(via danihell, who says: sophie muller makes amazing videos and this song never gets old)

yesterday, after 9 years together, mike and i got domestically partnered and i found out he prefers burger king to mcdonalds. now he can be on my health insurance which, given the fast food predilection, seems prudent.

after spending a few hours listening to one man insist he needed his marriage license NOW because his partner was giving birth tomorrow, and to a woman threatening the inefficient supervisor that she knows someone at fox 5, i came home and read some queer theory. if MARRIAGE BUREAU MELTDOWN was one of last night’s top local news stories, i happily missed it.

“Domestic privacy can feel like a controllable space, a world of potential unconflictedness (even for five minutes a day): a world built for you. It may seem of a manageable scale and pacing; at best, it makes visible the effects of one’s agency, consciousness, and intention. This leads to another reason the couple form and its spinoffs so effectively siphon off critical thought about the personal and the political: to refuse the maturational narrative of ‘a life’ would require a confrontation with another idea, that social forces and problems of living that seem not about the private ‘you’ are, nonetheless, central to the shape of your story…

…Yet it is hard not to see lying about everywhere the detritus and the amputations that come from attempts to fit into the fold; meanwhile, a lot of world-building energy atrophies. Rethinking intimacy calls out not only for redescription but for transformative analyses of the rhetorical and material conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies to thrive in the minds and on the bodies of subjects while, at the same time, attachments are developing that might redirect the different routes taken by history and biography. To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living.”

—lauren berlant, intimacy