I follow a pair of YouTubers who discuss movies together and analyze the characters’ psychology and I absolutely love them. I absolutely love the relationship between them. And I might actually kind of ship them in a One True Aspec Pairing kind of a way … except they are not fictional characters and I wouldn’t want to write a post speculating about real life people … but I will do it (here) anyway, just without revealing their identities.
These two YouTubers have been friends for a really long time and the deep connection they share with each other is very evident in their videos. I guess you could say they are like brothers … but ya know, actual siblings don’t always necessarily have the best of relationships … but these guys totally do. They love each other and are clearly very important to each other. To me they are basically soulmates. Please note that when I think of soulmates, I don’t necessarily (or even usually) think of sexual or romantic pairs. I think of people who connect on a deep level and are on the same wavelength as each other.
But both of these guys are married to women. I’m biased because I get to see the dynamic between these two guys much more than I do their dynamic with their respective wives, but their wives have come on camera once or twice and my biased brain doesn’t perceive those married relationships to be as deep or as strong as the platonic one. And I’ve always thought that it’s such a pity that these guys have bought into the amatonormative narrative that made them want to go find wives even though they’ve had each other; and that they must be blind if they don’t think their relationship with each other can’t be sufficiently fulfilling. Because if I had a relationship like the one they share, I feel like I wouldn’t ask for anything else.
But then one day, it hit me: what they get from their relationships with their wives is very different, almost mutually exclusive, from what they get from their relationship with each other. In retrospect, it should have been obvious, but somehow, it just didn’t occur to me for the longest time.
The obvious candidate for what they get from their wives is sex. For two presumably straight guys, it’s very likely not possible to get sexual needs fulfilled from each other. But honestly, I think it’s only one factor, and maybe not even the most important factor. The reason I say that is, I have no idea how important sex is to these guys; but even if it was extremely important, I highly doubt they would’ve been fine with getting their sexual needs fulfilled from other sources while getting their emotional needs fulfilled from each other. I just get the sense that their sexual needs are intertwined with emotional needs. And they probably both want multiple sources from where they get their emotional needs fulfilled. (I’ve written previously about how it can be too much pressure to rely on one person solely for all your needs.) But I’ll return to this later. Let me think about what these emotional needs could be that they get from their wives.
The next candidate is romance. However, romance, as understood in much of the conversation in aspec communities, is really nothing but a cultural script for courtship rituals. Often, romance, as we understand it today, involves performative and transactional gestures. I’d have a hard time believing that people would have some kind of internal need for following a cultural script in the same way they might have a physiological need for sex. Sure, they might think it’s fun to get to know someone new, flirt, and/or engage in romance-coded activities like dinner dates and long walks on the beach, but they don’t need to get married for that and they can totally do dinner dates and weekends away with platonic friends. Once again, I think these romance needs (as well as the sexual needs) are intertwined with other emotional needs.
There is another kind of emotional need that I thought of when that realization hit me. To go over this, it would be helpful to refer to my 8 reasons for wanting relationships. This need corresponds to #3 on my list: validation. When I made the list, I thought of this as a broader concept: it is a form of validation to be chosen by someone to be their partner. It can make you feel special; it can make you feel desired or desirable. It can contribute to your sense of self-worth. But for the purpose of the current discussion, I’ll focus on a narrower aspect of it: romantic relationships, for cishet people, can offer the opportunity to perform gender roles and get validation through that.
In many societies, men get validation through being able to provide for their partners and/or their families. They could be providing for their wives financially, logistically, emotionally (e.g. being their “rock”), or even physically and/or sexually. I am coming at this from personal experience. One of the reasons it didn’t work out between me and my LO is because he had past relationship trauma from a time when he thought his worth was tied to being able to provide for his partners. And he didn’t want to go back into that cycle with me. And from my side as well, the brief time we spent isolating together during the early days of covid, I found myself wanting to take care of him in a domestic sense. For example, I actually started putting effort into my cooking when I never do that for myself. I think that is the closest I can describe to “feeling like a woman”. (To be fair, I’ve also put effort into cooking for my little brother and my best friends, so it’s not like it was exclusively for my LO, but you get the point.)
