significantly other

when polyamory people say ‘primary partner’ i usually want to kick them in the butt. that is just glorified monogamy baby. i still commend the effort, to atleast semantically rephrase your other relationships to include the potential of something more, uh, primary.

what i like more is when monogamy people call their partner their significant other. that's kinda hot. you acknowledge that you're too busy trying to survive in this world to deconstruct your relationships, and while you're at it, you two have latched onto each other for some stable orbit and sense of reality. good, go for it. this then decays/ages into historical labels like husband and wife.

but ‘other’ is an interesting term, inhereted from a rich tradition of philosophical literature. most philosophy really does come down to negotiating your relationship with the ‘other’. philosophy that doesn't account for the other usually spirals to bite its own tail endlessly, while philosophy where the other is assumed implicitly to be the subject is called poetry. same thing, tbh.

the problem of meaning, for instance, is impossible to solve without the other. what you mean is entirely dependent on who you're talking to. the problem of truth, similarly, although always true, can only be proved when you verify with an other. we're all secretly scared we're schizophrenic, and capital mediated alienation doesn't help, so the burden of proof is on the other rip.

but i kind of lowkey hate the word? like sure, it is significant that they are other, so that you can take their word when you can't trust your own but eh. i feel the purity of the philosophy is used to justify a lot of other othering. which is to say, if you find security in such philosophy, or community, so to speak- ideologically bound community, then it is courtesy the otherness of the other that its purity is sustained. this can be at an individual level, in marriages where sex difference is weaponised into something essential. or larger philosophy obsessed classes, like brahmins. or any ‘intellectual class’ justifying their contract with power.

this then puts the onus on the other to mediate, integrate, and assimilate with the supposed ‘one’, in their imagined ideological unity. cue my mother saying ‘we live in a society, aadi.’

but any way, not that all that justification really has any power. i still turned out pretty gay, mom. people subscribe in and out of ones and others depending on their needs. just don't lose track of who you are, your identity, trying to speak the language of a lie.

i like being other, significant or otherwise, i like the fleeting moments in your arms where i look like truth, and our bodies look like our only freedom. i like when one sees herself mirrored in the other, recognising her own otherness, and all of living comes together for a moment, and all burden of proof is on god.