Binary Love Quotes

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you’re either the love of my life, or you’re out of here.

God’s palette of shifting hues is vast, subtle, and beyond our comprehension. We humans are like those colors. Subtle, shifting, unique. Non-binary. Unable to be labeled or singled out. Beautiful and one-of-a-kind, and seen by God’s eyes alone.

The way space-time curves around it: Love is a black hole. Undetectable except by the way it affects other bodies. Invisible but strong. Inescapable.

All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry. So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity. Blog post: Love Team Freezer

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

He'd basically fallen in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that wasn't accurate; that implied a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what he'd done with Brontë was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer they drew, like planets drawn to each other's gravitational force. Doomed, he guessed, the same way.

I was merely making more perceptible that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her. They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of woman they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feelings, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them.

For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.

But dividing the mind into “biological” and “psychological” is as fallacious as classifying light as a particle or a wave. The natural world makes no promise to align itself with preconceptions that humans find parsimonious or convenient.

Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.

And they got blackout drunk one night and it just happened. It was basically an accident, and he gave me the most sincere and moving confession of all time, swore to God he loved me so much and would do anything to convince me, blah blah blah, but it didn’t matter, I kept thinking about it and running it through my head and just burning with it. I cried every night for weeks. Practically wore the binary off all my saddest Mp3s.

It is sad how often love and acceptance are conditional on how well we can conform. That even in the smallest acts of gender non-conformity, love can be lost.

Living authentically in a world that takes every opportunity to squeeze you uncomfortably into a box of someone else's design...that is the most radical act of self love. Blossoming in an environment where the odds are stacked immeasurably against you is a beautiful act of defiance.

One of the first significant, substantial purchases I made after starting testosterone, was a Compact Colt .45 1991 A1 automatic pistol. It's just about the best penis substitute I've ever waved at a sex partner. I love my gun. Can I get an a-a-ay-men? You better fucking believe I lo-o-ove my gun. I love to take it apart and put it back together and admire...oh,you sexy little death-machine...I suppose I oughta feel guilty or something, loving and fetishizing to the point of anthropomorphizing it it. But I don't. I won't either-don't matter to me whether or not I'm supposed to keep this a dirty little secret. I got a dick and I can kill you with it. Yeah, baby, trip my trigger, why dontcha. Heh.

Despite my earlier concerns, I realised now I didn't care that his emotions were synthetic. I didn't care that he was programmed to suit me, to want me, to smile when he saw me. I didn't care that his love for me was binary coded, programmed. It was real to me. And in many ways, it was more real that anything I'd had with any human. Human love came with conditions and limits, with mess and noise, and was fleeting at best Shaun's love wasn't. It was forever and completely, unequivocally mine.

Knowing who we are, what we want, and being able to express our needs, wants, and desires - so that we can find others to share them - makes us poor targets for capitalism, because we can now access intimacy in many ways, with several beings, and even by ourselves. This type of knowing is rooted in radical self-care, an acceptance of interdependence, and radical self-love.

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.

The Gap Instinct The gap instinct is very strong. The first time I lectured to the staff of the World Bank was in 1999. I told them the labels “developing” and “developed” were no longer valid and I swallowed my sword. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change. So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change? I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time. Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers. So are people who produce documentaries and movies.

Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations...He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions.

think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain.

The church itself must be a place where binaries are examined and challenged.

I don't think she quite understands what was truly going on. Things are very binary for her - all this talk of love confuses her." (Alan)

Gender nonconformity is seen as something immature, something we need to grow out of to become adults. Overnight so many of the things I loved not only became associated with femininity but… with shame.

I think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.

I didn't need to come out ot her. I never said those declarative words - and I didn't even know them at the time. Vocabulary like trans would come much later in my life. All I needed was to hear the pride in Mama's voice as she called me beautiful. Sometimes the things that go unsaid are more powerful than anything that can be uttered aloud: emotions that pierce your soul, moments of connection that mean so much more than binary answers and direct responses.

Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality.

