Love, Reimagined: Tiq & Kim Katrin Milan’s Blueprint for Love

In light of Pride Month, I want to celebrate a couple whose love has given me great inspiration: Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan. Tiq Milan is a tireless advocate for transgender rights and honest media representation, and his partner, Kim Katrin Milan, is a writer, educator, and artist who uses her platform to champion queer, trans, and feminist issues.

Tiq Milan (left) and Kim Katrin Milan (right)

Their love story is a phenomenal one.

In their TEDWomen 2016 talk, “A queer vision of love and marriage,” they reflect on the evolution of their love and how it morphed into the beautiful creation that it is today. Like most couples in the digital age, they found each other online. But their connection was almost immediate.

Over the course of three days, they exchanged a total number of 3,000 messages. 3,000 messages. For reference, the average person sends and receives an average number of 94 messages per day, and consequently, 282 messages every three days.

When Tiq gave this news at the TED Talk, the audience reasonably gasped. I did too (in the comfort of my home). But after the shock and laughter settled down, Tiq calmly and confidently said: “During those 72 hours, I knew she was going to be my wife.”

So what is the magic formula for love?

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. No one does. Not even the world’s greatest love and relationship experts.

But what their love can tell us is this: honesty, authenticity, and a commitment to “setting your partner free” is at the core of its success. At the onset of their online conversation, Tiq and Kim Katrin were quite frank with one another.

Tiq: “We didn’t wait any prerequisite amount of time for our courtship; we told each other the vulnerable truths up front: I am a transgender man, which means the F on my birth certificate should have stood for ‘False,’ instead of ‘Female.’”

Kim Katrin: “I am a cisgender queer woman… I’ve identified in a few different ways -- as a bisexual, as a lesbian -- but for me, queerness encompasses all of the layers of who I am and how I’ve loved. I’m layers and not fractions. And for me, the fact that he was queer meant that I could trust his courtship from the very beginning.”

What I take from this is authenticity to oneself and to others is the preliminary step towards building impregnable and loving relationships. It takes wearing your heart on your sleeve. It takes full disclosure of your intentions. It takes a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude that is profoundly unapologetic.

LGBTQ2SIA folx have long been shapeshifting the meaning and mechanisms of love for the better. As marginalized members of an exclusively gendered society, Tiq, Kim Katrin, and an infinite amount of others have historically had to create spaces where there were none before.

In the couple’s case, the constant back-and-forth messaging was one of the many efforts to “create spaces outside of convention, including the conventions of time.” As Tiq and Kim Katrin put it, “And, in those 3,000 messages, we collapsed time; we queered it; we laid it all on the table.”

Indeed it is an admirable quality: to lay it all on the table. To remain open, receptive, and truthful with your partner. To construct a love based on mutual respect and freedom of expression. To whip out a crisp new blueprint for love, one that does not tell you how to build, but rather encourages you to remodel.

In my opinion, I think this is one of the greatest beauties of love. You are responsible for your own fates. You work together with your partner, and cut and paste the aspects you see fit for your relationship. Because when love is in a constant state of drafts, edits, and revisions, love is alive.

Sources (in order of appearance)

Milan, Tiq, and Kim Katrin Milan. “A Queer Vision of Love and Marriage.” TED, 2016, www.ted.com/talks/tiq_milan_and_kim_katrin_milan_a_queer_vision_of_love_and_marriage?language=en.

Burke, Kenneth. “How Many Texts Do People Send Every Day (2018)?” Text Messaging Service for Small Business - Text Request, 2016, www.textrequest.com/blog/how-many-texts-people-send-per-day/#:~:text=That%20means%20%2D%20roughly%20%2D%20that%20Americans,94%20text%20messages%20per%20day.