My antis are making me too, uhh, tweaked tbh to stuudy effectively fore midterms so here, have some Twispike Feelings Dumping
the concepts of different types of love is one that has always enamored me.... while I’m romo, I’m friends with an aro (but allosexual, she’s not aroace) girl and her thoughts regarding the emotions she goes through being friends with people who want to push her into a relationship/want “more” from her always fascinate me... (if ur reading this, Friend, hop it’s not weird to refer to you in the third person like this i don’t even think u look here). asymmetric relationships tend to be portrayed as always bad, unfair, to be avoided.
but it’s like, if two people want something different from one another, and they bother understand and respect that -- well, i think that’s very beautiful. i don’t know. if they can understand that their partner’s needs are different than their own, and meet those specific needs? what a lovely endeavor!
(incidentally this is why I love fictional depictions of healthy polyamory, even though i’m mono)
Twi is needy, neurotic, impulsed and driven. she does her best but her anxiety tends to rule the roost and direct her actions without a second thought. that big brains spins its wheels and she follows it wordlessly, often to her own dismay. She needs a wrench thrown in her gears -- Spike. she needs grounding. For the auspicious life she’s led he has been on of the few constants and there is no denying she will continue to need his attention and calming. Spike is always there. Spike needs her too. In her worst moments Twi is clingy and possessive of Spike out of fear, terrified of her security blanket ever leaving. this is temporary, this is a demon of anxiety driving her. as they mature, and as Spike continues to prove himself a constant, the possession acquiesces. She is assured and exalted in his consistency.After they become open about their feelings Spike could straight fuck off and out of town for a year and Twi wouldn’t flinch. he could fuck someone else. Twi wouldn’t care, she Has Him and Spike Is Always Going To Be In Her Life, The One Constant She Has Always Had Absolutely Will Not Change. she needs this. her love is eager, driven, necessary.
Contrast Spike. Spike will probably never leave the liminal state he currently occupies. His entire existence is one of a search for identity in the face of a society that has none to give him. he has no dragon role models, very little sense of family or relation; but he is chipper and calm in spite of it! Being an outsider -- Spike does NOT understand, truly, the intricacies of most of the sociological and/or anthropological (equestrilogical?) implications of where he lives. He is poorly enculturated. He does not wholly understand, well, much of any of these customs of his society, not relationships or gender or family or community. He speaks Friendship with a very funny accent. There were spats in his adolescence where his obvious outsider status frustrated him, but now, he is content. Spike is content to drift as a permanent tourist in this alien land and has accepted this. And Spike Knows he loves Twi. he doesn’t quite understand the implications of this -- why does that mean he can’t love anyone else? why COULDN’t he love Twi? Why is that wrong? -- but he knows it as truly as any other fact in his life. From an early age he accepted that he was going to be with Twi forever, not really getting that, to others, that was not quite such a given. Why were they asking his when he was gonna move out as a teenager?? Why did Scootaloo make it weird when we kissed that one time, asking things like “so what are we”?? Auugh, don’T ASK Spike these things!! He is frustrated by a society he does not understand intimately telling he is wrong for stepping over invisible boundaries constantly. But Twi never does that. Twi accepts Spike as the weird little gremlin he is. She’d never ask why he was digging a nest for no reason, or hiding in the fireplace because It Seemed Cool. He’s Spike, he just sort of does his own thing, and it seems like Twi is truly the only one to not tut-tut him back into place if he seems to violate norms. His love is warm, big, but in all honestly, simple. Breaking it down to brass tacks, he probably has a single frequency of “love” -- he does not love Twi especially more than he loves anyone or thing else (contrast Twi, who ABSOLUTELY has gradients of affection, where he sits squarely at the top).
Spike seems to at least superficially understand that the emotions Twi feels for him are not symmetric to his experience. He gets that Twi loves him “harder”, in a much more intense, needy way. He’s okay with that. He understands that sometimes Twi will need him and he won’t quite understand why and that’s okay.
Twi understands that this big lug that likes to cuddle and fuck is never going to be some suave Casanova. He’s never gonna wax poetic. Twi understands that his love is more, for want of a better term, “basic” -- but it is just as real. She knows she can’t demand some sort of relationship model he would never fit in; he would absolutely never really “get” it, and that’s okay. Twi knows Spike is always just gonna be this big affectionate puppy and not some insightful lover.He’s always gonna be Spike, and that’s all she could ever want.
relationships don’t have to be 1:1 to be lovely and functional. everyone just has to understand everyone else, and their needs. that sort of stammering to speak the others’ language is even, in a way, all the more beautiful
