While I'm yelling: I need words for how wrong this is, and why.

[azurelunatic]

Spotted in the wild from someone I don't know: "You don't have my permission to break up with me."

This statement makes a whole fuckton of alarm bells ring, and I want to label every damn one of them.

Let's start with co-opting the language of consent culture to do something that's profoundly opposite.

The consent culture model of relationships is that they are maintained by mutual consent. Once one of the parties has stopped consenting to the relationship, that relationship is over. Even if the other party does not want it to be over.

The process of breaking up can be profoundly unpleasant, and it's not nice to spring that on someone, especially unexpectedly. However, it is less nice, and in fact actively coercive, to make someone remain in a relationship that they no longer consent to.

Not all relationships are good ones. Not all relationships can be repaired. Sometimes despite legitimate efforts on both sides, a relationship can't be repaired. Sometimes only one person is putting in legitimate effort to repair a relationship. Is it fair to that person? Fuck no.

Sometimes relationships include support, shelter, and division of necessary labor. These are horrible but necessary things that will need to be figured out in the breakup, and often are/should be covered by local law. There are eviction laws. Alimony is a thing that exists. Custody battles are a thing. This hits a lot harder when poverty and disability are factors, and the safety nets in the US do not cover people who from every ethical viewpoint fucking ought to be covered.

What else is there?

Comments

[silveradept]

Thee's also the part where the speaker is asserting that their relationship is more akin to a broken Dominant/submissive relation than a relationship of consent among equals.

[azurelunatic]

Really *thoroughly* broken, because the thing that makes D/s powerful in the paradigm that I am accustomed to is that the submissive party could leave if they chose to, at any time, for any reason, as well as calling a halt to the D/s portion of things, and calling a halt to any scene.

Though "active and enthusiastic choice to remain" does assume that the default state is apart, not together.

Now I'm having thinky-thoughts about pair-bonding, inertia, and cheating. (Cheating, as opposed to polyamory, because of the serial-monogamy-with-cheating model, which is smoothed up in the poly-until-I-leave-you-for-the-new-partner model.)

[silveradept]

The default state is apart - and anyone wielding that "permission" line has changed their assumption so that together is the default state, and that's bad.

I'd be interested in those thinky-thoughts. I have my own theories that the best state for general happiness in everyone is not relentlessly pushing people toward a monogamous legally binding relationship, but instead always being able to choose whether to have one partner or many or many friendly relationships so that you don't end up in a situation where you have very messy results if you're not actually interested in a relationship with someone any more.

[azurelunatic]

As you might have surmised from things I said later, I believe it boiled down to "I think some cheating is driven by having already broken up in one's heart with the current partner, but having had too much inertia to separate before meeting a new person."

[siderea]

I've had occasion to reflect on the socio-legal nature of marriage lately, and, you know, I'm pretty sure that one of the core differences between "breaking up" and "getting divorced" is that only the latter requires someone else's consent. Marriage is what changes, as you say, the default.