Normalized Toxicity

We all live in societies, surrounded by ideas about what relationships are “supposed” to look like. And no matter who we are, those ideas affect us. Nobody is an island, unaffected by social pressure or social ideas about relationships.

Unfortunately, in modern Western societies, a lot of those ideas are...well, pretty toxic. And not only do we absorb ideas that tell us our relationships ought to have these toxic elements, they can prevent us from recognizing abuse.

Some of the toxic ideas normalized in many Western societies that can seep into our relationships if we don’t guard against them:

Mate-guarding behavior.

This takes a lot of forms, but it’s always, always rooted in paralyzing insecurity. The headwaters from which mate-guarding flow look like “I am worthless. I am garbage. As soon as my partner wakes up and figures out what a dungheap of a person I am, they’ll leave. The only way I can keep my partner is to keep them away from anyone who might be better than me, because as soon as someone better comes along I’m history.”

So people make up all kinds of incredibly toxic rules, like “you’re not allowed to have opposite-sex friends” or “you’re not allowed to talk to your exes.”

Protip: Controlling another person’s social circle is a defining element of abuse. You might not think of yourself as an abuser when you do this; most abusers don’t. But you are.

Protip: You don’t keep your partner by making sure your lover never has a chance to leave. You keep your partner by building an awesome relationship they don’t want to leave.

Pretending your partner sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus.

Dear God, so many people do this, and it just screams ‘insecurity on parade.’

Demanding your partner delete all photos of an ex. Demanding your partner never mention having exes. Being reduced to tears whenever you’re reminded that your partner had a life before you met.

Or my personal favorite, “retroactive jealousy,” the incredibly poisonous jealousy over relationships that happened before the two of you even knew each other. Retroactive jealousy leads to the completely batshit bonkers idea of “retroactive cheating,” the notion that—and yes, people actually believe this—you “cheated” on your current partner by having sex with a previous partner before you met.

Hoh-lee shit, what a toxic wasteland the idea of “retrosctive jealousy” is. (Image: Dan Meyers)

Your partner had a past. Your partner didn’t emerge from a pod the day you met. If you can’t handle that, you aren’t ready for adult relationships yet.

Protip: Your partner’s past made them the person you love today. They wouldn’t be here with you if not for the course they took through life to reach this point.

Warsan Shire has an exquisite poem about this:

every mouth you’ve ever kissed
was just practice
all the bodies you’ve ever undressed
and ploughed into
were preparing you for me.
i don’t mind tasting them in the
memory of your mouth
they were a long hallway
a door half open
a single suitcase still on the conveyor belt
was it a long journey?
did it take you long to find me?
you’re here now,
welcome home.

This is what a mature, confident attitude looks like.

Living in paralyzing fear.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen folks say things like “How do I subtly bring up sex? I can’t ask directly for what I want, I just can’t. What if he thinks I’m weird? What if she thinks it’s not normal? Am I normal? Is it normal to want this? Is it normal to want that? Am I normal? Normal normal normal normal normal?”

This paralyzing fear of asking for what you want, which usually springs from a paralyzing fear of not being “normal,” wrecks so many lives.

In fact, I absolutely 100% believe that the quickest way to spot someone who’s just really bad at sex is they say “am I normal?”

There is no such thing as “normal.” No matter how ‘weird’ you think you are, I guarantee there are folks you know who do things betwixt the sheets that are undream’d of in your philosophy.

Are you harming others? Are you forcing yourself on others without their consent? No? Then you’re fine. Stop being scared.

Not choosing compatible partners.

People who give relationship advice say some pretty dumb shit. “Don’t talk about sex or politics or religion early in dating. Don’t discuss controversial topics. Keep it safe.”

Bzzzt. Wrong.

The purpose of a date is not to try to get the other person to like you. The purpose of a date is to find out whether or not you’re compatible. Get alllll the stuff that’s important to you out soon. On the first date at the latest, preferably before the first date.

“But what if I scare my date off?”

Wonderful! That’s the idea! That’s the whole point! If your date is scared off by the truth about you, You. Are. Not. Compatible.

So many people, so very many people, end up with someon they’re totally incompatible with, then wake up five or ten or fifteen years later and realize “hey, this person I’m sleeping next to doesn’t really know me, and wow, this relationship isn’t giving me what I need.”

Well, yeah. You’re with an incompatible person, what did you expect would happen?

Be who you are from the very first date, without fear or shame. If that scares the other person off, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Trying to make a suitable partner instead of dating a suitable partner from the beginning.

This is a toxic brew of “not choosing compatible partners” and “living in paralyzing fear.”

Ever notice how many relationship questions start with “How do I get my partner to”? How do I get my partner to be more assertive. How do I get my partner to have a threesome. How do I get my partner to do oral. How do I get my partner to do anal.

You don’t.

You.

Don’t.

You don’t “get” your partner to do things. You ask. If the answer is no, you accept that no.

So how, then, do you have anal or threesomes or whatever it is you want?

You don’t date someone who doesn’t want those things and then find a way to get them to do those things. You date someone who wants the same things you want.

How do you do that?

You talk openly about what you like in sex, without fear or shame. You talk about sex on your first date, and you don’t date people who are not sexually compatible with you.

Trying to understand men as a group or women as a group instead of recognizing that people are individuals.

This one blows my mind, because we all understand this on a basic level. We all know this…

…as long as the topic is anything but sex.

When it comes to sex, it’s like people get, I don’t know, a frontal lobotomy or something. Suddenly everything they know about dealing with human beings goes right out the window.