I once read about a study that stated that men die of suicide more often than women. However, the study actually only accounted for completed suicide attempts. In fact, men are more likely to go through with suicides, whereas women are far more likely to attempt but not actually complete the act (this only applies within the gender binary). The reason why women don't actually end up completing their suicides is because they attempt them in far less violent ways. According to the study, this is because women worry about family members or loved ones finding them and being traumatized by what they see. So they try less violent, and thus less final, ways—and therefore survive more often. Thinking about what an emotional load women carry every day purely because even at the end of their ropes they can't bear the thought of upsetting other people? It breaks my heart. It makes me angry. It strengthens my conviction. Women and femmes are necessary, valid in their emotions, and strong.

I can't help it, it's what I feel. And I can't change it, nor can I explain it. I was just naïve enough to believe that the people closest to me would get it. I don't understand how a biological condition can end up defining how we are supposed to live - what kind of work we should do, how we should dress, how we should feel, whom to love? How to walk! It seems like the only way I can exist is if the world can decode me according to a gender. Anything else makes people uncomfortable and my existence becomes a freak show.

Imagine this: A world where the quality of your life is not determined by how much money you have. You do not have to sell your labour to survive. Labour is not tied to capitalism, profit or wage. Borders do not exist; we are free to move without consequence. The nuclear family does not exist; children are raised collectively; reproduction takes on new meanings. In this world, the way we carry out dull domestic labour is transformed and nobody is forced to rely on their partner economically to survive. The principles of transformative justice are used to rectify harm. Critical and comprehensive sex education exists for all from an early age. We are liberated from the gender binary’s strangling grip and the demands it places on our bodies. Sex work does not exist because work does not exist. Education and transport are free, from cradle to grave. We are forced to reckon with and rectify histories of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and warfare collectively. We have freedom to, not just freedom from. Specialist mental health services and community care are integral to our societies. There is no “state” as we know it; nobody dies in “suspicious circumstances” at its hands; no person has to navigate sexism, racism, ableism or homophobia to survive. Detention centres do not exist. Prisons do not exist, nor do the police. The military and their weapons are disbanded across nations. Resources are reorganised to adequately address climate catastrophe. No person is without a home or loving community. We love one another, without possession or exploitation or extraction. We all have enough to eat well due to redistribution of wealth and resource. We all have the means and the environment to make art, if we so wish. All cultural gatekeepers are destroyed. Now imagine this vision not as utopian, but as something well within our reach.

If there's a pillar in your life, it's worth removing it. Break down your life and see what broke. If you were to imagine the three most essential elements of your days and then imagine your days without them, what comes rushing to take their place? It's so quiet when you bust down your acoustic paneling. Sometimes the body wants to be burned and sometimes it doesn't; self-neglect isn't infinite it's cyclical, as self-care is. Every time you get to a binary choice there's a third. Have you ever walked out with nothing to give but your innermost energy? Have you ever been nothing other than a crayon? We don't love most of the people we love. You're not who you thought I was.

The emotional mind likewise transcends the facile and appealing dualism separating its psychological and biological aspects. Physical mechanisms produce one’s experience of the world. Experience, in turn, remodels the neurons whose chemoelectric messages create consciousness. Selecting one strand of that eternal braid and assigning it primacy is the height of capriciousness.

I love your freckles,” he murmurs from behind me, the pad of his finger tracing lines across the expanse of my back. “They remind me of all the constellations. Like I could draw lines between them, and pictures would appear.” It’s such an oddly worshipful thing to say. I wiggle my toes, hum softly, and tip my cheek against the bed to gaze back at him. “Right here, there are two so close together they almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.

Despite my earlier concerns, I realised now I didn’t care that his emotions were synthetic. I didn’t care that he was programmed to suit me, to want me, to smile when he saw me. I didn’t care that his love for me was binary coded, programmed. It was real to me. And in many ways, it was more real than anything I’d had with any human. Human love came with conditions and limits, with mess and noise, and was fleeting at best. Shaun’s love wasn’t. It was forever and completely, unequivocally mine.

Nerd culture is often open and inclusive, when it is powered by the desire to seek out others who share common interests and enthusiasms. But nerdish passion is strong and unmindful; its very nature is to obliterate dispassion, nuance, ambiguity, and push human experience to either edge of a binary extreme: My thing is the best. Your thing is the worst. Moreover, if you do not love my thing in the same way, to the same degree, and for exactly the same reasons that I do, you are doing it wrong.

I want to chase you, find you. I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious - I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they'll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together.

