit of the doubt as I could possibly muster

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