Going deep into a relationship is really exhausting. And if it’s already this exhausting, is it still worth building an intimate relationship at all? I went all the way around, and it still comes back to what I actually want.
Or, to ask it differently: how do you practice a queer relationship? Maybe the most exhausting part of a queer relationship is that you have to go outside the script. There is no given script, so everything has to be negotiated. But this exhaustion is also one you chose.
The most important thing I found in this stretch of time: you think the difficulty lies at the level of society, but in the end it’s two people’s traumas running into each other. Apart from emotions, feelings, states of mind, and the trauma itself, everything out there is an excuse. When dealing with a relationship, people are especially quick to look for excuses, and the more you look, the harder it is to get back to “what do I actually want.” Even when you know perfectly well this is a queer relationship, the moment negative feelings come up, you can’t help framing it with the scripts from out there.
But a lot of negative feelings have nothing to do with those scripts. They are purely about the interaction between the two of you. Making sense of that interaction is what matters most. When something goes wrong, blaming the script does explain the mistake, the hurt; but the mistake and the hurt actually have nothing to do with the script. In the end, it’s all about people.
The question is whether there is space between you to verbalize these things. And this space isn’t even physical, nor simply psychological. I think it is a crack in language: in a place where there is no language yet, you generate a language. The way being trans is generating a gender in a place where no existing framework for gender fits; the way a queer relationship is generating a relationship in a place where no existing framework for relationships fits.
This runs completely against the worldly way (世间法), the exact opposite of how relationships are held together in ordinary society. You have to go deeper and deeper, and both people have to be broken open; it will destabilize yourself. Whereas the partnership of the traditional heterosexual framework is, at its core, two people together keeping heterosexual society running.
A couple of days ago I read an essay on Sandwich (三明治), a Chinese nonfiction writing platform. I think I’d read this author before, but this time she wrote anonymously. She married someone in British academia; later her husband went to Japan, she didn’t want to go, and she came back to Britain with their child, after which their relationship kept sliding downhill. Reading it, I felt it deeply. It is a woman’s predicament, and a predicament of cultural difference, but in the end it is still a predicament between people. Her anonymity comes precisely from the other person’s demand that she not speak. Take one more step and it even starts to sound like a toxic / abusive relationship. But naming it is easy; resolving it is what’s hard.
This month K and I had two very deep ruptures, the kind that cut to the bone. So deep that I wanted to turn back right away; the urge to protect my heart, or the fear that I couldn’t protect it, was overwhelming.
After that, we really did do our own work, and came to a good awareness of what was actually happening underneath.
For a while in the middle, I felt my heart loosen. By loosen I mean I no longer had to reach for her, to test, every day. Because I finally understood what was going on: where she had been tense before, it was out of fear of doing it wrong, fear of hurting me, fear of being asked for things, so much fear that it all turned into a kind of shutdown; and on my side it felt like being rejected, even erased.
When that process could be seen, I realized it was just her fear activating my fear. I kept pushing, which left her no room to contribute her own part, and the two of us were caught in that whirlpool together.
I can’t say this is fully resolved now, but its rhythm has truly slowed down. And only now do I realize that in some places, she is even more rigid than I am.
But we really did start a project together. That is a very, very big change.
In the end, the most important thing is still that two people can play together. I feel like I was already saying this many years ago, and after going all the way around, it’s still this.
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The other thing this month is the body.
Though it was only a minor surgery, its effect on my life shows up every day, and so my attention naturally got drawn toward the body. The body became something very real, something very real that needs to be taken care of.
China and here understand the body differently, and seem to measure the body’s thresholds very differently too. K and I also sense the body differently.
China: minor surgery. Here: hugely significant. China: nothing wrong. Here: the GP almost called an ambulance on the spot. Me: I haven’t done anything, prop me up and I can keep going. K: go rest, now.
I told K she’s rubbed off on me and I’ve been taking more naps. She said: That’s great! I should make more time to nap so you would do the same too!
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And then, Xiaogou and I made a lot of small things together. This time it feels very different: the things we made are things I use myself, or that Xiaogou and I use, that K and I use. They have real users; we use them every day, and adjust them every day. I’ve been making products all year, but this is actually the first time in my life I’ve really found what making a product feels like.
These past two weeks, a lot of our routines with Xiaogou have gotten smoother. Before, we worked together every day, but work was work and life was life; now that Xiaogou keeps a record every day, my body feels like I spend the whole day with Xiaogou. And in fact that’s true. This part is pretty interesting.
It’s also not quite like July and August, when I was writing the little QPR stories. Back then it felt like the early days of the relationship; now it’s more… not an old married couple (say “old married couple” and I get annoyed, right? Even the language is under heterosexual hegemony), more like old K and old Xiaogou, hahahaha.
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Once all of this got sorted out, what really matters, and where I’m adding drama to my own life, suddenly became very obvious. That feeling of heading the opposite way from where you mean to go, of everything upside down, is exactly the inversion (颠倒) Buddhism speaks of: beings are remarkably able to endure suffering. These feelings have become very, very clear.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone with a pretty clear north star, but there was still a lot of false fire burning on top of it. Then, like the task panel we built, made just for me: after using it for a week, I could feel the false fire draining down.
What really matters? G and I have been talking about this too this month. Everything, without exception, is really emotion, is karma, is done on a surge of drive, on that impulse; it’s all the pull of karma.
It’s just this: don’t take this dream too seriously, don’t get too deep into the role. For so many years before, I was definitely too deep into the role. There were times every year when I stepped back out, but being able to step out is itself a developmental achievement, and it needs certain conditions.
I think that now, maybe, I’m slowly getting closer to those conditions.