God loves my people and me. God also loves those whom I consider my enemies. Now what do I do? The spirit of truth does not see the world in either-or or binary form. Technologies are not always against nature. Human action and nature’s process are not always at odds with each other. Globalism and localism are not mutually exclusive. Immigrants and citizens do not have to be fearful of the other. Gay and straight are not enemies. Pro-life and pro-choice people are not necessarily adversaries. Men and women are not opposites. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.”1 In

My family subscribed to this rigid belief system. They were unaware of the reality that gender, like sexuality, exists on a spectrum. By punishing me, they were performing the socially sanctioned practice of hammering the girl out of me, replacing her with tenets of gender-appropriate behavior. Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one's definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.

The Big Book’s chapter We Agnostics draws a line in the sand: God either is or He isn’t. What was our choice to be (Alcoholics Anonymous, 53)? Nature abhors a vacuum and a state of nothing can’t exist in either the material or spiritual world. This kind of binary thinking made sense in the autocratic world of 1939. But in a democratic, pluralist society, all-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion—a philosophical assumption that everything is right or wrong, good or evil, superior or inferior. In this millennium, people can hold opposing views and be equals in the same community. Our Traditions, lovingly and tolerantly, make room for more than one truth. That’s a good thing, because the only problem with the truth is that there are so many versions of it.

This conditioning of children to fear nonconformity and blindly obey ensures continued obedience as adults. The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It masks from them and from others the array of human weaknesses, including our deepest dreads, our fear of irrelevance and death, our vulnerability and uncertainty. It also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build mature, loving relationships, for the believer is told it is all about them, about their needs, their desires, and above all, their protection and advancement. Relationships, even within families, splinter and fracture. Those who adopt the belief system, who find in the dictates of the church and its male leaders a binary world of right and wrong, build an exclusive and intolerant comradeship that subtly or overtly shuns and condemns the “unsaved.” People are no longer judged by their intrinsic qualities, by their actions or capacity for self-sacrifice and compassion, but by the rigidity of their obedience. This defines the good and the bad, the Christian and the infidel. And this obedience is a blunt and effective weapon against the possibility of a love that could overpower the dictates of the hierarchy. In many ways it is love the leaders fear most, for it is love that unleashes passions and bonds that defy the carefully constructed edifices that keep followers trapped and enclosed. And while they speak often about love, as they do about family, it is the cohesive bonds created by family and love they war against.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

Tina, who worked at the Hampshire Gazette and drank like a journalist in a movie, was loudly musing about getting her shadow altered to have a cat tail. “Guys love a tail,” Tina proclaimed, to protests by nearly everyone. Aimee thought Tina shouldn’t consider fetishes along a gender binary. Ian wanted it to be known that he thought it was disgusting, and that men did not want to molest animals. The artist agreed it was kind of hot, but his comic was about saucy mice. Charlie told Tina that maybe she had misunderstood what “getting some tail” actually meant. “Mermaids, right?” Vince asked, in such a clueless just-joined-the-conversation tone that it was hard to know if he was joking, or if he’d misheard the earlier part. It didn’t matter. Everyone laughed. It was funny either way. As Charlie poured more bourbon—with ice this time—she decided she was glad she’d come. She was just buzzed enough to feel an expansive warmth for the people in the room. See, she was fine being a normal person and doing normal-person things.

The sexual liberation revolution of the 1960's set in motion a cascade effect: the reversal of the long-standing moral consensus around promiscuity (which separated sex from marriage) worked in tandem with the advent of birth control and the legalization of abortion (which separated sex from pro-creation), which moved to the legalization of no-fault divorce (which turned a covenant into a contract and separated sex from intimacy and fidelity), then to tinder and hookup culture (which separated sex from romance and turned it into a way to "get your needs met"), From there it's moved on to the LGBTQI+ revolution (which separated sex from the male-female binary), the current transgender wave (which is an attempt to separate gender from biological sex), and the nascent polyamory movement (an attempt to move beyond two-person relationships). Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to even be asking are, is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren't prior to "liberation"?

