By Miri

I’ve never had a very good grasp on love. As a queer, kinky, and neurodivergent individual from a dysfunctional family, my ideas of love – what it means, how it is shown, who it is given to – have always seemed to drift from what I was taught love should be by the people and structures around me. In most spaces, it has always seemed that love was limited to the hegemonic delineations of platonic, romantic, and familial. There was seldom space for love to float between or beyond these pre-set categories and definitions.

For most of my life, it felt like love was broken into types. There was the type of love that you felt for your friends, the type you felt for those you were in a romantic relationship with, or the type you felt (or were supposed to feel) for your blood family. Each type came with a pre-existing set of expectations for expression. With your friends, you could be emotionally and mentally close, but sexual relations were less accepted, if you had sex with them, you were no longer just friends. If you had a friend that you felt you loved, you still couldn’t love them like you loved your family members, it had to be different; blood family had to take priority. If you loved someone romantically, it was expected that sex would be part of your dynamic with them. Deviation from these expectations resulted in misinterpretation at best and outright violence at worst.

As queer and/or kinky people, we already experience our love differently than our hegemonic counterparts. Even if our interpretations of love neatly align with the accepted different types, our love and expressions of it are policed around the world. Our movements and motivations are dissected and inspected for faults. Even with the strides that both queerness and kink have taken into ‘the mainstream,’ so many still view our expression of love as wrong. We are told we must love our family, even if we are not accepted by them. We are told our romantic loves are unnatural. We are told that not being interested in romantic and/or sexual relationships is a flaw to be fixed. We are told our friendships must fit platonic boundaries. We are told all these things and expected to be kind, gentle, and educational in the face of those who ‘just don’t understand.’

But what does it look like when we ignore all of the things we’ve been told? What does it look like when we imagine love beyond the limitations of platonic, romantic, and familial?

It took me years to truly begin to question what love meant to me. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve begun to identify language to describe how I love. The words may still be messy, but they’re true.

I started this article by saying I didn’t have a very good grasp on love. Maybe it’s better to say that I’ve never had a good grasp on hegemonic love. I love deeply. I love wholly. I love completely. But, my love for my loved ones has never fit neatly into the type it was supposed to. I’ve loved my friends as deeply as I’ve loved my family members as deeply as I’ve loved my romantic partners. I’ve been sexually intimate with friends while not wanting sexual relationships with romantic partners. My love weaves in, out, and beyond the boundaries of platonic, familial, and romantic. Sometimes, my love is all of those and none of those at the same time. I’ve taken words and created my own definitions to describe my love of someone.

I’ll tell you about one of these words: mush. The definition for this started out rather rough. The best I was able to describe when I first used it was that Mushes were the people I felt mushy about. Not very eloquent or descriptive. Revisiting it later, Mushes are the people in my life who are platonic, romantic, and familial loves simultaneously. There is no way to describe my relationships with or the love of these folks in a simple and digestible way. At different points throughout the years, we’ve been sexually intimate kink play partners, we’ve been platonic roommates, we’ve gone on romantic dates, and we’ve helped each other find and date other people. Throughout it all, our love for each other has never changed. They are my Mushes – my family, my friends, and my loves.

Kink teaches us to adapt our practices to meet our needs. If your favorite practice, rope, for instance, is no longer accessible due to injury or ability, you are faced with a choice. You can either adapt your practice by using new implements or techniques, or you can abandon it altogether. And if you have no choice but to abandon it all together, you can then choose whether or not you want to try something else that is still accessible or if you’d rather leave kink behind. The same tenets apply to love. We can adapt how we express our love to maintain our love through any solvable obstacles, or we can let our love fade.

As members of inherently subversive identities, hegemonic love is not as accessible to us because the structures that uphold it were not made to include us. When I was still trying to force my love to fit neatly into these boxes, love felt impossible to achieve. Often, it felt limiting and harmful. No matter how hard I worked to meet the pre-set expectations, I never met them satisfactorily enough to feel fulfilled. When I finally let myself break out of those confines, I found my queer and kinky loves to be more fulfilling than the love I experienced prior to my recognition of and entry into these communities. And that got me thinking, why must we continue trying to fit into boxes that were not meant for us? Why must love and relationships be confined to platonic, romantic, or familial? Why must love be limited?

Queer and kinky love is a beautiful thing because it pushes boundaries. Our power as queer and kinky folks lives in our ability to create. We have unimaginable strength in the face of a world that continually tries to break us down. We find beauty in the smallest of moments and love in the never-ending unexpected. So, why not create our own versions and definitions of love? I don’t have all the answers; I think I’d count myself lucky to have an answer some of the time. But I do have many thoughts, and hopefully, they resonate with someone else out there.

This article was originally published in the fourth issue of PROUD & Kinky Magazine. You may read it in its original format here.

Advertisement