You see straight people, sometimes, stammering awkwardly around whether that special someone they’ve gone on a couple of dates with counts as their boyfriend or their girlfriend yet. It’s a wellspring of pain and awkwardness: did he really just introduce me to his parents as his girlfriend? is she ever going to say ‘boyfriend’ about me? is he going to think I’m moving too fast? is she really that clingy?

It doesn’t tend to go that way, when you have my tendency to date nonbinary people. Instead, what should I call you? is an inevitable question from the first shy invitation for coffee. It’s a hard question, and one which prompts more hard discussions. I’ve learned in the course of these that my Californian friends don’t share my Southern instinct that partner implies a serious, long-term relationship, one which might be marriage if you weren’t too gay or anti-establishment for the institution. They agree it’s a touch clinical, but what else is there? You can rifle through coinages and neologisms, but they all have their pitfalls. Datemate has a pleasing assonance to it, but it’s painfully cutesy. Boyfriend and girlfriend generalize into the unfortunate childfriend, which no one uses. Emfriend, my personal choice, taken from the ey/em neopronoun, is prone to mishearing. Sometimes I’ll just pick one, boyfriend or girlfriend, guessing which will fly under the radar or be more conspicuously gay, depending on my mood. I’ve always wished for the audacity to use lover.

It doesn’t get easier when the relationship takes steps forward, either. Fee-ahn-say, spoken out loud, is pleasingly ambiguous, but writing it down requires a collapse of the wave function. Sometimes I spell it with three e’s, instead of one or two, or replace them with a cryptic schwa: anything to signal this word does not fit into your lexicon. Other times, I get fanciful: my betrothed, my affianced. Once you’re married, you can say spouse with a straight face, or dodge the question with my better half, but I’ve never found a good word for the wedding day – only the hideous broom and gride.

The conversations never stop. Queerness is an exercise in deconstructing relationship paradigms – maybe the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written. It’s true, though. Sometimes you just throw them out of the window; sometimes you bend and contort yourself to squeeze into the radio buttons of an obstinate form; but most often you take the Ikea furniture of social expectations down to its constituent pieces, build something new and weirder out of it. Sometimes the result is charming but rickety. Sometimes it fits better than you could ever have dreamed.

Weddings, of course, with their whirlwind of traditions – only half deBeers-coined – are a minefield from before the question is popped. You’re spared the agony of unwanted proposals when you’ve been talking for months about whose job it is to pop the question; no one has to return an ugly ring when you’ve had to negotiate who would wear it in the first place. The Betrothed and I had two proposals and an anti-proposal, assembled like up and down quarks into a proton; we negotiated engagement rings cuddled up on the couch, arms around each other, shopping side-by-side on our computer screens. I’d always told myself I wanted a ring that cost less than a hundred dollars; the one on my finger now cost twenty times that. It was a long discussion, but I love my ring.

Who wears a white dress, if anyone does? Do we reject the patriarchal social construct of virginity, or do we admit that the color never even meant that and we want the lace and frills? Is there a garter? Who smashes cake in whose face? Who will marry us, and where, when a church and a priest are out of the question? (God bless the Unitarians, and all that, but I’m not marrying in a church – I don’t need a panic attack on my wedding day). Who leads the first dance? Who speaks their vows first? Wait, who speaks their vows first in straight couples?

And then there’s the vows. You can’t say lawful wedded wife, of course, or you may now kiss the bride, but does it really sound as good to just say you may now kiss? Maybe we don’t need anyone’s permission to kiss. Maybe we want to include disclaimers in our vows, terms and conditions that our guests would prefer to click on through without reading. Certainly we can’t say forsaking all others, not when my emfriend is standing in the congregation smiling. (Is it still a congregation? It sounds wrong to call it an audience. Is there a group noun for guests?) If we say to obey, are we practicing kink in front of children? If they put a collar on me, will a grandparent faint? Must you dodge till death do us part if, like a lesbian couple I know, you intend never to die? What am I promising, when I stand up in front of friends and family and the state of California? What does marriage mean to me? What does love mean? Does anyone care, or are they just waiting for the cake?

It’s not just the formalities, either. You can’t just assume kids will happen if and when they happen, when your gametes are incompatible. Whose will you use? Who will be pregnant? Or should you adopt? What will they call you, when Mom and Dad don’t apply? You could just use your first name, if only you knew what that was – legal name, work name, the internet handle your friends call you…? How do you decide who gets their top surgery first? And the joke about the lesbians who can’t open a jar of pickles – it’s not just a joke. Not always, at least.

