Thread by @monaeltahawy

I usually ignore Valentine’s Day and I rarely talk or write about love. But much like with religion, if you don’t claim your right to shape, critique and make demands of love...

...if you don’t stake a claim, even if you don’t practice–you cede the ground to the absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical.

So here I am, staking my claim to love, as a feminist in love and in my 50s.

i.e. I am both practicing and preaching.

feministgiant.com/p/essay-a-femi…

I wanted nothing to do with love when I was younger. I started having nightmares when I was 17 that I’d married the wrong man.

My subconscious knew something my conscious took years to understand: I was neither heterosexual nor monogamous.
#ValentinesDay

For all my 20s & most of my 30s, I didn't have the power for such introspection.

I worried that love would wreck me with a weakness I could not afford. I wanted to be free and I associated love–at least in the ways I saw it around me–with the opposite of freedom. #ValentinesDay

I wanted to be powerful and to be free, and in love, yes.

And if I could not have the first two, well, then, love could wait. I chose me.

I had to grow into the knowledge that a love that is free is powerful and tender; tender, not weak. feministgiant.com/p/essay-a-femi… #ValentinesDay

Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom.

Free love is revolutionary.

#ValentinesDay

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feministgiant.com

Fuck Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day.

feministgiant.com/p/essay-a-femi… #ValentinesDay #ValentinesDay2023