Weird take, but I truly believe anti-capitalist thought is crucial for a healthy marriage or long-term relationship. 🧵

Capitalism teaches us to expect total emotional fulfillment from a partner, and to blame them for feelings of loneliness, emptiness, ennui. Only when we correctly identify capitalist systems as the source of most of these types of suffering are realistic expectations possible.

A shared understanding of and commitment to restorative justice is also crucial for conflict resolution. If you're stuck in a carceral mindset, you're doomed to stay trapped in a never-ending cycle of scorekeeping, grudge-holding, and punishment.

There's a colossal amount of media teaching people in cishet relationships to conform to gender roles that locate the source of one's suffering on the individual cohabitating with them, rather than the oligarchic government oppressing them. Women are nags, men are dopes, etc.

Learning to view these tropes as the capitalist-supporting propaganda they are and free your relationship from those pattern requires a lot of intention and purposeful unlearning if you were raised in an individualistic, capitalist culture like, eg. white people in the U.S.

Consumer culture also teaches disposability. Toss something away the second it fails to be shiny or needs a repair. We do that with people too. Gaining the patience to grow with someone, self-reflect, be humble enough to realize our own flaws, is harder than getting a newer model

I'm not saying to stay with someone abusive or impossible to communicate with. But I do think we've overcorrected when if you mention the slightest amount of interpersonal conflict in certain online spaces, the prevailing advice will be "Go no contact."

Tl;dr, the more I radicalize, the easier and more supportive my marriage gets. Spouse isn't responsible for the vast amounts of dread and horror I carry around in my bones all the time. He's just my best bud, who holds my hand as we try to survive the collapse of neoliberalism.

Sim Kern