Thread by @orangecrushed, i see this everywhere now: "you can't charge people by loving them." [...]

i see this everywhere now: "you can't charge people by loving them." but i understand that what is really meant is, "people (especially women) aren't obligated to stay with those who treat them badly, to 'fix' them with romantic love." and that's a useful, corrective take.

but that take has been expanded and expanded, diluted and twisted, until we're left with "showing redemptive or transformative love in movies is abuse." it's the revival of "beauty and the beast is really stockholm syndrome!!!"

but those kinds of takes offer only extremely reductive views of what love is. what change is.

it makes me think about my dog, actually. when i got him he was a scruffy 6-month old street rat; his entire life had been scrapping to survive. he liked people, but didn't trust them.

he misbehaved constantly. he was always looking for a way to escape the leash. always breaking into the pantry or the trash. we could have gotten angry about that, and we did sometimes. but mostly we just tried to love him and make him feel safe & at home. eventually, it worked.

part of my point is, we didn't fully train him out of that behavior. he just stopped doing it. when he realized we weren't going to leave him, hit him, lock him outside... he finally relaxed. he stopped looking for a way out. he didn't want to go. he wanted to stay, and be loved.

that is basically the plot of beauty and the beast.

beauty doesn't "change" the beast. it is, if we're talking in strict factual terms here, impossible to change someone else. change is internal.

what beauty did, through love, was show the beast a life worth living.

that's what love does. it shows us a life worth living. a life where we're valued and we value others. that's why love is so powerful. love isn't just... being polite, or sweet, or totally supportive of anything someone does. love isn't being a doormat. it's valuing other people.

i agree with the core take in that first tweet: nobody is obligated to stay with someone to "fix" them. you can't do that yourself. all you can do is show someone a life worth living together. if they won't work for it, to be worthy of it, to be present for it, that's on them.

but the idea that love can't help people change, that people never change for it, that if you need to change you can't be loved, that you can't love someone who's not already "just right"... are not universally helpful concepts.

that's capitalism's idea of love. buy "the one."

buy a gym membership so you can be healthy enough to be loved. climb the career ladder so you can be successful enough to be loved. make yourself funny enough to be loved, stylish enough to be loved, smart enough, rich enough, "stable" enough, never sad, never scared, never bad.

you have to be perfect before you get there, because love can't help you get there, and it's wrong to expect other people to love you on the way, while you're unfinished, while you're still greedy and needy and irritable, while you're a mess, a burden, a clog.

and like, i am obviously not talking about violent domestic abusers or gaslighters here.

i'm talking about the run of the mill imperfect people you see everywhere online, being told to immediately dump anyone who ever makes them feel bad about a single thing they do.

i'm talking about the inflated rhetoric around redemptive love stories in fiction: "showing someone loving a 'bad' character in spite of their flaws and them trying to change for the better romanticizes abuse!!!!"

if those stories romanticize anything, it's the human condition. we are all both good and bad. those stories are as much about learning to love ourselves, hoping someone will love us (bad parts and all) as they are about actual relationship dynamics.

in conclusion: love can help people change, actually. it's not a switch that can be flipped, turning someone from bad to good. but it's one of the only real lights we have along our path. it's capable of showing us who we could be, our best selves, if we're willing to try.

and if not love, then what else? what tools do we have at our disposal, besides love, to help average but imperfect people heal and grow? pain? punishment? should we isolate them in grey places with barred windows for years and years? will that fix them? does that fix anybody?

can't believe i started this entire thread by typing "charge" when i meant "change" but apparently you all just get me

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