What to do when you want to save the world, but your partner doesn’t give two f**ks
When Bridget Harilaou (pronouns: they/them) was 19, they entered a relationship they would later regret. Everything was fine during the first five months. Bridget was just getting started as an activist, recruited to the campus women’s collective at their university in Sydney and a left-wing faction in a student union called Grassroots. Their boyfriend, Sudin*, was working for the Australian Labor Party (ALP). It was when the exhilaration of newness had settled and their relationship became official that things started to come undone.
Sudin began talking down to Bridget about their non-centrist political beliefs. He began to patronise them and call them naïve, idealistic and too radical. “It was really difficult not to feel invalidated and, basically, gaslit because I had a different approach to creating change that directly put myself in an organising position of educating others, holding protests and organising expressions of radical politics that did not conform to a system.”
Instead of simply disagreeing with Bridget, Sudin would say things like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Eventually,
