Yesterday, my partner showed me my mom’s WhatsApp status. She had put up the picture of my sister and her husband up there with the caption, “my daughter and son-in-law” with pink hearts as exclamations. The picture was a sweet one, where my sister was cuddled with her husband – and the emotion was a simple one my mom expressed. It was affection and pride. It was a charming manifestation of what straight people feel about love and family.

I felt a pang of remorse and a prickling rejection. The man I have spent 23 years with, Anand, never once featured with me on any one of my mother’s status updates. He has been with me since the year 2000. He has handled every family problem along the way. Furthermore, he has met the needs of all the elderly people in my family and done, many a time, what even my sister and I have failed to do for them. My aunt, Goodie, loved and appreciated him more than any other in this family – and he treated her like a mother. No surprise there.

But he is still gay. In love with me, another gay man. We have no true measure of our relationship except for the one we both share in private. Our love gets no label. It gets no name. I am fine with that. I am not fine when to respect and appreciate it, others must understand it in the structure of their world view. If there is no marriage, there is no justification for love between two people. If there is no following the codes of society, society chooses to nullify the relationship.

I am even fine with the rejection that I face and will face from society. I owe them no justification. I am not fine with the ones who say they love me and have been a part of my relationship and not been okay with its manifestation. I am not fine with the ones I love who have used this relationship when they needed to use it, and then discarded its worth when faced with the questions society could ask. I am not fine with it.

That being said, I want to talk directly to my LGBTQ+ brethren now. When I fell in love for the first time, I thought it would last forever. I was 20. I ideally believed that love would conquer all. But over the months that passed, I made my lover my first priority. I was strong in my belief that he loved me like I loved him. I won’t go into the complexities of love and how strange it can actually be. I will, however, write of how a gay man saw our relationship.

He said to me, casually, one evening, “Blood is always going to be thicker than water.”

It took me aback. Here, I was making him my first priority. For him, I would have left my family and journeyed with him to his country, if he so desired. But to him, I was never a first priority. I was never family. I was not connected by blood. To be absolutely crude, ejaculating inside him would never count. It would never result in a baby. A being that would contain both our different bloods. A manifestation of what comprised of family.

(I will not get into the fact that even wives going to their husband’s homes, are treated as the Other. The ones living on the periphery of the innermost circles of what is construed as blood relations. Spouses, by default, in the straight world, are family in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the true family, still very much outsiders. There is no shared history, except for the ones marriage begins to make. There are divorces. There are separations. There are no links, by blood, that cannot be easily severed. Even there. But I won’t talk in detail about the straight world. Because in the gay world, we do not even have the choice of legal representation. We do not have the right to marry, before god and the rest of the clans, and prove to the Law of the Land that family ties can be formed with the blessing of society.)

So, in the gay relationship, I come into, if I choose to override the fact that we are not linked by blood, my lover becomes my spouse because I feel and think it so. But – and this is a big but – if my own lover thinks blood is thicker than water, the relationship is doomed from the get-go. For who else do I count upon when society builds up its stacks against us? When those with common blood decide to call upon its worth, my lover has to decide that blood isn’t the final calling. Love is. Until then, I will only be the lover. Never a spouse. And most definitely, never family.

When my first love said. “Blood is thicker than water”, he quoted what he felt was true. Heinrich der Glîchezære’s wrote this in the poem “Reinhart Fuchs” which he composed in 1180. “I moreover hear it said,” he writes, “family blood isn’t demolished by water.” He was writing this to mean that even if your family lived over the ocean, separated by leagues of water, the bonds of blood would keep them bound together. You might expect this saying to have arisen at such a time when Germanic people were migrating north, leaving their family behind on continental Europe. My first love was from South Africa, and he had come to India to study. Here, it seemed quite apropos. And true to form, once he left India, despite making promises to return for me, he never did. He broke my heart and made me realise my love was not stronger than his blood bond.

As gay people, we are often ostracised for who we are. Our parents reject us. Our siblings spurn us. We are not given a modicum of respect for who we biologically are, many, many times. Most of the abuse we get starts from within the family. How, then, does blood become thicker than water? We must come to realise this, and the sooner we do, the sooner can emancipation truly begin. Because emancipation comes from thought – it comes first from within, then from without. We have ample examples from our most beloved and revered stories. They manifest from truth.

In the end, I would like to quote a proverb from the Bible.

“One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
– Proverbs 18:24

This proverb was further used by Henry Clay Trumbull, to create a twist in the saying people quote to me. He writes, “the blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” This means that people who make a blood-bond or blood-pact become more bonded than brothers who shared a womb. “The saying means that chosen bonds are more significant than the bonds with family or ‘water of the womb’. More directly, it means that relationships you make yourself are far more important than the ones that you don’t choose.”

Over time, I have begun to realise this to be true for me, because I know this is what I believe in my heart. I do not preach to those who choose the family they were born into over the family that they choose for themselves. I merely state this: If I choose to make someone my family, I do so with the complete definition of love. I am not obliged to love them because they are bonded to me by blood. I choose to love them of my own Free Will. I manifest this bond by love. For me, this love lasts for a lifetime. Being bonded by blood is a happenstance. I know this because my father never loved me, we were just connected by blood. But the man I have been with for the past 23 years, has stood by me, and given me more love than my father ever did. We do not share a blood bond. We just share love.

In my head and heart, that is what truly matters.