SmartLess - Listen Now: The 82% by This is Actually Happening

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

This is a preview from episode one of The 82%: Modern Stories of Love and Family by This is Actually Happening, produced in collaboration with the Modern Family Institute. If you’d like to find out more about the Modern Family Institute, donate to help advance their work, or get engaged, please visit their website, modernfamilyinstitute.org. Listen to the 82% now: Wondery.fm/ActuallyHappeningSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever heard of the term nuclear family? The term was coined by an anthropologist in the 1920s to describe the family structure of a straight married couple and their kids. Well, now, over a century later, only about 18% of Americans actually live in a family by that definition. And that means that over 82% of Americans represent different kinds of family. From this is actually happening comes the 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, a special limited series available ad-free on Wondery+.

This series focuses on those who have broken away from the norm and challenge society's notions on what a family can be. From an asexual educator and activist raising a child with two other co-parents, a gay man in the clergy who chose the path of celibacy and created a unique family unit with his straight best friend. Each episode offers an intimate first-person story from those whose family lives have taken different shapes. Not only can you listen to the 82% on Wondery+, but you can get early access to your favorite podcasts, exclusive content, and ad-free listening to all episodes. I'm about to play a clip from the 82% modern stories of love and family.

Follow the 82% modern stories of love and family on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Around, I don't know, fifth or sixth grade, I think was when my friends started to process their sexuality. I'm there was starting to crushes on people and started become clear that sexuality was a thing that was taking up their time and attention if only because it was something that they were told what they were supposed to be experiencing. they were supposed to be experiencing. But through fifth grade, sixth grade, it started to become real. I started to have my first sex ed classes in sixth grade

and the sex ed classes made it really clear that sexuality was a thing that everyone would be experiencing and be the source of a lot of joy and a lot of pain and a lot of upheaval and that this joy and pain and upheaval was going to be core to how we became adults. There was this sense that sexuality in adolescence was sort of a rite of passage. In sixth grade, I haven't felt this thing yet, but I have to get ready because who I

am now is going to be really profoundly transformed. And i remember waiting i remember having this sense of like this thing is coming and it's gonna it's gonna up in my world. Some people are great we're starting to kiss people people are talking about having crushes people really want to know who i had crushes on. had crushes on, I didn't have a felt sense of what a crush was. And there's a moment where I was just reflecting on this waiting. I was sort of like, okay, I've been waiting and maybe waiting is the thing I need to get used to. Maybe the state I'm in now of not feeling this thing is something that I should start thinking about rather than something I should be getting ready to get over. The thing that I felt like I was not experiencing that everyone else was experiencing was crushes. Like everyone was having crushes, everyone was talking about them, everyone was talking

about what movie stars they thought were hot. Like that was a really big part of middle school life. And that was something that was completely a foreign language to me. And there were a lot of things I needed to learn about how sexuality worked in order to fake it effectively that I didn't know. Like what was considered hot? Like what were the nuances of how I was supposed to feel

about someone who was hot? Sometimes I could fake, but I couldn't fake convincingly. So I just try to avoid those sorts of conversations. So by seventh and eighth grade, I sort of been waiting to start feeling this thing that everyone around me had been experiencing, and it wasn't happening. And that started to get really scary, because there wasn't really a model for me of people who weren't sexual. And I didn't know what that meant at first. I didn't know if that meant that I wasn't interested in physical touch at all, that

I wasn't interested in emotional intimacy with people. Like all of those, sexuality, touch, intimacy, love, humanity, all those things were tied up in a knot that I had to kind of pick apart. I also remember making a few friends and really just talking with them for hours about their experiences of sexuality. I had a few relationships initially with queer women because I couldn't relate to other straight men, because the other straight men were bonding too much around sexuality. And I was afraid to connect with straight women because I was really afraid of them being attracted to me. And I didn't yet know enough about attraction to know how to navigate the experience of someone being into me.

But queer women felt safe. So I started having all these conversations about like their, you know, early girlfriends or crushes on girls in our grade, to try to map for myself what sexuality was and try to find a place for myself in it. Because I had all of these questions. Like I really wanted to know what it was like to have a crush on someone.

I wanted to be able to understand these things that felt like they were having such a profound impact on my world, but were a foreign language. I think for a few years, I assumed that this was a psychological disorder. I had this sense that like for some reason, I must be not letting myself be sexual. Like there must be a sexuality in there

and I gotta kind of dig to find it and figure out what's blocking it. So there was this sense that I had a problem to fix. And so I spent several years really holding that question of like, is this okay? And I can just accept it and move on with my life? Or is this a thing that needs fixing, in which case accepting it could really hold me back. You can listen to the 82% modern stories of love and family ad free right now by joining really hold me back.