DATE YOUR HOMEBOY: NORMAL DOESN’T EXIST

I just saw a video where a guy asked other men if they had ever wished their homeboys were women so they could date them. Then he started explaining how women drain his energy, but his homeboys don’t. He enjoys being around them. He connects with them. They understand him. He would apparently date the hell out of one of them if only that pesky little detail of them being men would disappear.

Bitch. DATE YOUR HOMEBOY.

It is okay to be gay. It is okay to be bisexual. It is okay to discover that whatever label you have been carrying around for twenty, thirty, forty, or sixty years does not completely describe you. Hell, you do not even have to grab another label immediately. Maybe start with the revolutionary concept of admitting who the hell you like.

We have created a society where somebody can describe attraction, emotional intimacy, compatibility, comfort, affection, and the desire for partnership, then spend ten minutes explaining why none of those things could possibly mean what they sound like because the person attached to those feelings has the “wrong” body parts. At some point, sweetheart, we have got to stop rearranging the furniture and admit there is an elephant sitting in the damn living room.

And religion has played a massive role in this mess. When people are taught that certain feelings could cost them their family, community, identity, reputation, or relationship with God, of course some of them are going to spend years trying to negotiate with themselves. They will rename attraction. They will intellectualize desire. They will create entire explanations for why they feel safest, happiest, and most emotionally fulfilled around someone while refusing to consider the possibility sitting directly in front of them.

Then society joins the party. Now you have people policing everybody else while privately wrestling with their own shit. That is the part that gets me. Some of the loudest enforcers of these ridiculous rules seem absolutely obsessed with what everybody else is doing in bedrooms they were never invited into. Baby, if somebody else kissing a man has ruined your entire Tuesday, perhaps Tuesday had some questions for you already.

This obsession with being “normal” is exhausting because NORMAL DOESN’T EXIST. Normal is a human-made concept. We looked at whatever the majority happened to be doing at a particular time, drew an imaginary circle around it, and started acting like everybody outside the circle needed an explanation. Then generations inherited the circle and forgot somebody made the damn thing up.

Human beings are weird. Beautifully, spectacularly, hilariously weird. We like different people. We enjoy different clothes. We eat different foods. We believe different things. We love different music. We build relationships differently. We decorate ourselves differently. We experience attraction differently. Somehow we keep trying to shove billions of wildly different human beings into one imaginary instruction manual and then act shocked when everybody is stressed the hell out.

If you want to love a man, love a man. If you want to eat flowers, eat the fucking flowers, preferably the edible ones because I am trying to make a point here, not send your ass to poison control. If you want sparkles on your hat, PUT THE DAMN SPARKLES ON YOUR HAT. If singing Kumbaya until the cows come home fills your little heart with joy, SING THE FUCKING KUMBAYA SONG. The cows may even appreciate the entertainment.

We spend an unbelievable amount of our lives performing for people who are performing for us. Think about how ridiculous that is. Everybody is standing around pretending to meet some imaginary standard while secretly wondering whether everybody else actually meets it. Meanwhile, somebody desperately wants to paint their toenails purple, somebody wants to leave a career their family bragged about for twenty years, somebody wants to admit they hate being married, somebody wants to date their damn homeboy, and everybody is waiting for permission from everybody else. WHO THE HELL CREATED THESE RULES?

Society is made up. Money is made up. Status is made up. Gender expectations are made up. Fashion rules are made up. Dating rules are made up. Half the etiquette we treat like sacred law was invented by somebody who has been dead for three hundred years. Human beings created systems to organize civilization, and somewhere along the way we started worshipping the systems instead of asking whether the people living inside them were actually happy.

And let’s talk about who gets the most freedom from these supposedly sacred rules. Wealth and power have always purchased enormous amounts of social flexibility. Powerful people can be eccentric, unconventional, sexually adventurous, oddly dressed, unmarried, remarried six times, living on a yacht with a crystal collection and a pet peacock, and society calls them fascinating. Everybody else steps two inches outside the approved script, and suddenly Aunt Brenda needs to organize a prayer circle.

I am exhausted watching human beings sacrifice entire lives trying to qualify for an imaginary certificate of normalcy that nobody receives. People hide relationships. They hide dreams. They hide personalities. They hide interests. They hide sexuality. They hide talents. They hide questions. They hide themselves so thoroughly that eventually they are living a life constructed almost entirely around keeping other people comfortable.

And THAT is where this stops being funny to me. People actually die carrying this shit. People reach the end of their lives having spent decades terrified of disappointing family members, religious communities, neighbors, strangers, coworkers, and people on the damn internet. They trade years of their lives for acceptance from people who are probably hiding something themselves. Enough is enough.

I want people to experience their own damn lives. I want people to know themselves before somebody hands them a script and tells them who they are allowed to become. I want people to ask, “What actually makes sense for me?” before asking whether everybody else will approve. I want human beings to become curious about themselves instead of constantly auditioning for the role of Acceptable Person Number 7,493,821.

Your existence does not need to resemble everybody else’s existence to qualify as a human life. You get one strange, unpredictable, complicated ride in this particular body, with this particular brain, during this particular moment in history. Spending the whole damn thing pretending because somebody invented a rule before you were born is one hell of a waste.

So yes, sir. If you are sitting around wishing your homeboy were a woman because you adore his company, love his personality, feel emotionally connected to him, and think you would happily date him if he were a woman, I have a groundbreaking suggestion.

Explore that shit. And everybody else? Mind your goddamn business. Maybe if we spent less time enforcing “normal” and more time actually living, we would finally discover something humans have been making unnecessarily complicated for centuries: People are just people.

Let them fucking be.

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