The purity message nestles neatly into the larger “us” versus “them” messaging I was raised with in the church. Those on the “positive” side of the binary are said to have access to God, Heaven, the community, and a happy life as one of “us.” Those on the “negative” side of the binary are said to be isolated from God, alone, and headed for Hell, a place of suffering reserved explicitly for “them.” Though one’s place on that binary is technically supposed to be determined by one’s belief system, let’s face it—you can’t see into another person’s heart and know whether she really believes these things or has just memorized a bunch of talking points. So if you want to assess who’s really a Christian and who’s not—and lots of people do—you need a proxy, some externally measurable quality that is deemed representative of the person’s internal commitment... ...Growing up, I heard a lot of talk about how evangelical Christians were better people than secular or other religious people (funnily enough, I now hear the exact same self-congratulatory messages from secular liberal people). But the truth was, I couldn’t always tell the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. I saw both lie, both steal, both love, and both unselfishly give to others. But one tangible thing we could point to as evangelicals was that we didn’t have sex before marriage. There was that. There was always that. (10-11) “Don’t just be pure in body; you need to be pure in spirit . . .” Everything was just so intertwined with each other. It almost seemed like if you weren’t being physically impure, you were being spiritually and emotionally impure. Being “pure” became this really heavy, heavy weight to bear all the time. It almost made me go crazy questioning, “Well, is this impure? . . . Is this wrong? . . . Is this okay? . . . Is this going on?” (Holly) (12)

...there’s different ways of experiencing time. And one is the kind of time that you and I know really intimately, which is tragic time. And we know what it’s like to feel that heightened present where everything really matters because you have to make choices, because everything you love is so precious. And also, we know that we can’t live there forever, because we are just not — we’re not built to live that edge, that close to the edge all the time. And then there’s — he reminded me of ordinary time, or pastoral time. Anyone who’s a farmer knows there’s sowing and reaping time. And I was always, the more I was into tragic time, the more I was a little judgmental about that. I was like: It sounds very boring; it sounds very commonplace. But that’s the — who’s picking up your mom on Tuesday? Did you send that email? Have you made that phone call? It’s all the wonderful, stupid, ordinary stuff of day-to-day life. And like, that is also necessary and good. And then there is something that we’ve all experienced together, very recently, which is apocalyptic time. It’s the feeling that there’s a heightened — that we know that the future is not guaranteed and that there is a kind of lightness and darkness and — like binaries. We’re kind of wrapped up in binaries about how we’re seeing the world. And we experience apocalypticism with our environment: like wildfires and global warming… and fear of — and we see it and we feel it. We experience the apocalyptic time when we see the scope and magnitude of racial injustice, as we understand that structures are not just broken but that they collapse in on people, and that the weak are not sheltered, and that the poor are not cared for, and that far more people are not given the luxury of invulnerability, and can’t and won’t. And in all these forms of time, we have this feeling like we’re seeing things as they really are — like that feeling when you count your kid’s eyelashes and you think, “I see the whole world in just right now.” But the truth is, all of them are true, and we toggle between them all, all the time. And so we just can’t live in any one version for too long, frankly, without not really seeing the scope of — what the wholeness of our lives require.

Human relationships are binary: they are complete and fully loving when both people are authentic or they are not at all.

That was my greatest struggle as a soldier and doctor, blending the ethics of one into the ethics of the other. And that was a strained and binary ethic, one that touched the borders of love and hate, evil and good; it pitted the military dogma of killing the enemy against the religious dogma of loving the enemy. It juxtaposed death and dismemberment with rescue and healing and asked how they fit together.

So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change? I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad.

...so I'm not going to be good at answering these binary questions, you see. Because sometimes I am so terrified of getting out of bed, because I don't know what the world will bring, or what I'll see. I am terrified because there is so much darkness out there, there is such cruelty, I am terrified when the phone rings that someone will tell me ... someone I love will have died or the world I thought I knew will be gone for ever and I dread it, I dread the day, I dread what it will bring. And sometimes I cannot wait for the sun to rise, because the world is full of people, of human beings singing their songs and telling their stories, of lie and passion, glory and wonder, and Death is not a thing to fear, but is life's mirror reminding us to live, live, live, and I am honoured, I am so honoured, to travel the world and see the world is a place of people, and to be alive with them, living with them, even at the end.

