what it might look like for us to prioritize and honor our friendships in a way that allows for a more expansive understanding of what friendship is. Nordgren writes that “relationship anarchy questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple.”

keenly aware of the absence of the world we’d made.

“Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name

the places we go to escape the distractions and obligations and stressful busyness of our everyday are not where we build our lives.

It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like we are spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae. It’s only in an environment with others that this generative, multiplying power can be created.

As writer and activist Shon Faye puts it, “Queer is about removing labels and replacing them with a question. It is a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics. It says, ‘I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’”

People do not survive racism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and poverty without developing extraordinary skills, systems, and practices of support. And in doing so, they carve a path for everyone else.

A 2018 survey from Cigna found that a quarter of us don’t have people in our lives who we feel understand us.2 Only half of us have daily meaningful interactions with others. “At least two in five surveyed sometimes or always feel as though they lack companionship (43%), that their relationships are not meaningful (43%), that they are isolated from

While it’s open to anyone, it’s not for everyone.