Boyfriend. Girlfriend. Fiancee. Husband. Wife. Friends with benefits. Friends without the benefits.
When staring at these things, what do you think they all have in common? I will give you a moment to ponder this as you are getting a pencil, slash getting a cup of coffee. Okay, you give up. Okay I will tell you since I am a good person and all.
The following nouns that I have just shared with you are labels for relationships. Labels are something that cause you to put something or someone into a category, and make them that certain thing. Labels are something that add pressure to the relationship. But, where do the pressures of labels come from you may ask?
Well, it comes from society. From watching others on your social media newsfeed who are happy in love because their significant other gave them chocolate and roses on Valentine's Day while you're lucky enough to even get a 'Happy V-Day' text. We live in a society where a relationship label is sort of like a check point. Let's take the expectations of the word 'boyfriend.' A boyfriend is someone who you go out with on a whatever you want basis, buys you presents and tells you that you're the most gorgeous thing in the world. It's been a while since I have had one of those, but if memory and the help of watching a ton of chick flick movies serve me right, that's the way that it goes. But what is the need to put a label on something deriving from? Can we just have fun without putting a sticker on it?
We need labels for those perfect people out there. They are those people who have the perfect relationship with the perfect boyfriend. They are the ones that post about their bae being the best in the world. They ones who will have the perfect wedding and the perfect children where the cycle of perfection will then continue with a bang. They are the ones who ask you what is going on with that guy who you are hooking up with, and then judge you since there is no indicator whether or not you are just friends with benefits or something more.
Those people pressure you to a mold. We live in a society where we can write our own 140 status updates, but when it comes to writing our own rules for our relationship patterns we often fall short of having something to say. The relationships that we have sometimes don't need a label. However, because we are in the world where we need to 'ship it or make it Facebook offical, we need to come up with those labels.
I am a semi-fan of the label. I like them because then you know kind of what to expect. If I ever get a boyfriend, I know to expect that I am hopefully the only girl that he is doing stuff with, and that I can introduce him as my boyfriend. I don't like them because we are not a black and white society. Instead the lines are blurred. Of our genders, and of each other in general. Therefore, we can not expect relationships to fit those black and white labels.
Let's just leave the labels for when we go shopping, and out of our love lives. Wouldn't that be easier?
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