For most people the format is the same; after a certain amount of time spent dating you have ‘the talk’, and become official. A year or two passes and you take ‘the next big step’ and you move in together. A few more years pass and one of you ‘pops the question’, you become engaged and eventually married. More time passes, more banal phrases in inverted commas begin to sum up your relationship, and before you know it, you’re knee deep in dirty nappies, and neither of you has gotten a wink of sleep in six months. You’re tired, you’re cranky, but here you are, living the dream, and you’re happy, right?
Since 2015, the relationship ideal that had been held in such coveted regard is now a package that is aggressively sold to gay couples. Not that it wasn’t an option before, it’s just that now it is done so with legitimacy and an extra weight behind it. Society said we can get married, they said they don’t care, that they want us to be able to live exactly as they do, and hoorah for that! But sometimes can’t help but feel like, now that they have let us in, they never want us to leave! Like the permissibility of our relationships can only be afforded to us if we conform to the societal constructs that they have had in place for generations.