A relationship I was in for four and a half years ended in December. (Salient to what follows: my partner was a straight, cisgender man.) Ever since my breakup, people have been telling me stories about women in their lives who’ve thrived after their long-term relationships with men ended. Women whose skin cleared up, or whose mobility significantly improved. I’ve felt lighter, happier, more optimistic and energized, more myself, and, frankly, less disabled.
As a woman in the world alone, I can interface with my body as I see fit, without having to manage somebody else’s relationship with my symptoms and their consequences. I inhabit my own reality rather than struggling to assert or explain it. Here, sick time is the only time, crip joy is the default joy, happiness is a skill I’m strengthening. I feel more attuned to myself and to the love and beauty inside and around me when I’m single, when nobody is gazing upon me and no external energy is interfering with my ability to read my own.
A lot of the women I talk to, most of whom also live with chronic health issues and/or identify as disabled, feel similarly. Sometimes it can feel like loving a man means forgetting how to love ourselves. In contrast, my friend Kai-lani describes being single as “the freedom to love on yourself.”
On an Instagram post I wrote about falling back in love with myself, my friend Olivia commented:
It seems it’s not just that there’s something about being single that’s good for us, but that there’s something about committed romantic relationships, and possibly ones with men, that are bad for us, that make it harder for us to honour ourselves. “Men are exhausting,” as one friend put it. For Harper’s Bazaar, Melanie Hamlett wrote about the toll bearing the burden of male partners’ emotional regulation puts on women. The article opens: “Kylie-Anne Kelly can’t remember the exact moment she became her boyfriend’s one and only, his what would I do without you, but she does remember neglecting her own needs to the point of hospitalization.” For those of us whose health is already precarious, the cost of relationships that drain our finite energy is amplified; perhaps the benefits we experience from opting out of them are more palpable, too.
I’m not entirely convinced that this is all about gender, the same way intimate partner violence is not confined to relationships between men and women. Can’t any relationship be(come) imbalanced, or diminish our vitality? Earlier this year, I shared a poem I’d written about not wanting to fall in love, and my friend Claudia, who lives with her partner, replied. We had a conversation about these questions via DM that we both want to share.
Claudia:
Claudia: I don’t know! This is partially why N and I broke up a while back.
When we got back together, there was a noticeable shift in our power dynamic and I absolutely felt more of myself in the relationship. Of course, I don’t think it’ll ever be the same as being on my own and to be honest I still struggle with that as I love being on my own. We still talk about breaking up now, but it comes from a loving place as we both know I do very well on my own.
I miss my own perception of time when I’m on my own and I also miss the whims on which I do everything. There’s always a compromise when partnered, all the way down to how you move through your day and how you think. I don’t think it’s bad or good but I feel like I’m only just realizing how much I like being an ever-shifting being and it’s hard to enjoy that fully when you have a partner.
Kyla: Do you feel like it’s gendered at all?
Claudia: I'm not sure! I definitely notice the power imbalance in my heteronormative relationships. There is always an emphasis on their perception of time and space and I wonder if it's because it's so static and unchanging whereas mine has always been more fluid, which obviously lends itself to my experience curving itself around theirs.
In order for mine to not curve around theirs, I often have to make my experience of time and space more sturdy, which inherently takes away the pleasure of it being fluid. So I don't know! I'm still figuring it out! Actively trying to stitch together two contradictory desires: freedom and access to my own movement-through-time WITH the act of loving and growing in love.
I honestly thought that love and freedom came together but it turns out it's a lot more complicated, particularly if you're in a heteronormative relationship, I *think.* I still wonder what it would've been like if I'd fallen in love with a woman four years ago. Maybe the same! But part of me feels like it might've been different.
Curious what you think?
Kyla: So fascinated by all of this. Especially the temporality aspect, which…I had noticed my own rhythms and how they conflicted with my ex’s, but I always thought it was a health vs. capitalism conflict.
The impact of the gender of one’s partner is something I do think about a lot, as a bisexual woman. I still don’t know what’s gender and what’s society and what’s internal vs. external, innate vs. learned, etc., but I do know that this feels like a puzzle I’ll have to solve if I want to have certain types of partnerships.
Claudia: I've also thought about health and capitalism in relation to all of this, too. Really difficult to parse out what is the result of gender and what is the result of having an able-bodied partner, that definitely comes up a lot with us. What is innate/learned is obviously a challenging one, too.
Gender and illness are so intertwined—the medical system is set up to support the types of ailments men are more likely to suffer from.
If those of us that don't identify as men are sick, under-supported, unable to work regular jobs (or work at all), and are dependent on those around us for financial support through no fault of our own, of course our lens is going to be different.
That being said, I've encountered some of the worst ableism from other women in my life.
It's really difficult and I think it requires a partner who is willing to have many puzzle-solving conversations. I think it might also require a type of love that is at peace with difference, regardless of understanding.
Kyla: I definitely wouldn’t say men are more ableist than women, but I feel like the power dynamics in hetero relationships can exacerbate disability??
