A gay veteran’s spouse is not as equal as a straight veteran’s spouse.
Interesting clip, no?
This is Your Brain on Love.
Is it possible for one person to love more than another? In an attempt to find out, filmmaker Brent Hoff teamed with Stanford University neuroscientists to test lovers’ abilities, using an fMRI to monitor brain activity and measure whose adoration was the strongest.
It might be a funny way to try to find out, but still, it’s pretty damned cool.
The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.
But the couple married 50 years – wow. If they could sell what their secret was, we’d all be buying. My parents were like that, and I’m sadly witness to the only downside of a love like that in seeing my mother’s grief. Still, I’m sure she would say it was worth every second.
For me, at least, there’s this accompanying feeling that my eyes can see more, my senses are more alive, and I feel content in a way I don’t most of the time. It is amazing how the right arm around you, on the right day, at the right moment, can set the bar for what love feels like. It’s like that first flush, all over again, except it sustains itself in such a different way over time.
Asexuality/Aromantic Links
Don’t know what asexuality is? Don’t understand why someone might identify as aromantic? Would like, as a sex-positive feminist, to quit dismissing asexuality as a “problem” or illness or personal shortfall?
Here’s a little piece on people who identify as aromantic, and one particular variant of that identity:
* Also related to numbers: some people identify as aromantic, i.e. experiencing no romantic attraction. And some, like me, go “hold on a second, what’s this ‘romantic attraction’ thing and where are you drawing the line between it and platonic relationships? I don’t understand! How do you tell the difference between romantic love and friendship love and …”
Of late, we’ve been calling this wtfromantic (although I still like calling it “romantic orientation of divide by cucumber” and other people may have their preferred terms) for Makes No Sense, Does Not Compute, Wrong Question. What we’ve been talking about a lot is things like relationships that don’t fit the romance/friendship binary; emotional commitment; partnership and intimacy outside of romance; etc. This has some interesting intersections with polyamory.
I have to say that I entirely grok this; it has long been a dilemma for me that there is a certain intensity and intimacy in some of my friendships which I, or others, have misinterpreted as having been more than they were — especially when it comes to rules of sexual orientation, such as the When Harry Met Sally one (which states that het men can’t ever be friends with het women). I have spent more time explaining that my closest friendships are often with straight men, or with men who are straight but who radiate some kind of queer sensibility (e.g., the kind of guys others may think are closeted or bi).
That said, a lot of relationships that survive transition seem to make their way into this category, where the relationship becomes (infamously) “like sisters” or comprising an intimacy that once was but is no longer sexual (e.g. Jennifer Boylan & her wife).
On the one hand, I find these attempts to define every possible variation on types of friendship frustrating, but other times it is quite liberating – at the very least, to know others have been up against a similar feeling of not naturally falling into the ways other practice and/or conceptualize their lives and personal attachments.
MD = 8
Maryland just voted through a bill to make same sex marriage legal, with this added detail:
Maryland will become the eighth state to allow gay marriage when Gov. Martin O’Malley, who sponsored the bill, signs the legislation.
Wow. This is pretty much all of the northeast now, just when I moved to the midwest. I would so love to be living in a state where marriage was sane and offered equally to ALL citizens.
This Week’s Progress: NJ
Not only has NJ passed a marriage equality bill through the state house & senate, but they don’t have enough votes to over-ride the governor’s (expected) veto.
That would be 8, folks.
It’s cheering to see so much progress, even while the usual misogynist bullshit comes out of the GOP.
WA Makes it Legal
Governor Gregoire of Washington state signed the marriage equality bill into law tonight. That’s seven down, 43 to go.
Happy Valentine’s Day, queerios! What a lovely, romantic day to make it legal.
NC Wife of Trans Story
A good article by a wife about her husband’s transition, although it does gloss over sexuality, as most of them do.
The Prop 8 Ruling
Here’s a copy of the actual ruling.
Breaking: CA Court Declares Same Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional
Wow.
Seven + D.C.
Washington state’s Senate just passed a bill to make same sex marriage legal. It’s expected to pass all the way through to the Governor’s office, who is expected to sign it.
Washington will mean that seven states and D.C. have made it legal, folks. (Only 16 states had full suffrage for women before the Federal Government gave women the right to vote, and I don’t think there will be even that many before same sex marriage becomes legalized on the national level.)
