it wouldn’t feel like “settling” if you had realistic expectations of human beings as opposed to capitalist fantasies of romance and various egoic fictions that confuse luxury and leisure with love or beauty and ideality with care and sustainability.

a lot of people are settling for Instagrammability and Hermès flip-flops; for abs and lightskin; for matching outfits and The Ritz and will wake up one morning to nothing but decades of empty intimacy and unrequited touch for the taste of champagne and Chanel.

and I think that’s okay. I’m not one of those people who thinks everyone wants to be loved or that disinterest in love is necessarily pathological. Love—even done right—is, in so many ways, overrated—overrated because it’s labor, as opposed to candy-coated raindrops.

however, I want us to be clear that refusing to settle is often touted as being about encountering a lack in the other to fulfill the presupposed capacities of a partner. yet, these presupposed capacities are very often political and it’s time we stop acting as if they aren’t.

and the hilariously dark thing about love in an antiBlack world is that capitalism has organized us to desire the very things that are an obstacle to fulfilling that said desire (Berlant, Lacan) because surplus value is predicated on surplus enjoyment—the desire for Desire itself

and this is demonstrated not only at the cash register. we constantly choose people for partnership that are way less invested in *being* a partner than they are in representing what it means to be desired as worthy of partnership and the current calculus of worth is antiBlack.

so stop confusing your refusal to settle with your politics of desire. y’all settle with people who don’t respect your boundaries but will buy you a Birkin, who will cheat on you before they cheat on the gym and wonder why you’re lonely, even when they’re around.

and I want to clarify that fat people cheat and broke people will trespass boundaries because they are human beings, contrary to hegemonic belief. but the idea that it’s better to cry in a Rolls Royce than on the bus is a coercive capitalist-patriarchal logic for cyclical harm.