Intimacy is beyond kisses and cuddles and sex. Intimacy is getting a headache and taking a nap, and waking up to your laundry folded and your partner rubbing your back. Intimacy is crying and yelling at night about your past to someone who listens and comforts you. Intimacy is watching shows in your pjs for hours and eating pizza together and being able to communicate love through holding hands. It’s never running out of conversation but doing it anyways to enjoy silence.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Intimacy was defined by my health teacher as: Being able to feel vulnerable with someone while still feeling safe.
Tag: healthy relationships
If you ask yourself “Would Gomez Addams treat me this way?” And the answer is no, move tf on from that situation.
If you’re a wlw ask if Morticia would ever treat you this way.
If the answer is no, move on.
“Is this how an Addams would behave?” Is the best way to make sure you’re being treated fairly and with love
Here’s an unpopular opinion that shouldn’t be unpopular: Not wanting sex is a reasonable boundary to set for literally any reason. Be it your trauma, your mental health, your sexuality, or any other factor. Your partners should respect that and they should respect you. This shouldn’t be a debate.
I will teach my daughter how to love, but most important how to stop. They never teach you how to stop.
They truly don’t. This is a beautiful lesson. Teaching her to know when to let go, when to know she’s worth more than what she’s getting.
I’m really uncomfortable with stories where one person is like, really wary and Doesn’t Trust Anyone/Believe in Love because they’ve Been Hurt Before, and their love interest’s way of Teaching Them to Trust Again is to just utterly ignore their boundaries.
Especially if whenever our prickly protagonist calls them on it, the love interest shames them and insists it’s for the protagonists’ own good, because They Need to Learn to Trust Again.
That’s so fucked up.
After a bad situation, especially a bad relationship, it’s completely understandable and normal to be afraid of losing your autonomy again, of being railroaded and having your boundaries ignored like they were before. It’s completely understandable to be cynical about people’s intentions and to not want to fall in love when your love for someone has been weaponized against you before.
And the right way for someone to earn your trust should involve them taking the time to listen to and respect your boundaries and be there for you in a way that doesn’t threaten your autonomy. Someone who deserves your trust and love won’t try to bully or manipulate or coerce you, even “for your own good!”
Someone who wants to earn your trust and love should be willing to prove that they can be trustworthy. If it’s too much work for them – which is fine! – they shouldn’t be pursuing a relationship with someone who doesn’t feel safe without that work.
It’s not romantic for someone to decide that their interest in someone gives them the right to do absolutely anything, however inappropriate, that might result in a relationship. It’s really gross that we get sold this idea that it’s “romantic” to overrule people’s boundaries and autonomy, as long as your goal is to be in a relationship with them.
It’s not romantic. Stories where this happens are not good love stories. They’re stories of people afraid to trust, having their choices taken away from them yet again.
i see all these posts around here that are like “date someone who…” and all that’s fine and good but like i feel like they focus on cutesy stuff and leave some really important stuff out. so like yes, date someone who you can watch netflix with and pet dogs with and make waffles with but also
- date someone who will call you out on your shit
- date someone who thinks the sun shines out of your ass, but also knows you’re not perfect and will offer the support you need to change and grow
- date someone who doesn’t passively accept your flaws, but recognizes them and helps you deal with them
- date someone who you can disagree with but still love and care for all the same
- date someone who can understand where you’re coming from and help you through your rough times
- date someone who won’t enable your negative, self-destructive habits and tendencies
- date someone who doesn’t think “you’re perfect don’t ever change” but rather “i love you and will help and support you in whatever changes you need to make”
- date someone who sees you not as a perfect lover but as a human being and who wants to be with you even though they can see all your faults
basically date someone who’s going to be with you, not just worship you. and more importantly, be this person for your SO. do not put them on a pedestal and call it love.
#sorry for the weird rant but i feel like it’s really easy to get into the cheesy YA tumblr view of what love is #and like picnics and midnight pancakes are fun
#but they do not a good relationship make #lots of kinds of relationships are dangerous #but i think we rarely talk about the danger of loving someone to the point of completely dehumanizing them #so please #do the cutesy stuff #but be there for each other #be critical #give each other the support humans need #bc just worshipping them won’t be enough
Things to Keep Out of Your Healthy Relationships!
(Alternately: how to identify problematic YA romances.)
Written by yours truly, contributions from @jltillary, @theinkrepository, @time-to-write-and-suffer, and @sakrebleu.
