Love is a liberatory practice, not an endurance test

I know I’m not the only one who has a history of putting the needs of others before my own…

And then feeling really overwhelmed, spirally, and resentful about everyone else having so many needs…

But then remembering that people get to have needs and convincing myself that the real problem is that I’m struggling to hold it all.

Who am I kidding? We all know I’m not the only one.

I’ll tell myself: “I really should be able to hold it all. Limitless needs calls for limitless capacity!!”

So I’ll try out a fake-it-til-you-make-it approach until I crumble.

Sound familiar?

This particular strategy has not, historically, yielded the desired results for me.

Just because there are limitless needs in the world doesn’t actually mean any individual person can offer limitless capacity. It turns out that “I can hold everything for everyone forever” is not a particularly sustainable relational model.

Who knew? (I didn’t know!)

Turns out it’s not so cute. Not for me, and not for the people doing relationship with me.

It’s actually quite painful and heartbreaking.

Some of my life’s work is ending this cycle. I’ve had to admit that I have limits—not just as an intellectual concept, but as a bodily reality. There are things I can give and things I can’t. Things I can endure for a short time, but not a long time. There are moments when I have more room and moments when I have less. There are relationships I can show up for in one season that I may not have capacity for in another. There have been times that I simply don’ t have the needed skillset to meet a real need.

Learning to notice these things and say something before I hit the wall is one of the more caring things I can learn to do.

Sometimes it looks like noticing the particular flavor of resentment that arrives when I have volunteered for something I secretly didn't want to do. Sometimes it means recognizing that underneath my desire to care for everyone are underlying needs to be included, celebrated, prioritized, and cared for in return.

When we listen, our bodies are honest with us about this stuff.

Sometimes they tighten when something doesn't feel right, and sometimes they become really porous so as to lessen the impact of whatever we’re being confronted with. Sometimes we will feel a heat build, or something thudding in the chamber of our hearts. Maybe it is a knot in your throat, a subtle shift in your eyes, or the strong instinct to split and run. They have their ways of saying “absolutely not” long before our conscious minds catch up, not to mention our voices.

And yet many of you — like me — have learned to override those signals in the name of being good friends, partners, community members, organizers, comrades, and so on.

Many of us queer and trans folks have spent years imagining that there must be another way to love. We've questioned compulsory monogamy, gender roles, ownership, hierarchy, conditional love, and scarcity. Those of us trying to build relationships outside of the scripts we've inherited are especially vulnerable to getting stuck in this over-giving, over-extending pattern because the love we’ve known has not been enough. So we think the solution might be: offer more, offer it all.

We confuse boundarylessness with generosity. We treat every need as a personal responsibility and every limit as a failure to our beloveds. We become so committed to not reproducing harm that we become terrified of disappointing or causing pain for anyone.

It’s exhausting, depleting, and confusing for everyone involved.

If I believe that loving someone means I should be able to endlessly accommodate, tolerate discomfort, absorb their feelings, and keep showing up regardless of my own capacity, then I’m enacting a love in which endurance and martyrdom is more central than honesty and collaboration. Which is actually an old, hetero- and mononormative narrative, now isn’t it?

Liberatory love isn't about proving how much we can endure on someone else’s behalf. It's about creating relationships where nobody has to be limitless in order for everyone to know that they matter.

This is part of why I created Somatics for Queer Liberatory Love.

I want a space where we can slow all of this down enough to actually feel what is happening. We can learn to notice what happens in our bodies when we’re about to cross our own boundary, or when we imagine setting one with another person.

We'll explore capacity, compassion, contradiction, shame, conflict, repair, accountability, surrender, consent, pleasure, belonging, and satisfaction. These are all layers of our being that contribute to that reflex to over-extend ourselves.

The hope is not that we can become more able to trust our own cues, recognize our actual capacity, and tell the truth earlier. We can practice staying connected to ourselves while staying in relationship with other people.

We can build a security in self that helps us become more comfortable with each person having multiple sources of love—not just ours—and to co-create carewebs where reciprocity can flow with relative ease.

I want more relationships where limits can be part of intimacy rather than evidence that intimacy has failed. Where care moves in multiple directions. Where we can tell the truth before we're at the breaking point.

I want love to be something that makes more life possible, not something that requires us to disappear ourselves in order to sustain it. For me, that is a central part of what makes love liberatory. We get to be present inside of it, too.