An open secret: sex gets better when you deconstruct it. You can lay it out like a buffet: penetration, orgasms, hands, mouths, toys, domination, submission, pain, pleasure. Usually only one of us gets off, in any given session; you’d think some kind of formal alternation might be required, but in practice it works out fine. (We did have simultaneous orgasms, once.) There’s a dizzying array of silicone dicks – we each have favorites – and half a dozen vibrators charging at any given time. Sometimes one of us is too dysphoric to undress; sometimes, instead of fucking, we cuddle with a pillow in between us, each individually miserable in a body warped away from our mind by puberty. We’ve had scenes where no one undressed, no one was touched, and they were fabulously hot. Once we both woke up in the middle of sex, having started to fuck in our sleep. Sexsomnia: it’s a thing, people.

I see women, online, bemoaning that they can’t get off on their boyfriend’s dick; I see men who feel emasculated because they can’t come from a blowjob. My Betrothed went to a forum, once, and asked men if they’d have a one-night-stand where no one touched their dick. How would that even work? one asked. So, just video games? I’m down, said another. I want to take people by the shoulders and say: sex can be what you want it to be! You can have a dick shaped like a rosebud or a tentacle! You can put your hand inside your partner and make them come screaming! You can have five orgasms, or none, or give one to yourself with your head in your partner’s lap while they watch TV! Think about what you actually want, for once. Jerk off in the bedroom alone, and invite your partner in for cuddles in the afterglow. Have a conversation with your partner and find out that they think you grope them too much, and you think they grope you too little. Tie someone up and then come five times while they choke you on their cock. No one can stop you.

Here’s my point: all of love is like this, not just the parts which have a letter somewhere in a too-long acronym. When I try to figure out whether to refer to the multiple system I’m engaged to as my partner or my partners, it’s the labels question all over again. We spend as much time and energy deconstructing dishware as sex: I like mugs, they like glasses, our plates are from the West and our bowls from the East, we agree that an electric kettle is a necessity but I will never understand what’s wrong with making rice in a pot on the stove. It’s all right. They put up with the enormous waffle-maker that was a present from my ex. I’m not going to get rid of it. It makes great waffles.

I’ve discovered, like (no doubt) every generation before me, that building a household together is an exercise in deconstructing your assumptions. Things you took for granted your whole life turn out to be a family quirk. You have to pick and choose and compromise, and with enough luck and enough love, you come out the other end happier and stronger than how you went in. Inside our house, you take off your shoes (Betrothed’s hobbyhorse) and you don’t drink alcohol (mine). We have separate bedrooms, but we share a bed at night, because it’s important to me. They taught me to eat hot pot, and learned to make macaroni and cheese that’s better than the comfort food I grew up with.

Of course we fight, sometimes, when the assumptions clash. I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do with more rooms than we have people living in the house. They wish I would stop drinking from their water glass. Other times things we brought with us click right away. I sold them on Teva sandals, and now I have to figure out which of the two near-identical pairs is mine ever time; they introduced a bus tub for dishes, and I liked it at once. Each of us brought our own weighted blanket to the relationship, and now they both live on the couch. We merged our collections of Squishables.

Love is queer: you have to take it apart, look at the pieces, figure out what sparks joy. Even Marie Kondo says that it’s okay to have eleven pinball machines, if that’s really what makes you happy. Not all baggage is bad. My mother told me once, when I was little, that it was okay to ask your husband to open a jar for you, even if you can do it yourself; it’ll make him feel validated, strong, like a provider. I’d never dream of playing dumb for a guy, or throwing a game to one, but the jar thing seemed sensible to me. These days, Betrothed brings jars to me, and asks me to open them with your strong boy hands. It’s true – it does make me feel validated in my masculinity. Some things get folded back in, like that, like a sourdough starter. Some things are made new. We’re choosing our own last name.

Love is queer, and I think any love that survives has to be, more than a little bit, no matter how heterosexual it is. No one has the wedding they dreamed of as a little girl; you have to put your dreams together with someone else’s. (Unless you’re one of those people who marries a bridge, I guess, or the Empire State Building. I think those people are wonderful, I honestly and unironically do. May we all know so clearly what we want in life.)

It’s been striking me, lately, how much the process of building our household resembles the process of building my body. I think a lot of cis people would benefit from learning to look at their bodies like trans people do, thinking about what they like, what they want, what would make them happy, what they can do to get it. And I think building a household, straight or gay, is much the same. You have to queer it up a bit. Bring in your coauthor from the internet to coparent your child. Admit that you’re too disabled to keep up with the chores and hire a damn maid already. Skip the dining table and get cushions to eat on the floor. You don’t have to follow the rules. No one can make you. The doormat says come back with a warrant. (Betrothed, who is very patient, puts up with it.)