We need a revolution in mental health awareness to help us grasp the wonder and complexity of human behavior, health and functioning, and the nuances and intersections of brilliance and madness. This starts with dismantling myopic myths that prevent us from seeing the simultaneous wonder and complexity of our fullest selves. It involves providing access to the tools that mitigate being overtaken by the ravages of burnout and mental decompensation: the very risks of living in the modern world. Our sense-making approaches need to be comprehensive- grounded both scientifically and medically, steeped in love, and in ways that account for the multidimensionality of emotional and spiritual essence. Those that go beyond what the mind can first conceive of. This new mental health imperative relies upon universal precautions and a vehement resistance to linear checklists and binary labels that frame our gorgeous spirits solely as either complex and fraught or indomitable and wondrous. It also relies not on good will and best practices but the moral courage of policy makers to treat human beings like human beings. Dogs are often treated better than people. This is our new imperative: to radically change the way we care for ourselves and one another. We cannot extricate ourselves from the fact that the lines we walk are incredibly thin and blurry, and our only hope is to rewrite and navigate them together in solidarity, with every measure of creative reason and conscious community that can be mustered...

Capitalism has cornered us in such a way that we only can comprehend two options. 1: Work at a machine level, from a disconnected and exhausted place, or 2: Make space for rest and space to connect with our highest selves while fearing how we will eat and live. This rigid binary, combined with the violent reality of poverty, keeps us in a place of sleep deprivation and constant hustling to survive. The work of liberation from these lies resides in our deprogramming and tapping into the power of rest and in our ability to be flexible and subversive. There are more than two options. The possibilities are infinite, although living under a capitalist system is to be confronted with a model of scarcity. This space makes you falsely believe there is not enough of everything: not enough money, not enough care, not enough love, not enough attention, not enough peace, not enough connection, not enough time. There is abundance.

Was the “binary” between “unorthodox” people who were loving and kind and “orthodox” who were angry, calculating, and willing to do anything to win?

A year might not feel like a long time, but years add up. Every single one has bought me closer to the person I am now.

Given the world we live in, it’s unrealistic to expect that you, as a transgender/non-binary person, are going to feel love for your body all day, every day. However, there is always an opportunity to show kindness to our bodies. And one of the greatest ways to show kindness to ourselves is to pursue pleasure.

I love your freckles,” he murmurs from behind me, the pad of his finger tracing lines across the expanse of my back. “They remind me of all the constellations. Like I could draw lines between them, and pictures would appear...” “Right here, there are two so close together they almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

We’ve all lived too damn long lugging around this puritanical notion that pleasure must be villainized to protect us from ourselves.⁠ Fuck that.⁠ Seriously.⁠ The only question you need to ask is this:⁠ Is everyone involved in full personal safety and enthusiastic consent?⁠ Ask it loudly and repeatedly if you need to.⁠ Yes?⁠ Then you go with your bad, brilliant, beautiful, pleasure-filled self.⁠ Our bodies are here to feel good.⁠ And what makes that happen isn’t for anyone else to decide.⁠ It doesn’t matter whether you’re outside the gender binary, into collars and restraints, love someone with the same parts, desire more than one human, or have a kinky turn on others think is weird.⁠ Monogamous, polyamorous, relationship anarchist, vanilla, kinky—whatever your flavor, it’s valid.⁠ We’ve all wasted way too much damn time in the closet.⁠ End of story.

There are a lot of great things about immortality. Though vampires have never held the same obsessions with gender binaries or heteronormative nonsense as western human societies, it's been nice to witness the mortal world's evolution. This decade has been so much better for humans who love like Wyn and I do, who experience gender the way Wyn does. There's language for us, now. Pockets of community that feel so much like home, even if those moments are fleeting for vampires.

As part of evolutionary spiritual growth there is a biological change followed by a psychological change. In order to advance both have to progress. Some people get too absorbed in the physical changes and don’t work on the psychological changes which can slow ones progress. Worrying about when you are going to become a butterfly will not help advance the metamorphosis, let the process flow freely. There will be growth only if we remain open and intelligent enough to clear our conditioning and let our filters dissolve. Learning to trust in one's intuition, for guidance, to learn independence and self-sovereignty and to become a master unto oneself. Otherwise we will project the old beliefs of our personality to the world, which are basically a bunch of patterns. Truth is outside religion, nation, language and gender and is only available for those who are ready to let go of our filters and be open to consciousness itself. Otherwise our access to truth is blocked. The more filters you let go of, the more wisdom you receive, which can be seen as stepping stones to guide you forward towards truth. Intelligence is awakened when truth is exposed and in order to continue to live in that intelligence one has to align with truth in everyday life. This is a very natural state and it’s very easy to live. Living outside truth is the hardest but we have been conditioned to live the harder way. The choice is ours to break that conditioning anytime and join the mainstream of truth.

