Like many people my age, I inherited a fairly limited cultural script for what romantic love entails. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl forsake all other sexual entanglements. Maybe they have a couple of kids? Yada yada yada…happily ever after. It’s a sweet story, but over time I learned that it’s not the only one. Sometimes boy meets boy, for example. Sometimes a girl meets several boys. Sometimes a person who uses gender neutral pronouns meets another person who uses gender neutral pronouns, and it feels right and natural immediately even if neither of their grandparents are quite sure what words to use to describe their relationship.

Obviously, physical and emotional love have taken many shapes since the first two people rubbed up against one another for warmth in a cave. But we’ve developed an increasingly mainstream understanding of the various pathways towards romantic fulfillment. It’s wonderful to watch the people in my life figure out what works for them. I know solo-poly relationship anarchists who practice numerous satisfying nonhierarchical romantic attachments. I know at least one person who has kids with one partner and also has another partner who’s deeply intertwined with their family life. I have several friends and acquaintances who were happy enough with their decisions to get divorced that they wrote books about the topic. A few people close to me barely date at all and others use the word “play” as a suffix when describing physical acts that wouldn’t even occur to me could make anyone horny. I am happy for all of them when they are happy.

I believe, truly, that the world is often a cold and lonely place, and if you find the kind of love that nourishes your body and/or soul with another consenting adult or group of adults, that’s a gift worth holding onto. Maybe to you that means a demisexual romantic relationship. Maybe it means being avowedly single and having sex with strangers in bar bathrooms. Maybe it means being in a long term relationship and also having sex with strangers in bar bathrooms while your partner is either busy somewhere else or getting busy along with you. The heart wants what it wants, and the same goes for the other body parts. And that’s beautiful. My life, however, is structurally vanilla. Love can look like anything, even marriage.

Read more unpaywalled here: [https://playboy.substack.com/p/love-can-look-like-anything-even](https://playboy.substack.com/p/love-can-look-like-anything-even)

Love Can Look Like Anything, Even Marriage | Comedian and writer Josh Gondelman on choosing a "structurally vanilla" life