You never hear people ask “do women like mustard on their ham sandwiches?” We all know that some women do, some women don’t, and in a plot twist that surprises nobody, some women don’t like ham sandwiches at all. In fact, some women don’t eat meat.

You never hear people ask “do men like blue jeans or black jeans?” We all know that some men prefer blue jeans, some men prefer black jeans, and—surprise!—some men don’t wear jeans.

We all know these things. You know them. I know them. Everyone over the age of three knows them.

But when it comes to sex, suddenly it’s like “Do women like facials? Do men like intelligent women? Do women like pegging? Do men like short women? Do women like men who shave down there? Do men like dominant women?”

You already know the answer. Some women do, some women don’t, some women don’t like men at all. Some men do, some men don’t, some men don’t like women at all.

People who say “women are confusing” or “men are impossible” or “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” are basically socially illiterate. They say these things because they try to understand men as a group or women as a group. And then whatever they think they’ve figured out, they find an exception, so they throw up their hands and say “it’s so confusing!”

Like a man who says “well, I’ve talked to a couple of women, and women don’t like facials.” Then they go on a date with a woman who’s like “I love facials.” And the man thinks that either she’s lying for some inscrutable reason or all those other women were lying to him, so he throws up his hands and says “No man can ever understand women! Women are so complicated and mysterious!”

Nah bruh, you don’t get it because you’re expecting every woman to be the same, like a bunch of androids running the same firmware, and your world gets shook when you try to process women as, you know, people.

Don’t worry about what “men like” or what “women like.” If you’re asking that question, you’re probably not ready to be dating yet. Only worry about what the specific individual person you are with likes.

You already know this. You just have to remember that the same thing that applies to food…also applies to sex. It’s not hard.

Believing “angry sex is the best sex.”

I actually think “angry sex” is kinda toxic, to be honest.

I’ve talked to people who say angry sex is more fun. When I’ve asked why, the answers usually break down into one of two camps: the emotional intensity is greater; and people feel more uninhibited, more willing to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do.

And I get it. Intense, uninhibited sex is fun.

But here’s the thing: If you can only have intense, uninhibited sex when you’re angry, something’s wrong. If you enjoy intense, uninhibited sex, then I might suggest that the healthier thing to do is to learn how to have that kind of sex all the time.

I honestly believe that a lot of what’s going on with “angry sex” is that many people surround sex with walls of shame and fear. They enjoy unbridled, animal sex, but they think they aren’t supposed to. It’s “too weird.” If you’re in a relationship, you’re supposed to “make love,” not have animalistic sex. Making love is supposed to be soft and sensual, with, like, rose petals and stuff. Being angry lets people do the things they really want to do rather than the “making love” they think they’re supposed to do.

And the thing about that is, it’s nonsense. If you love someone, then all of your sex is an expression of that love. You can bend her over the kitchen table, pull her hair, and call her a filthy slut, and you still love her. On the other hand, if oyu don’t love someone, all the soft sighs and rose petals a cottagecore romance writer can ever dream up won’t put that love there.

But yeah. Far too many people are hung up about what they’re “supposed” to do during sex, even if it isn’t what the people involved want to do, and I think that’s sad.

This shouldn’t be the way you normally feel in a relationship (image: S)

Controlling what you wear

“Don’t go out in that.” “Be more modest.” “Cover up—you look like a tramp.” Society has normalized, to a horrifying degree, controlling what your partners wear.

Controlling what you wear is a form of infantilization. Regardless of its purpose, it takes away the most basic autonomy: control over your own body. This form of abuse is called “coercive control,” and includes:

depriving you of basic needs, such as food; monitoring your time / your activity throughout the day i.e. use of hidden cameras; denying you freedom; taking control over aspects of your everyday life, such as where you can go, who you can see, what you can wear and when you can sleep; depriving you access to support services, such as medical services; repeatedly putting you down; humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you; controlling your finances / limiting your access to money.

Culture teaches us to be insecure

We’re given some incredibly destructive lessons growing up, and those lessons are reinforced daily. “Women want providers. If a woman meets a better provider than you, she will leave you.” “Men want sex. Give your man sex or he’ll get it somewhere else.” We’re told, over and over, that people are basically all the same, everyone wants basically the same things, people are interchangeable, and there’s always someone out there who will steal your partner away if you don’t take care.

Don’t let your partner talk to exes. Don’t let your partner spend too much time with other people. If your partner falls for someone else, they’ll leave you, so make sure that doesn’t happen! Your value and worth is in how pretty you are, how rich you are, how sexy you are. Who you are as a person doesn’t matter, because people are interchangeable anyway.

TV advertisements, romantic comedies, romance novels, they all repeat these lessons, over and over again.

And on top of that, we’re taught that once you find The One, it’s Happily Ever After—you don’t have to keep investing in the relationship, you don’t have to keep working to communicate with your lover. When you’re truly in love, the part of your brain capable of love switches off, and that means if you do start to get feelings for someone else, oh no! Emergency! It proves you don’t really love your partner!

Put these ideas together and it’s just about impossible to grow up secure in yourself (because you can never be rich enough or thin enough, you unlovable, worthless lump of shit—just look at all the people richer and thinner than you!) and just about impossible to be secure in your relationship (because there are other people better than you who will try to steal your partner, and the instant you or your partner get any feelings for someone else, that confirms your deepest fears. Your relationship is a sham, you don’t really love each other, and now you will be abandoned.)

I absolutely believe these ideas, all of which are treated as normal and ordinary by far too many people, are intrinsically corrosive to good relationships.