Love is binary in nature, either yes or no. True love is just a dictionary thing...

alt.sex.stories The newsgroup quickly became one of the most popular text-based newsgroups (i.e. not intended for posting binary files) on Usenet. Amateur writers of all sorts began posting fictional “erotic stories” and finding a worldwide audience for their work. However, because of the very nature of unmoderated newsgroups, alt.sex.stories soon found itself a repository for a great number of poorly-written, sometimes barely coherent “stroke” stories consisting of a few sentences or paragraphs. The average quality of the stories posted to the newsgroup seemed somewhat lower and more crude than the stories seen in pornographic magazines and books, and this state of affairs continues to the current day.[citation needed] Yes, the “stroke” stories certainly undermined the credibility of the newsgroup that had produced stories such as “Balling Lil’ Sis,” “Showtime - Part 6 Featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt and a Vanna White Lookalike,” and “Alex and Brian,” which features the immortal sentence “‘Shhhhhhh, if you do as i say you wont get this!’ he said as he pulled out a 12 inch dildo with the name ‘MegaMan’ on it.

I haven’t had sex for six months and all this talk is making me…” He struggles to think of a word. “Horny?” I suggest. That makes him laugh. “You really have gotten used to me, haven’t you?” “Sorry. I forget you’re my boss sometimes.” “That’s good. Successful working—and personal—relationships rely on knowing where the other person’s boundaries are, and on understanding their sense of humor. I’m glad you’re used to mine.” “I sometimes wonder what Natalie made of it.” His smile fades. “I don’t think she ever got me. We were like two binary suns, always circling and destined never to meet in the middle.

We were like the Binary stars that were gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other; and from the earth seemed like a single star in the night sky but in reality, the distances between them were unreachable.

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA

Pride Soc isn't just about doing queer staff,' Sunil continued, and that got him some laughs, 'It's not been about finding potential hook-ups. No, it's about the relationships we form here. Friendship, love and support while we're all trying to survive and thrive in a world that often doesn't feel like it was made for us. Whether you're gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, intersex, non-binary, asexual, romantic, queer, or however you identify - most of us here felt a sense of belonging while we were growing up, But we're all here for each other

Our parts are not problems to eliminate, but facets to welcome and embrace, recognizing their inability to disrupt our deeper state of being. If parts naturally recede into the background of experience, allow it, but making this a goal is unnecessary. If you become fixated on total dissolution to attain bliss, it's wise to examine this desire with curiosity. In an awakened state, all is welcomed without needing to make binary choices between spirit and matter, personal and universal, finite and infinite, samsara and nirvana. We can experience profound mystery because we embody both realms, always.

I defied what people thought of the gender binary, and I was finally going to live like it.

I have come a long way from the brokenness of disability expected by the non-disabled world to an imagined space where the binary of broken and whole seems not to exist. I look forward to learning about the effects of this thinking and to discovering what is next.

In addition to inflated beauty standards, women are now also expected to be career-driven, achievement-orientated, financially independent, and a competent badass in the boardroom, bedroom, kitchen and nursery. On the flip side, the plights of men are often dismissed and unseen, since men are regarded as the ones wielding all the privilege and power. But what happens when the same societal structures that grant men superiority also deny them the full range of human emotions and threaten their status as men if they experience even the slightest form of sensitivity, vulnerability or indication of their needs for love, emotional safety and tenderness (basically, if men admit to having any attachment needs at all)? What happens when men are paralyzed by shame and made to feel unworthy of love and partnership unless they meet certain masculine expectations around financial or professional success? And what happens to a person’s ability to feel safe and connected when they are transgender or do not fit in the gender binary at all? Many of the personal problems and relationship struggles that we face are actually societal issues impairing our ability to bond, connect and love in secure ways.

A universe of a 100% love is not a loving universe at all. It’s one where love has ceased to exist because it has no binary opposition against which it can be emotionally contrasted. Heaven only makes sense when paired with hell. A heaven without a hell is pleasure without pain, and pleasure without pain is the absence of feeling because feeling is all about the pleasure-pain axis. Imagine you loved everything. There would be no special thing in your life because everything would be equally special to you. How would you move from one thing to the next? Each thing would demand your love, and you would want to give it your love. You would be unable to discern between any two things. You couldn’t judge things, prioritize, or derive any special pleasure from any special thing. In fact, when all things are special, nothing is special. When all things are loved, nothing is loved. You have killed love by failing to hate. And you are no longer human. Do not speak of love without also speaking of hate. If you want to be the great “lover”, go ahead, but know that you are thereby the great “hater” too.