Also, this performance of gender roles can also correspond to #4 on my list: social standing. Society does tend to look well upon those who perform their gender roles well. For men, society looks well upon those who can provide. For women, society looks well upon women who can nurture. In fact, society often judges your worth by the kind of partner you can land. This might be especially true for men. That’s why so many guys feel like a loser if they can’t find themselves a girlfriend. Society will admire you for having a really pretty or very rich romantic partner, but society doesn’t care if you have a very strong friendship that can fulfill all your emotional needs.
So, basically, I’m supposing that (cishet) people might get the emotional need of self-validation and societal-validation from their spouses (or romantic partners) that they won’t get elsewhere. If we grew up in an alternate universe with different gender roles and societal expectations, people might never have these needs, but the fact is that we will only ever get to live in this one, in which most people have internalized the norms of the society in which they grew up. And while I am critical of heteronormative and cisnormative ideas that can drive people to seek fulfillment from romantic relationships, I can still acknowledge that “feeling like a woman” was a pretty nice, even satisfying, feeling; so I fully understand why people might want that kind of fulfillment.
Regarding these YouTubers I was talking about, it is incumbent upon me to clarify that it is pure speculation that this (“feeling like a man” validation) might be what they are getting from their relationship with their wives that they can’t get from each other. I should clarify that from whatever I have seen of their interactions with their wives, those do seem like loving and fulfilling relationships.
So, even though these two guys share a beautiful relationship, it can’t provide everything they each need. And they seem to have supported each other (based on their reminiscing) on their journey to manhood / achieving self-actualization through various aspects of their lives: careers, family, etc. They haven supported each other through their dating misadventures and bonded over said misadventures. They have supported each other through their education and career ups and downs and ups and downs with their relationships with their respective parents. While their relationship is lovely, this one relationship can’t be everything (and, indeed, shouldn’t be).
And maybe these YouTubers also share the beautiful friendship they have with each other with their wives as well … I haven’t witnessed enough of their dynamics with their wives to form a fair judgement … but as I understand it, a deep, spiritual, psychological, intellectual connection is not crucially necessary for an effective marriage. The crucial element is effective teamwork and complementarity.
Personally speaking though, I can never imagine wanting a partnership in which I didn’t have that kind of connection. For me, what I’d get from such a partnership has a huge overlap from what I’d want from a friendship and vice versa. And this could be a reason why I relate a lot to the “platoniromantic” orientation, even though I don’t fully identify with it.
Returning to the idea of sex, of course it is usually big a factor it is in setting apart romantic relationships from platonic ones. However, it’s also worth bearing in mind people often experience their sexual desires in a convergent manner with other desires. For men, the desire to love and protect and provide for a woman might be hard to disentangle with wanting to satisfy her sexually. For women, the desire to love and nurture and take care of a man could be hard to disentangle with wanting to satisfy him sexually. Even in homosexual relationships I’ve heard of one person fulfilling a “male role” and the other a “female role”, even though to be honest I don’t fully understand what that means. But the point is, gender roles might play a part in people’s desire for romantic relationships for many people.
I am now wondering about how one’s “romantic orientation” is influenced by gender and the desire to perform gender. And I also wonder whether queer communities, especially ones in which the traditional performances of gender has been questioned and challenged, can help to shed more light on the role gender plays on “romantic orientation”. (I put “romantic orientation” in quotes because I personally find it more helpful to think of orientation as a composite.) How are romantic relationships approached by those who perform a different gender than the one they are assigned? Or the one with which they identify? Or by those who do not identify with a gender? After all, the extant cultural scripts we follow in romance rely heavily on gender roles. So those scripts have to be either tweaked, massively altered, or discarded altogether in queer communities.
If you identify as queer and your queerness affects your relationship with romance, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Related articles
Are allosexual people more likely to find validation in performing gender roles? Just a question I’ve been pondering … here are some articles that lend support to that line of thought.
Genderless and asexual: two interconnected identities by Cinderace
On (Not) Being a Woman by Blue Ice-Tea
sildarmillion 
“And from my side as well, the brief time we spent isolating together during the early days of covid, I found myself wanting to take care of him in a domestic sense. For example, I actually started putting effort into my cooking when I never do that for myself. I think that is the closest I can describe to ‘feeling like a woman’.”
I can relate to that. One of the things I’ve found about living with roommates is that I get a lot of validation out of being able to do domestic tasks like cooking shared meals. And, because cooking is an activity I associate strongly with my mother, I do think of it as part of womanhood, and I do “feel like a woman” when I do it.
