“I Think Women Like To Read About Murderous Mothers And Lost Little Girls Because It’s Our Only Mainstream

and the grocery store is never just the grocery store. i'm staring at cereal boxes trying to find one that'll stain my heart honey-sweet again. i'm pacing the snack aisle looking for an epiphany or addiction. i'm circling the croissants like they'll make my life beautiful. i'm looking at birthday cards wondering who i have left to congratulate. i'm clutching my sleeves in the produce section. as if this particular lettuce will cleanse away years of inner turmoil. i'm cradling wilted bouquets like precious cargo--have i ever been held this tender, this secure? i'm hovering before the self-checkout and cashier line, wondering if it'd be nice to go through something with someone else for once.

“In an experiment revealing the importance of having friendships, social psychologists have found that perceptions of task difficulty are significantly shaped by the proximity of a friend. In their experimental design, the researchers asked college students to stand at the base of a hill while carrying a weighted backpack and to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some participants stood next to close friends whom they had known a long time, some stood next to friends they had not known for long, and the rest stood alone during the exercise. The students who stood with friends gave significantly lower estimates of the steepness of the hill than those who stood alone. Furthermore, the longer the close friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared to the participants involved in the study. In other words, the world looks less difficult when standing next to a close friend.”

— my new favorite psychological study, done by Schnall, Harber, Stefanucci, and Proffitt and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

a short collection on catering to men. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012) A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1879) The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (1993)

the love club, lorde | sharp objects, gillian flynn | lady bird dir. greta gerwig | class of 2013, mitski | white oleander, janet french | girl in progress dir. patricia riggen | writer in the dark, lorde | little fires everywhere, celeste ng | electrick children dir. rebecca thomas | mythological beauty, big thief

— Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, c. 1978.

fuck does anyone have that poem thats like the speaker used to press her ear to conch shells when she was a child but as an adult the world has closed its second mouth or something

hi! i'm not sure if you already did this, but could you do a web weaving about the eldest daughter/ child (as a parental figure, taking care of younger siblings, etc.), but it doesn't have to be specifically about those things. thanks :)

@thisisalovestry (x)

Holly Warburton, Sisters

Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom

Taylor Swift, tolerate it

Tabitha Suzama, Forbidden

@ch3r1b0mb (x)

Becks_Rylnn, How the Light Gets In

Supernatural (2005–2020), 1x18: Something Wicked

@thrill-of-first-lovee (x)

Daughter, Smother

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

When Older Siblings Step Into Parents’ Shoes, NPR

— mimi evangeline, from girlhood is godhood

Do you have something on Platonic love?

well, there’s definitely elements of it in the love tag, but i haven’t really differentiated between romantic and platonic in the tag system. concepts like love as attention etc aren’t strictly defined as either imo & also, it definitely depends on the context of the specific text/the author i feel..? it’s all tangled up and complex!

anyway, there’s this one which just came across my dash 😳 i think it fits this theme well! and this platonic love quotes by @4400lux​ is an absolute gem 💓

& here’s a couple from the friendship tag 

this one! / two / three (this one has i’d say the strongest focus on the ‘all friendship is romantic’ slant) / to sit in hell with you / the heartbreak of friendship

a lot of these themes come up in a few of the above but it depends on what type of relationship you’re considering? they’re all forms of platonic love but perhaps there’s different trappings to them like: 

the mothers tag / other familial love which. i don’t think i have tags for currently oops...

there’s also the whole ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’ angle, love for found/chosen family! !! there’s quotes in some of the above links :’) 

love for humanity! for yourself !! for strangers (this compilation!!) just the inherent connection... the love we all send out to the world 🥺 

love for nature!! for being alive!! would highly recommend mary oliver’s poetry for this... and the love for your pets, again off the top of my head, would rec ‘dog songs’ by mary oliver, it’s very sweet 

& have a couple of other quotes n stuff! 

this tenderness photoset by wing shya about brotherhood 

this very sweet story about kafka and the doll traveler (or tumblr post here) !! “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

- ray bradbury

The other element of friendship is tenderness.

- ralph waldo emerson 

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. 

- c.s. lewis

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships — certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person. (...) You can tell how strong the friendship is by the silence that envelops it. Lovers and spouses may talk frequently about their “relationship,” but friends tend to let their regard for one another speak for itself or let others point it out.

- andrew sullivan

...the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

- david whyte

“But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe.” 

- jeanette winterson 

ok these are, for the most part, friendship focussed but going to stop now otherwise this post would be wildly long aha but i hope this helps! 💓

Trista Mateer, Honeybee