I sent another poem:
THE STORY SO FAR
Is this the story of a sick woman
or the story of a woman
who was not loved
the way she needed to be
Kyla: Recently I’ve been wondering, because I was with my ex since a year and a half after my concussion and it’s now been six years since my injury, how much of my experience of disability was actually the suffering of not being supported in my relationship and not being loved the way I needed to be loved. Because I think that can be expanded to a wider scale, there are many ways that disability results from our needs not being met, from disabled people essentially being unloved by society and communities.
I think about this because rich people with chronic illnesses often don’t identify as disabled (see: Selena Gomez documentary), even when their diagnoses are the same as those of disabled people I know, and I think it’s not just because of their internalized ableism, or PR, but also because money eliminates some of the friction/difficulty/suffering/isolation from care of disabled experience.
Which may seem like it’s not connected, but I wonder if my relationship increased the friction that I felt moving through my life, because my illness was so problematized within the relationship and his circle. And I also let things like my lack of desire be pathologized when in reality…I don’t think PCS [post-concussion syndrome] was ever the main factor there. I’ve always tended to lose my sex drive in long term relationships with men.
Claudia: You might be demisexual, too? Not trying to paint your experience with broad strokes. I found that when I feel less emotionally seen, I have no interest in sex. You don't need a label, either.
Kyla: I don’t identify as demisexual, I actually think I’m the opposite—emotional intimacy combined with sexual intimacy can overwhelm me.
Claudia: I think what you said here: "I feel like the power dynamics in hetero relationships can exacerbate disability" is almost the perfect response and rings true for your relationship with your ex and other disabled women in hetero relationships.
I'm so sorry Kyla. That would've been so hard. My heart aches for all those years you suffered without a human to help you hold it.
And I completely agree, especially with the money point. Money plays an enormous role when suffering from any chronic illness. From time off to supplements to treatments, money is specifically what differentiates living with chronic illness from suffering from chronic illness.
Kyla: Everyone outside of the relationship was like “but you have your partner” and I weathered a lot of comments from single friends who told me their lives would be easier if they were partnered like I was.
Yes—I think both money and severity of illness make the biggest differences re: living with it or suffering because of it.
Claudia: I also think other rich people and rich-people-aligned (conservative) folks disdain the label "disabled" unless it's someone who uses a wheelchair or is attached to a success story.
I also see a lot of ableism within the left-leaning-community, too. Especially as someone suffering from invisible disabilities. Again, often men, but also friends who've had less difficulty with school and work due to their bodies and brains working consistently.
There is an over-emphasis on grit from both communities IMO. As much as I agree grit is important, I feel as though disabled people are being gritty just by living. What is really groundbreaking? Being able to surrender. Creating a space where we are allowed to surrender.
Kyla: YES.
*
What Claudia said about surrender reminds me of the Saretta Morgan quote I wrote on a bright pink post-it and stuck on the wall next to my bed: “I want to wake every morning into love, where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, where that means whatever it needs to mean.” Have I ever known, or made, love that posed and sustained this question?
I also remember a Gina Berriault quote, which I encountered as an epigraph to a poetry collection whose title I can’t recall: “At times it [is] necessary to grant the name of love to something less than love.” When I graph the inverse relationship between the times I’ve lived with men and my attunement to love and beauty, I do find myself asking whether I have, at times, granted love’s name to lesser things. But is there anything more petty than rescinding the name of love from the places our hearts have been? Perhaps what’s more true is that the romantic love I want to inhabit is still unknown to me. Perhaps the ways we love grow as we grow.
I’ve grown out of believing in love as an ideal, love as a word whose meaning is unchanging, love whose body is a river we fall into, a current by which we are carried. What I do believe in is the web of care I feel holding me now, gossamer threads of interdependence and witness. And what I trust is the way I feel, not “in love” but in love with myself, in love with my life, in love with my people and language and this difficult and breathtaking world.
I hope you enjoyed this Impolite conversation as much as I did. The Saretta Morgan quote, which I found via @poetryisnotaluxury, is from her new book Alt-Nature. It’s also available as a letterpress print here.
Claudia Wilde is a writer and maker based in Vancouver, BC. Her work has been featured in ELLE Magazine, PRISM international, and Scout Magazine, amongst others. She works as a freelance communications specialist and is often found writing near the large, south-facing window in her living room. She lives with endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and other invisible illnesses.
Kyla Jamieson is the author of the poetry collection Body Count, which was a CBC Best Poetry Book of the Year in 2020. Her work reimagines time, embodiment, care, and identity in the aftermath of a brain injury. Kyla lives and relies on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, where she dreams of systemic change, care-full futures, and disabled joy.
Thank you for this offering, as I reflect on it I find myself noticing dynamics and habits of normalizing my bending to others time- and hopefully practicing ways to resist that in favour of my fluid time ❤️ much appreciated
IMO, the m/f divide on this comes down to socialization & healing. Both sides of the coin at a base uneducated / unhealed level can be toxic in very different ways. With people who grew up in the world perceived as a woman, they’d have a lot of the same underlying traumas that garners a short hand understanding, where you're not further exhausted with the chore of explaining yourself. The rest of it is a variable of the individual & your compatibility. // A lot of the success of my current relationship lies on the capacity to coexist as whole individuals.