Sure, relationships typically start with a honeymoon phase that then grows into something deeper but a bit more mellow if things work out, but it’s depressing as fuck that this has turned into a really, really common script for straight relationships that says it’s totally normal and inevitable for dudes to just become more and more emotionally checked out of the relationship, and leave it to their girlfriend/wife to perform if she wants to get even a crumb of affection from him. I’m so fucking tired of seeing women constantly being taught that decades of emotional neglect is just our lot in life.

what “getting out of the honeymoon phase” should mean: you aren’t joined at the hip anymore and can spend time apart, but you still greatly enjoy eachother’s company and deliberately make time to be together. you’re not just a unit, you’re a matched set (like, you’re susan and bob rather than susanandbob). you start to see eachother’s flaws and don’t put eachother on a pedestal but instead love eachother as human beings, flaws and all.

what it should NOT mean: you barely talk anymore. you feel like two completely different people, tied together by a frayed thread. you’re annoyed by eachother’s flaws and don’t like to be around eachother

similarly: “relationships are hard, they take a lot of work” means that cooperation on a daily basis in both the practical and emotional realms takes conscious effort. you can’t coast on those honeymoon feelings forever, and you aren’t psychic, so you have to pay attention and communicate so you can honor each other’s wants and needs.

it should not mean that you’re fighting every two days or walking on eggshells to avoid the anger of an unreasonable partner or breaking your back trying to get the slightest sign of affection or respect from someone who’s checked out and doesn’t care about you.

This is so, so important. Dont keep investing in a relationship thats not giving back. You deserve to be heard, you deserve at the very least communication.

Looking for season 1 LoVe fics that don’t make excuses for Logan

Does anyone know of any LoVe fics where Logan’s cruelty and the damage he did and helped do to Veronica pre-series and early in the first season is actually dealt with, without making excuses, downgrading it to harmless flirtation, or making the bullshit claim that she gave as good as she got because she planted a bong in his locker that one time?

I always thought their relationship would’ve been a lot healthier and less painful for both of them if Veronica had actually held him responsible for all that the first time around, instead of her just trying to ignore it and shove down all the completely justified hurt, mistrust, and resentment only for it to pop up again later when Logan thinks things are good and can’t do anything to fix it because he doesn’t know what the problem is. And also I’m just really tired of the ‘poor Logan, Veronica is such an unreasonable bitch’ narrative.

Here are some I’ve found myself:

When the Cuddling Isn’t the Best Part by skk670

Sleep, perchance to dream series by wily_one24

ZODIAC SHIPS : TAURUS X SCORPIO

Dan Humphrey - April 20 (Taurus) Blair Waldorf - November 15 (Scorpio)

Taurus and Scorpio maybe opposite signs but these two complement each other. There’s a great potential for their initial attraction to move on to a long lasting relationship. Both are homebodies, ambitious, loyal, devoted and good with money. More importantly the bull and the scorpion are two signs that are in search for a legendary kind of love so when they meet and get to know each other more, magic happens.  When these two fall in love, they get blind to the rest of the world. The secretive Scorpio will let his/her guard down to trustworthy Taurus. Betrayal is the biggest fear of Scorpio; Taurus is extremely faithful and will always do his/her best to keep the relationship going when already committed. As their relationship progresses, trust will be deeply rooted and all doubts and suspicions will go away. For as long as both are willing to set aside egos to make things work this relationship will smoothly sail.

that is so fuckin’ romantic  (2/2) touches – blair/dan, gossip girl

Curse this damn scene.  It is what made me first become interested in these two characters and why I began to actually actively watch the series on a week to week basis.  Funnily enough, this is basically the opposite of the other touch I chose for this meme.  Here, Blair rejects Dan’s comfort, and the second that she took her hand out of his, I was a complete goner for this pairing.  There is something so incredibly compelling to me about the loneliness and isolation of the human condition.  About these two characters having traveled through such similar places and yet still having bridges that cannot be crossed.  The fact that Dan could reach out and take her hand is not all there is to the equation.  His offer of support isn’t the end of the story.  Dan and Blair.  Individual entities.  Two proper nouns separated by a conjunction.  Or a comma if mentioned in a fucking list.

Ugh, that is so fucking romantic.

Ugh, I was getting along with my life and then a dair fan has to go say things like this. ugh. Now I have to rant..great. There goes an hour of my life I’m never going to get back… 

Yes to everything in the post.  And also the fact that Dan offers comfort and Blair pulls away because she’s too proud to be weak in front of Humphrey AGAIN, or maybe she’s scared, or maybe she doesn’t want his pity. Whatever the reason, there is a look of regret on her face right after she pulls away. Like she wishes she hadn’t done it. She wishes she had just accepted his support, and wasn’t so proud or scared or resentful or whatever. Ugh.

This entire scene really. First he follows her up to this room because he knows she goes looking for Chuck and he knows that nothing ever good happens when Blair goes looking for Chuck. And right before they run behind the curtain Dan tries to very nicely tell her what Serena has been trying to tell her all episode, that Chuck is, again, in love with a girl that is not her. And ugh. Chuck says Raina is sacred to him which I know must have cut Blair to the core because he once claimed that their first time together was the only thing sacred to him and there he was telling another girl that she was sacred to him. She had to have felt either betrayed or like Chuck had used one of his pick up lines on her.