Then again, maybe “feeling like a woman” is more about “feeling like an adult” than specifically feeling like a female adult. It’s true that I don’t get the same kind of validation out of having a good job and being able to provide financially – but that might just be because I have a just-above-minimum-wage job and I’m not able to provide for others financially. Perhaps if I could I would find that a source of validation.
And there are activities I associate with my father that I enjoy doing. In particular, I’ve enjoyed reading novels to the child I live with. My mom read to me, too, but reading novels is an activity I particularly associate with my dad, and so, when I do it, I feel like I’m stepping into my dad’s shoes a bit. So perhaps it’s not about doing activities associated with one sex or the other, but simply about doing activities I associate with adults and parenting and how that makes me feel like a good roommate and a good alloparent.
Conversely, there are a lot of traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” activities I’m not so good at, like being nurturing or (as mentioned) bread-winning. So if you see “male” and “female” roles as clusters of activities, I don’t fit one cluster or the other. But I can borrow from both clusters and am thus able to perform my own, non-gender-specific version of adulthood that I think is still useful and valid. (One of the points I was getting at in “The Nother”.)
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Oh snap! It’s totally a valid point that those activities make me feel like a “woman” because I grew up in an environment where those things are associated with women. But if I grew up in the world of I am Not an Easy Man , those things might have made me “feel like a man” instead. But yeah, gender roles are defined by the society in which we live and the validation we get is by meeting those particular definitions.
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If you identify as queer and your queerness affects your relationship with romance, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Sure, I think that since sexuality, relationships, and gender identity are constructed as interdependent things, that relationships are a huge source of gender euphoria or gender dysphoria. For me, my gender dysphoria and gender euphoria have some of the same roots. When I came out, one of the messages I clearly got was that passing as cis and straight was necessary to find true love, and anything else would be tragically flawed. How can I be a “real man” like my father and grandfathers if I can’t marry, have children in a nuclear family, or meet the service and relationship obligations of manhood? I think the trans community is still collectively getting over the expectation that the end goal of transition includes a relationship that’s seen as heterosexual. And on the other side, it’s entirely acceptable to insult a person’s gender if they fail to perform the bewildering number of ritualistic behaviors expected to maintain romance.
On a social level, I still find the concept of romance to be extremely cisheteronormative. “LGBTQ Romance” is still a niche thing. I appreciate how Janet Mock writing for Pose cinematically took the storybook wedding episode and made in accessible by reframing all the rituals around chosen family. (Also Dan Levy and Emily Andras.) But I’m also keenly aware that all three groundbreaking wedding scenes happened in the last three years. Meanwhile mainstream churches still fight on how they’re willing to go in recognizing same-gender relationships.
And there are lots of things beyond gender roles that I find disturbing about how romance is constructed. Too much is supposed to be left to tacit and non-verbal consent, including sexual behavior, emotional monogamy, and sexual monogamy. We’re expected to “just know” the ritualism from living in our culture. Demanding explicit discussion of these expectations is seen as anti-romantic and transactional. These are norms that don’t necessarily apply to LGBTQ relationships, where a lot more stuff has to be negotiated.
Identifying me as “romantic” feels like I’m being cast in a bad Hallmark movie where I’m only given half of my script but expected to perform perfectly regardless. At this point, I’d rather use alternative terms to describe my relationships.
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That should say, “my gender dysphoria and my romance dysphoria have many of the same roots.”
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Wow, thank you for that! I hadn’t heard the terms “gender euphoria” or “romance dysphoria” before, but, sounds like “gender euphoria” was what I had been talking about in this post (i.e. people can derive gender euphoria from performing the cisheteronormaitve aspects of romance); and “romance dysphoria” sounds like something that I’ve been experiencing. Around 2 years ago, when I had my first proper encounter with “romance”, was when I started wondering whether I am on the aromantic spectrum, whereas before that, before actually encountering romance IRL, I had assumed I’m definitely not aromantic. I ended up deciding I don’t really relate to the concept of the romantic orientation or romance itself and I can call myself “wtfromantic” if I really needed a label. But, really, my problem with “romance” is that I feel repulsed by the way it is supposed to be performed and conducted in our world. Thanks for your comment; there was a lot of great insight in there!
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