BOOK EXCERPT: What romance means to me
I’ve been thinking about what romance means to me and processing my thoughts and experiences of it, and I’ve had a massive shift in my understanding of the role romance plays in my life. It turns out that I’m a very romantic person, so much so that I’ve actually stopped identifying as a relationship anarchist, which I’ve been identifying as for over ten years.
So what does romance mean?
To me, it’s signified by a high level of intimacy and commitment. I can be physically and sexually and emotionally intimate with a lot of people, but a romantic partner has to experience me fully. One of the main ways this shows up, as a transfeminine person, is that my partner and our relationship create space for me to be able to express my femininity.
This level of intimacy has been an uncommon occurrence for me in relationships, not least because I didn’t even know it myself. I’ve only ever had one partner I’ve experienced this with, and it’s this experience that allowed me to fall in love with them.
I truly believe that understanding my gender identity has helped me unlock my understanding of what romance means to me. Few people get to experience my femininity, because they don’t create space for it. Especially as someone who has had trauma around needing to perform masculinity, it takes a lot for me to feel safe to unmask. And because I didn’t know that it’s something I need—the space to feel feminine—I didn’t even know to look for it.
Romance to me is that deep level of intimacy, where someone can see my naked soul, where they love me fully and I feel safe with them.
Once I understand this to be my experience of romance, how can it not be of primary importance in my life?
I actually have a non-romantic relationship in my life that comes close to this…
This is an excerpt of an essay in my book, At the Intersection of the Margins.