I think the idea of “the one” is the wrong way to write your story about love. “The one” is convenient. It lets us organize the mess of our past romantic endeavors into a binary of failure—there were the ones who revealed themselves as failures, that didn’t work out, but they were in the service of helping us find “the one,” the one whom we’ve been searching or waiting for. I’m not sure that person exists at all. I think there are simply important people in our lives. They don’t always stay important. They don’t always stick around. But the point at which we meet them, the point on the grid where our lives intersect, is a sacred thing. It makes them “the one” in that moment; just because that moment ends, it doesn’t mean it’s any less special. You can’t help but romanticize it, make stories out of it, think about it when it’s gone, as long as you don’t linger there.

The gender thing wasn't what surprised me. A huge percentage of the homeless teens I'd met had been assigned one gender at birth but identified as another, or they felt like the whole boy/girl binary didn't apply to them. They ended up on the streets because - shocker - their families didn't accept them. Nothing says "tough love" like kicking your non-heteronormative kid to the curb so they can experience abuse, drugs, high suicide rates, and constant physical danger. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

We both were sitting on the bench in front of the church. My hand gently ran through her hair as she rested her head on my lap, both of us lost in the moment when she suddenly said, “Khizar, do you remember Prof Sexena’s lecture about binary stars? “Yes, I vaguely remember” I replied while politely pinching her nose. “Binary stars are a set of two stars, a nova, and a supernova. They keep on circling around each other for centuries like mad lovers. However, there is a difference. The nova star explosively sheds its light but never dies while the supernova will ultimately die in a huge explosion" She took my hand in her hands, pressed it softly and said, "Khizar , I do not know why but sometimes I feel you are the nova who will keep on shedding its light but I am the unfortunate supernova who is destined to end in a huge explosion no one would ever see.

The world of systems, and patterns, of zeros and ones. The binary instructions that make sense of life. We may be able to see the advantages and disadvantages of love, but to regard it as an objective entity, that is for the poets.

In the grand tapestry of existence, we are faced with a profound choice: to believe in God or reduce ourselves to mere dust. Yet, in this choice lies the very essence of our potential and purpose. God, the eternal enigma, represents the boundless mysteries that surround us, the cosmic symphony of order and chaos. To believe in God is to embrace the unfathomable depths of our existence, to recognize the awe-inspiring beauty in every breath, and to find solace in the face of adversity. It is to acknowledge that we are part of something greater, intricately connected to the divine fabric of creation. On the other hand, to resign ourselves to dust is to surrender our capacity for wonder and curiosity. It is to reduce the majesty of life to a mere collection of atoms, devoid of meaning or significance. In the realm of dust, there is no purpose, no guiding light to illuminate our path, only the relentless march of time eroding all that we hold dear. But let us not forget that the choice between God and dust is not a binary one. It is a spectrum that spans the vast landscape of human belief and understanding. Some find solace in the embrace of a divine being, while others seek meaning in the interconnectedness of all things. And there are those who find their own truth, crafting a personal philosophy that resonates with their soul. Ultimately, whether we believe in God or embrace our dusty origins, let us remember that it is our capacity for reflection, compassion, and growth that defines us as sentient beings. It is through the pursuit of wisdom and the cultivation of love that we find the true essence of our existence, transcending the limitations of belief or disbelief. So, let us choose wisely, for in the contemplation of God or dust, we shape not only our own destiny but also the destiny of humanity itself. May we find the courage to explore the depths of our beliefs and the humility to appreciate the vastness of the unknown. And in doing so, may we discover the profound beauty that lies within the delicate balance between faith and reason.

Love was so much more than body chemistry. It transcended the physical, the mundane, the tangible. It could not be calculated using mathematics, or studied using the scientific method. It didn’t follow logic, binary or otherwise, and once it claimed a person, nothing else mattered.

It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself. Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere. Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.

