If. IF the show, for whatever reason, decides to stick with Eddie being (assumedly) straight, then boy will that be fuckin weird, disappointing and boring. And a disservice to Eddie considering how he’s been written thus far.
If I may attempt to lay this out in the simplest terms.
The entire time Eddie was married to Shannon he literally, metaphorically, and emotionally kept running away from her. As far as we can tell, not once did he ever truly allow himself to be vulnerable with her. Not in a way that matters for the health of a relationship/marriage. When Shannon tried to be vulnerable, Eddie shut that stuff down.
Eddie was never vulnerable with Ana until literally when they broke up. He was never really invested in Ana or their relationship. His main investment was “get a new mother for Christopher.”
Same for Marisol, but somehow worse. He’s never been invested in their relationship nor Marisol as a person. He’s clearly been shown to be disinterested in her, actually. One way to avoid getting to know Marisol was using sex as both an avoidance technique (which he often did with Shannon), and using it as the only way for Eddie to accept any kind of closeness with Marisol.
Hell we can even mention Kim. He’s not seeing her as her own person, but merely someone he can project his dead wife onto.
When it comes to sex, frankly, Eddie does not seem to have a healthy relationship with it. Again, he’s predominately used sex as a combination of avoiding arguments, avoiding getting to know someone, and out of a sense of duty/obligation. The sense of duty plays into Eddie’s very heteronormative and frankly backwards/toxic stereotypes he has of what a male/female relationship in a marriage or otherwise should look like. ← This was inspired by both this fantastic 7x7 meta post by @sevensoulmates, and conversations I’ve had with @elvensorceress.
I genuinely question and wonder how often, if ever, Eddie had sex because he wanted to and not because he felt like he had to. I don’t think it means Eddie’s disliked every time he’s had sex, in part because let’s be real and keep in mind sex is biologically made/designed to feel good, but really. How often has he ever had sex because he actually wanted it?
Important side note, I’ll always think that Eddie, out of the many reasons he needs to go back to therapy, is that he needs to learn healthy consent. He needs to know that if he doesn’t want sex he’s allowed to say no. He does not have to have sex because he’s a man, and “men should want and want to provide sex for their wife/girlfriend.” That it’s “a man’s duty to satisfy his wife/girlfriend.”
Even with Shannon, Eddie’s relationships with women have been performative. He’s only been in and settled into relationships with women because it provides a comforting facade of “This Eddie guy here is a respectable man in a relationship with a woman and has a kid who he provides for, as he should.” ← Society, his family, his Latino catholic upbringing, and heteronormativity has taught Eddie this is what’s good and proper for him. That he should have and want to have a nuclear family (and that he must suppress what his heart really wants).
Three times (four if you include Kim) Eddie has consistently kept every woman he’s been romantically involved with at arms length. IF the show were to keep him straight, well they’ve been doing a shit job at making it look like Eddie even wants to be in a romantic relationship with a woman at all. To me Eddie very much comes across and reads as a repressed gay and demi man.
Now if you have different views, perhaps you feel that I’m wrong in my interpretation and understanding of Eddie and Shannon’s relationship, or hell, maybe you think Eddie is bisexual, that’s fine. Neither of us are stupid for our thoughts and opinions on this fictional character. But please do not comment or reblog this with “well actually” or anything like that. I have my opinion in my corner over here, and you can have yours on your own, okay? Thank you.
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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
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