What the heck are we even doing here?
Glad you asked.
Love Bytes Hard is a weekly stream on Twitch that centers around love, relationships, and mental health. We start with the material that was created for a special premarital education class and just kinda roll from there.
Just to be clear, there’s nothing “jeebuzzy” or religious about it – but that also doesn’t mean that we’re gonna get snotty at you about your own faith practices. We’re a lot more interested in discussing materials that are a little more practical and founded in social sciences.
Didn’t I see something about weddings?
You sure did! Love in the days of COVID requires a little more creativity to get you to your ultimate destination, including doing weddings over the interwebs. We kicked the whole thing off with an in-person wedding with some very, very close friends (which also means that we were able to verify their low-vector-risk status), but we foresee that most or all of the future weddings will be done completely remotely with multiple streams coming from at least two places.
What we’ve discovered about doing virtual weddings like this is that it’s honestly a fuck of a lot less of a headache! Seriously! You don’t have to worry about things like who to seat at the table with crazy Uncle George and how the hell you’re going to pay for an open bar. Instead, you get to focus on the actual real thing that should be the only important part of your wedding: getting the marriage between the two of you started. Period.
No crazy, pushy in-laws. No bullshit groomsmen antics. No sweating the small shit. We absolutely loved how little stress went into even a kinda “big” event.
We think you’ll dig it, too. Look for some pages coming soon with guidance on how to make that happen. And, yes, we are legally qualified to perform weddings in all US states*.
- There are a couple states that do require a pre-qualifying letter, but with a little lead-time, that’s never been a problem.
Do you work with the queers?
Well… if we didn’t… this would be really awkward.
We love the gays, ideologically, personally, and… eh… “biblically,” shall we say. And the bis. And the gender-queer, gender-fluid, trans, aces, and any other perfectly natural and wonderful variation you can imagine. BIPOC and cultural sensitivity is also a big deal.
Which also brings us to a big point to maybe warn you about: shit will occasionally get really fucking political. Like, hardcore political. Passionately political. There will be some seriously intense moments when political issues pop up, because if you don’t think that love, relationships, and politics are intimately related (pun intended), you have not been paying attention.
Remember that first wedding we did? Not even sixty years ago, that would have been highly illegal because Mr. Man was black, and the new Mrs. was white. And we would have done it anyway because love should never be in the realm of politics.
(Expect a really long and possibly rambling blog post and stream discussion about the history of marriage as a tool of patriarchal property management at some point.)
(And also how fucking stupid engagement rings are.)
Anyway, long and short of it, all genders and orientations welcome, including monogam and polyams – solo, active, passive, non-practicing, whatever.
But wait, there’s more!
You can’t really talk about relationships without talking about mental health because that completely predicates whether or not your relationship stands any chance at all of being successful in the first place. Again, gods are not invited to that discussion. You wanna pray about shit? Knock yourself out, but we’re gonna talk about the hard-nail step-by-step stuff over here.
When we do have “mental health days,” we’ll be drawing from a lot proven methods – not just “conventional wisdom.” Also – and I cannot stress this enough – FUCK POSITIVE THINKING. We will not suggest that “everything happens for a reason,” unless that reason is quite possibly because you were stupid or made stupid choices, and then we’re going to break those choices down, figure out how you got there, see if there’s a way it can get fixed, and then make a path to get there. We’ve got a whole series on grieving and forgiveness, and that whole fluffy-bunny bullshit about letting things go is right the fuck out the window. Woo-woo hand-waving might work for a minute to distract, but we don’t have time for that. We’ve got too much shit to do.
So, really, this is just a heads-up to the kind of things you can expect from the Love Bytes Hard stream and content. And, yes, we do cuss that much in person.
Which reminds me.
A special message for Fuzzy: “twat-waffle.”