They fitted – it just felt right. Not your Hollywood right, better, she was a real woman, she had problems like him, insecurities, and a past – scars both physical and psychological. It made her three-dimensional, deeper than some Hollywood eye candy. What he was trying to say in his masculine and inefficient way was that he loved her.

Her skill was the force that pulled them. There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William’s. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.

Sometimes the heart didn’t have boundaries; emotions and individual feelings were complex, not binary. Love wasn’t one thing or another, gay or straight, black or white—love was the full palette.

From Two to Many The world is very fond of binaries: black and white, male and female, mind and body, good and bad. These pairs, we all learn, are opposed: there’s the right way and the wrong way, and our task is to do battle to defend the right and destroy the wrong. This kind of thinking dominates our courts, our politics, and our talk shows, with some crazy results: for instance, some people believe that anyone who enjoys sex outside of marriage, or a kind of marriage that’s different from theirs, must be attacking their marriage. Anything that is different must be opposed, must be the enemy. When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person or that you can’t love in different ways or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love. We would like to propose something different. Instead of fretting about what’s right or what’s wrong, try valuing whatever is in front of you without viewing anything as in opposition to any other thing. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid, an abundance of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human…and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.

When our stories are taken away by abusive situations, we can become too desperate to create new ones and move so quickly, or can become stagnant and withdrawn, refusing to go on.

The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.

The weight of our losses might feel heavy one day and markedly lighter the next, but the memory remains. If it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Neither is indicative of being more or less "healed" or "healthy". Neither is right or wrong. There's not necessarily a linear path that leads us out of our discomfort and into an unaffected state. We might also compassionately absolve ourselves of the inclination to search for a silver lining. There might not actually be one, and that's okay. We need not feel pressured into finding bright spots when we just landed in the dark ones, and we mustn't succumb to this binary vision of adversity. Sometimes things don't "happen for a reason" and sometimes there isn't a cheerful way to look at a horrific or heartbreaking situation. Sometimes when we try to make sense of why bad things happen to good people, we find ourselves searching for meaning where there is none, getting caught in a manufactured duality. We can hold both. There is room and necessity for nuance, complexity, and gradation. We can be hurt and healing simultaneously. We can be grateful for what we have and angry about what we don't at the exact same time. We can dive deep into the pit of our pain and not forget the beauty our life maintains. We can hold both. We can grieve and laugh at precisely the same moment. We can make love and mourn in the same week. Be crestfallen and hopeful. We can hold both. And so it goes. We grievers might stumble upon these notions the hard way (I'm not so sure there's any other way to come face-to-face with them), but nevertheless, we work to integrate them and, in time, deftly tuck them in to our pockets as hard-won wisdom we might just get the chance to impart someday.

The partner/friend binary places coupled, monogamous, romantic, sexual, partnered love right at the pinnacle of human experience. Like the sexual and gender binaries this is quite a new, Western dominant culture thing to do, and certainly not the way that relationships have been done globally, or across time.

Perhaps an overarching binary when it comes to love and relationships is the one which privileges partners over friends. You can see this reflected in phrases like "just friends", "more than friends" and "friendzone", all of which suggest that being friends is inferior to - and less desirable than - being partners with someone.

We’re all just people and we all have the same wants and desires no matter how we realize them. I like sharing my favorite human function with a fellow human being: scratching our mutual itch against each other.

Abstractions like “top” and “bottom” lose all meaning when the two-player dynamic is removed. We form a sort of a sexual communism in which all participants offer their unique gifts according to their individual attributes, to be shared and enjoyed by all.

I, myself, have used this approach in large “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies” classes, suggesting to straight male students that if for no other reason, they should at least embrace feminism because doing so will result in better heterosexuality—more authentic relationships with women and better sex based on women’s enthusiastic interest, rather than women’s placating and ambivalent consent. But I don’t feel good about this approach; I want men to be feminists because they value women’s humanity, because they identify with women, and because they see that the gender binary is a historical, political-economic, and cultural invention that has caused no end of suffering for women and also for themselves. When men extend empathy and subjectivity to women out of self-interest, to grease the wheels of sexual access or to continue receiving women’s emotional labor, this makes no intervention into men’s profound sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and women’s love, nor does it pose any challenge to men’s unrelenting attachment to their own masculinity as the core of their identity, the foundation of their goodness, the basis on which they connect with other men, and the primary contribution they think they’re making to the world.

People love creating false binaries," Matt said.