What's Possible in Relation?
On Resisting Relational Essence
In my thirties I changed my sexuality.
By that point, I’d been a lesbian for quite a while. Never questioned it. Loved it (still do). Then I kissed a man, panicked about it, accepted it, and chose to explore my desire in a different way. That choice was choppy—the weight of social norms, my history of desire and pleasure, and the force of expectations all pressed against it. There were plenty of moments where I could have gone back to my “old self.”
But I was determined. Maybe it’s the stubborn Taurus in me. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m an existentialist who believes, with Jean-Paul Sartre, that “existence precedes essence.” I’m not born as something. I become someone. And my choosing, my experimentation in choosing, is a key part of who and how I become.
I’ve written about this—sexuality as a becoming, not a fixed thing—in an unpublished academic article that’s been assigned to hundreds of students. People with fluid sexualities often feel seen by it. Others, no matter their sexuality, resist what I’m ultimately saying: that they, too, can make choices that change their desires. That “can” doesn’t always land well.
I’m not the first, nor the last, queer or feminist thinker to make such a claim. In “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, Amia Srinivasan argues that our sexual preferences can and do alter “under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either.” She goes further: desire is political, and sometimes we have a duty to transfigure it. “[D]esire,” she writes, “can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.”
What both of us are circling is the question of possibility, not just that change is possible, but that it has moral and political stakes. If I’m not born any way, then to what extent do I have the capacity to choose something, or someone, different for myself? And as Srinivasan asks: to what extent, and when, do I have a duty to choose possibility?
It’s been brought to my attention lately that I go hard for possibility — which is kind of funny, given how much I think about, and genuinely feel, the weight of history and social norms and expectations. And yet, I guess I do. I care about those weights. I study them, I trace their limits. But I refuse to let them have the final word. Possibility, for me, isn’t naïve optimism or a denial of structure; it’s an insistence that even within constraint, something else is still possible. And in truth, this isn’t just about sexuality. It’s about how we live with one another, how we structure our intimacies, how we keep relating as a site of “could be” instead of only “this is how it is.”
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, possibility sits at the center of relationships. What’s possible here, with us? What can we experience together? What stands in our way? How do social forces—power relations, customs, norms—shape a relationship in ways that exceed any one person’s capacity to change them?
I used to talk about this with students when I taught feminist theory. Take a woman married to a man, with a child, and both partners working. To what extent is it possible for them to exceed the social norm that she will still do more housework and childcare? To what extent will the institution of hetero-marriage not be a trap for her? Historically, this institution has closed possibilities for women. So what is possible for her once she’s inside it?
Of course it is possible for their relationship to remain egalitarian. But the power of social forces can make that possibility a quasi-impossibility. By “quasi-impossibility,” I mean something that isn’t impossible in itself, but feels nearly impossible because structural, historical, and cultural forces press against our capacity to act. Anything isn’t really possible.
But then again: isn’t it?
Choosing isn’t a one-time event. If we’re intentionally and actively choosing all the time, then the extent of possibility grows. What exactly becomes possible when we really live this way—honestly, who knows.
For instance, I might choose not to take a partner with me to a holiday party because people will assume they’re my partner, when in fact we don’t “belong” to one another and we both have other partners. In the social custom of +1s, the legibility of our non-monogamy is a quasi-impossibility. But we can still interrupt the custom. We can clarify, decline, show up differently, even if we can’t erase it.
And this brings me to another place where quasi-impossibility shows up big-time for me: cohabitation.
I live solo, and I love it. Not in the defensive “I’m fine, really” way, but in the sense that living alone has been one of my favorite experiences of possibility. There are forms of solitude, spontaneity, desire, and self-styling that belong uniquely to living solo.
Cohabitation is also one of our major relationship benchmarks. Moving in together is proof of seriousness, a pre-engagement, the obvious next step. In that sense, the social custom of cohabitation functions a bit like the +1 at the holiday party: it makes one kind of relationship legible (the partnered, nesting one) and renders others quasi-impossible.
Of course, cohabitation doesn’t have to be dramatic or definitive. It can be practical, contingent, temporary, joyful, ordinary, or simply the best option this year. It can mean “this works,” not “this is everything.”
And also…it does change things.
Are the same things possible when you’re home alone as when you’re sharing your daily environment with someone else? My instinct is to say no. Cohabitation approaches its own quasi-impossibility: shared space concentrates time and access, and that concentration alters the field. For some people practicing non-monogamy, that shift may land more intensely.
But, even if I haven’t always experienced it as such, I know that cohabitation isn’t inherently limiting; it’s just a different configuration of possibility. The truth is that neither living solo nor with others guarantees or forecloses intimacy or individual agency. They simply orient us differently. Because possibility is something we co-create, we get to choose how to live inside those orientations, if and when we choose them.
Recognizing our capacity to choose is how we stay awake to the existential and political stakes of our everyday lives.
Which is why, in the face of quasi-impossibilities—social customs, norms, the gravitational pull of “this is just how it’s done”—I’m still going to go hard for possibility. Not because I know everything is possible, not because structures don’t limit us, and not because configurations don’t configure us, but because refusing possibility is the quickest way to let the world shrink around us. I’m not saying every person, all the time, needs to embrace possibility. Sometimes acknowledging something is impossible, that something or someone can’t change, that you don’t want to change, is important, life-giving even. So maybe it’s that I go hard for possibility because it’s a refusal of inevitability. It’s a way to keep open the precious spaces where something new might happen, spaces that only exist if we insist on them.