And Dan is just there. And that stupid song is playing the background with the lyrics “I will never let you down” repeating over and over and those words have rung so true for Dan. Because he tried with everything he had to never let her down (I’m ignoring the season 5 finale here of course). And teh poster was totally right, they have lived their own lives separately but they have suffered in similar ways and it’s just infuriating as a viewer because you can see how similar these two people are and how they can both be the end of the others’ suffering but Blair just isn’t ready to go there because this is DAN HUMPHREY. And Blair Waldorf does not like Dan Humphrey. Blair Waldorf does not need Dan Humphrey. Blair Waldorf isn’t even friends with Dan Humphrey. Right?

And don’t even get me started on the fact that they are dressed like a bride and groom with Dan in his black suit and Blair in that white dress. Blair has worn so many wedding dresses with Dan it’s frankly a little embarrassing.

And also, they are sitting on a couch that is very similar to the one that Harry and Sally sit on at the end of the movie WHMS. It’s the same couch that a all the old couples sit on to tell how they fell in love in that movie. And there are Blair and Dan, sitting in a similar manner ready to tell us their love story. I’m sorry, but they’re going to end up together. Blair will realize that being queen and all the money and power in the world aren’t worth killing herself inside. And Dan will realize that Serena will always be Serena and he will always be Dan and therefore they will never fit together. When they’re old someone will ask them how they fell in love and they can sit and tell their story about how they didn’t like each other the first time they met, but then they were friends for a while, and then they weren’t friends for a while, and then they fell in love, etc. You get my drift.

Let’s make a pact never to feel anything around each other ever again.

i think one of the reasons that spike is so compelling to me, and one of the reasons that i’m really glad he’s part of the show, is that he’s pretty much the only character that has a consistently poetic command of language. and by that i don’t mean that he speaks in a pretty or heightened way, exactly. he speaks frankly and irreverently as much as he speaks evocatively. i’m not talking about his insight either, given that i think we’re supposed to see his insight as unreliable or flawed or accurate-but-malicious about half of the time.

what i mean is that he phrases things interestingly, in a way that links unexpected concepts together. things like:

that repetition of “makes you…” is a poetic sort of conceit. it’s got rhythm. it links “warm” which can mean either physical warmth or emotional warmth,  and “hard” which suggests sexuality and more animal parts of living, and “other than dead.” it makes you intuit this more abstract notion of what it means to be “alive” and even: why the show is a vampire show in the first place. (there’s a whole other post to write about buffy’s obsession with the concepts of “dead” and “alive” and the way it uses spike in particular to express and explore that obsession).

he does this sort of parallelism again in the gift: “i know you’ll never love me. i know that i’m a monster. but you treat me like a man, and that’s…” that’s some cool overlapping repetition, where the “i know” parallel intersects with the “man/monster” parallel.

or go back to lovers walk. where he talks about “beautiful dresses with beautiful girls in them.” the show loves using demons to play on expected words and idioms like that. angelus talking about finding a heart “in a quaint little shopgirl” or dru saying “i didn’t like him. he got stuck in my teeth.” but spike is one of the few characters where it would make sense to use a repetition of “beautiful” as part of a “demons live in moral and linguistic opposite land” joke.

(actually one of the reasons i always thought spike and dru made perfect sense as a character combination is because drusilla also phrases things poetically. she says things that don’t make sense but actually do, and what’s more poetic than that? “you taste like ashes” etc. of course spike would be in love with her.)

or take his death wish speech in fool for love. that speech could never come out of any other buffyverse character’s mouth, and i love that he gives the show an excuse to use language in that way. “death is your art” is some intense phrasing. and like in his other speeches, the way he links death as art, death as a dance, and death as “on your heels” makes you intuit something complicated. the repetition paints death as this simultaneously constructive and destructive thing. something both kind of sexy and kind of terrible. it’s not an authoritative outlook on death by any means, but it is a poetic one. and i love that it exists in the show because it can stand in contrast to the stark, awful version of death in “the body” or the loving, sacrificial version of death in “the gift.”

because spike talks this way, he has this ability to bring things out in characters and scenes that wouldn’t be there otherwise. the beneath you church scene would probably have been unbearably overwrought if it had featured anyone other than spike. but because it does feature him, it allows the show to use unusual words and dramatic symbolism. or in episodes like smashed, as the tension mounts between buffy and spike, buffy starts speaking with an interestingly spike-like sense of repetition:

he also gives the show an ability to talk about the poetic instinct itself. that is, the way that putting things poetically can allow you to say unusually true stuff, but also can allow you to say false stuff in a dangerously seductive manner. it’s awfully pretty for spike to tell buffy “i don’t hurt you”…but we see not an episode later that that isn’t true. it makes sense to me that in season six, a season that is obsessed with the foolish and harmful parts of fantasy, spike starts out seeming gentle and attractive, but becomes an increasingly toxic figure. and basically finishes the season with all of his romantic images of himself destroyed.

(there’s something to probably say about his speech in touched and how it’s him speaking poetically in a way that is not about him, and not about finding a chink in someone’s armor, and this being a resolution of his season six role)

fiction is full of bad-boy foils. characters who can speak freely because they aren’t bound by kindness or propriety. but what i like about spike is the way that the show is basically aware that he is that kind of character and complicates him accordingly. not always elegantly or anything. but fool for love for example works hard to reframe him as a Poet and a Lover (and also importantly…a fraud), to the extent of ret-conning his past, and that colors how we see the way he speaks going forward. i never feel like spike is just “saying cool stuff.” instead, i feel like his character captures both the yearning to say things that sound good, to pursue to grand notions, and also the need to deflate that instinct. and that tension is compelling.

What I love about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that there’s something for everyone. Like, seriously, each season is like a different show. 

Like, this show encompasses so many different genres and themes that’s there’s something enjoyable in it for everyone. It works on so many different levels.