We’ve all been here before: You meet someone. You immediately feel seen, exposed, and vulnerable in ways that you’ve never been before. You question everything you thought you knew about love. You make space for each other’s emotional traumas. You meet each other’s blood and/or chosen families. You book a Caribbean vacation, have incredible sex, and profess your love for each other under the moonlight.

You make the big leap to move in together and even though your partner has a beautifully renovated pre-war apartment with south-facing windows, you decide to sign a brand new lease together for the sake of fresh starts and equal partnership. And one day, when y’all are doing your joint laundry, commiserating about your cycles (which are now synced, by the way), you look at your beloved and think, “Damn, this has been the best four months of my life.”

Thanks to religion, colonization, sexism, systemic racism, and homophobia (honestly, the list could go on), queer couples — especially black + brown queer couples — historically make it their business to secure safe spaces to express themselves and their glorious love for each other. While its history is rooted in solving seemingly basic logistical issues, U-Hauling is a mainstay in queer relationships.

Whether or not your relationship is doomed, I’m rooting for you, sis. I’m only here to wax optimistic, illuminate some truths you’ve been hiding from, and ask all the hard questions. So based largely on my personal experiences and the stories my femme friends are kind enough to share with me, here is a list of four reasons that brown femmes U-Haul:

Continue reading →