Non-consensual physical intimacy, especially in situations where it’s portrayed as being done for the benefit of the victim or situations where the victim forgives the forced intimacy because they decide they like it after it’s already been forced on them. Examples:
- Forcing a partner to accept physical comfort when they don’t want it.
- Kissing a partner in the middle of an argument.
- Framing consent as unnecessary simply because one person is attracted to the other.
- Stalking the other person, even for their own safety.
- Forcing the other person into some form of physical intimacy because they “liked it last time.”
- Implying that it’s normal for a certain physically intimate act to hurt and/or their partner should grin and bear it.
- Skipping over their partner’s preferred forms of intimacy in favor of what they want to do with/to their partner.
When in doubt: Consent should be explicitly given!!
Non-consensual communication. Examples:
- Physically stopping a partner from leaving in order to continue talking with them.
- Bringing up a topic the other person has made clear they don’t wish to discuss yet.
- Forcing the other person into conversations with people they previously showed they did not wish to talk with.
- Manipulating the conversation so that the other person shares a secret, especially one that doesn’t affect their partner.
Emotional manipulation. Examples:
- Telling the other person to do something (i.e. ‘go away’) as a test, where the person is at fault if they follow through and do as their partner asked.
- Blaming the other person for things beyond their control, especially “I wouldn’t be like this if not for you/your interests/your goals.”
- Claiming they’ll die (or kill themselves) if the other person leaves.
- Not wanting the other person to have friends of the same gender as their partner (i.e. a man not wanting his girlfriend to have any male friends).
- “If you really loved me you would do x, y, and z.”
- Demanding to be the most important part of their partner’s life, above and beyond their partner’s other responsibilities.
- Cheating on their partner as a form of punishment.
- Acting as though physical intimacy (or any other sort of intimacy) isn’t important, but then blaming the other person for not supplying it.
- Acting distant or cruel until the other person does what they want, or because the other person didn’t do what they wanted.
Demeaning actions and words, especially in instances where they blame the actions and words on internalized sexism, racism, etc as a shield, in instances outside of high-stress arguments, and whenever the character isn’t sincerely sorry for what they did or makes no point to change. Examples:
- Stating the other person’s interests or hobbies are inferior or a waste of time.
- Telling them they were look better if they did x, y and z.
- Demanding they stop doing something or start doing something else based on their gender, race, etc.
- Placing the other person in a subordinate role without their partner’s explicit consent.
- Not sharing certain pieces of information because they believe they know what’s best for their partner and don’t need the other person’s consent to act upon it.
- Bonus: Glorification of a partner simply for not demeaning the other person, (i.e. for acting like an average, decent human being,) especially when the partner in question boasts how amazing they are for loving their “curvy”/non-white/bisexual/not-like-other-girls/etc partner.
Please add more, if you feel so inclined!
Thank you!!! It makes me sick when a couple in a story act like this and it’s portrayed as “romantic”. Also I might add: Territorial behavior (such as overprotectiveness, taking care of the other when the other don’t want it, acting like they knows better what is good for their partner and doing something potentially illegal for “their safety” like locking them up) that is seen as romantic and sexy. And for some reason this is popular in YA??!
Intimacy is beyond kisses and cuddles and sex. Intimacy is getting a headache and taking a nap, and waking up to your laundry folded and your partner rubbing your back. Intimacy is crying and yelling at night about your past to someone who listens and comforts you. Intimacy is watching shows in your pjs for hours and eating pizza together and being able to communicate love through holding hands. It’s never running out of conversation but doing it anyways to enjoy silence.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Intimacy was defined by my health teacher as: Being able to feel vulnerable with someone while still feeling safe.
intimacy, according to my professor of philosophy, is to be able to say “I do not know” without fear of being judged.
be sure to understand ur s/o’s way of showing affection and make them aware of yours.. some ppl show affection by buying u things and some ppl will say I love u a million times and some will make u breakfast some will leave u the last ice cream, but it’s really important to know about these things bc u could not notice them and feel unloved while your s/o feels taken for granted and it’s just all a big misunderstanding so please talk about these things
Learning about love languages can be so important when trying to build meaningful relationships with friends and family as well. Not everyone perceives the world the same way.
We have a tendency to express love in ways that are meaningful to ourselves, but that may not always be recognized by a partner. It can be helpful to simply say, “When I do X, I’m saying I love you. What makes you FEEL loved, though, so I can do that, too?”
Question of Smoke 