I’m longing for this freedom and to extricate myself from the burden of wife. I’m reeling from being discarded/blindsided by my (please God, make it soon-to-be-ex) who decided to push the restart button on his life and replace me with wife 2.0 (25 years younger than him)- but I can glimpse the freedom he has gifted me on the horizon, and hope that the clouds part for me when the a-hole finally stops getting in the way of the divorce. I never want to be a wife again, even though i know I’ll have to fight the urge to return to the ingrained pattern every day for the rest of my life.
I'm so sorry, and I'm also glad you're already seeing the silver lining. He is indeed giving you freedom; meanwhile, I can't imagine wife 2.0 has much happiness in store. I hope a finalized divorce is in your near future!
I, too, swore to never marry again when I finally left my very difficult marriage in 1996.
Next year I will celebrate 20 non-married years with my partner (in the full sense of the word). I can't see any reason to spoil it by getting married. Living together suits both of us just fine.
I'm so happy for you!! No complaints about the multiple divorce posts. THIS, so much this. I remember being a newlywed and believing that the role of wife would just be like the role of girlfriend or fiancée, only BETTER. More time together, more commitment, more love, more cute tea towels and family Christmas cards. Lol. That's a nope from me.
Not to oversimplify, but I went from an ambitious, happy-go-lucky, sociable person to a person primarily worried about the feelings and moods (and OMG were there SO MANY feelings and moods) of a man. And the saddest part is that I thought it was just me. I thought if I could be better, then the moods would be fixed! And I could have what I actually expected and wanted. I feel so validated by your experience and your writing.
YIPPEE CONGRATULATIONS! 🎊🎈🎉 This is a wonderful piece and I’m right there with you. I’ve been divorced for a little under 2 months now and it’s wonderful. I grew up watching my mother be an unhappy wife, and both of my marriages became familiar prisons and the behavior of the men is depressingly similar. I’m no longer interested in romantic relationships at all. Friendships are where it’s at for me and I’ll never make a legally binding commitment to anyone again.
Yes! I often wonder if I am the only woman who is not delighted at the idea of being less important than everyone else in my own life!
I mean - like really? And yet I’m holding myself back from countless assurances that of course I love and care for my family. But it’s tough. We ALL only get one wild and precious life. When did I agree to give up mine? The answer is when I became a wife/mother.
That moment your lawyer called you and the sun broke through the clouds…I call that my “thank god it’s over” moment.
And like you, I had my “never again” relationship and never looked back. Life really is better on the other side, and I’ve never regretted my decision to be single for as long as I damn well please 🙏🏾
Although there’s a lot of language bullshit going on in my home province of Quebec, one of the things they got right was to insist that a woman’s birth name (in absence of a court decision) would always be her legal name. It is not legal to change a last name to a spouse’s last name, although one can petition the court for an official name change for other reasons.
I was expected to change my name and assume the role of wife and mother. I really sucked at being a wife and only partly sucked as a mother.
All of this. Yes to it all. So glad you are almost at the finish line (though if you read my content, you will know that doesn’t promise as much freedom as you hope). But I am so glad you are one step closer. Thank you for this post.
I saw your recent post and haven't had the stomach to read it yet. I'm well aware there will be more drama in store. But hopefully I'll be in a much better mindset to handle it than I was while contending with the drama of marriage. 🤞
Kerala, thanks for sharing - keep it coming! Divorce IS the ultimate interruption! It was satisfying when the ink was dry and I could finally breathe, or sob, like Uma Thurman in the bathroom at the end of Kill Bill. We have to fight so hard to end it, to untangle everything, and there's a beautiful release when it's finally over.
In my experience, when you have children with someone, “‘til death do us part” holds true long after irreconcilable differences cause the irremediable breakdown of the marriage, and long after the divorce is finalized. I'm 7 years post-divorce, and happy to report that co-parenting with an ex is preferable to sharing a life with him.
I'm not sure I want to be someone's wife again, or "a wife" again. I've been joking lately with my partner, that if we decided to formalize our union, we should both be the husband :-)
I'm glad you've found a co-parenting arrangement that works, or at least works well enough! Co-parenting during the separation/divorce has not gone well for me, but I'm cautiously optimistic that once the dust settles, we can find a way forward.
How odd and terrible that an institution that was (I think?!) set up to protect women (or at least men’s daughters :-/ ) from your unequal perils of fertility and hit-and-run fathering, also managed to set up women for lives of servitude, dependence, and disdain.
Seems a lot of my close women friends have paths and conclusions quite like yours on why a former wife would have zero intentions of becoming a future one… including one of your readers’ comments about focusing forward on friendships with other women, without romance with men. And when I hear what my women friends have to say, I believe I truly get it. It seems natural as shit, to be frank.
Your article sparks so many thoughts and questions for me, _none_ of which are about doubting your PoV.
One thing I deeply appreciate about your analysis is how you take into account non-hetero folks. Considering only the world of heterosexual men and women leaves out much wisdom, not to mention leaving out many people. For instance me, and my family.
After my sons were well into their teen years, I being the “mom-dad” and my husband being the “dad-dad” (in my son’s words), I was defeated and bitter, and realized I had to go through the dreadful and solitary toil of what I called “de-mommification”. (I know, there is deep dreadfulness in how I thought of this.) It was lonely. And the words I described to decry my reviled place in the family were all awfully gendered. When I stood up for myself. In my perception of how I was then treated, I became the “bitch”, the witch, the shrew, the nag; the one who was nastily punished for no longer allowing my precious moments to be considered expendable so the other men in my family could do shit (for the younger ones, shit like spending more time on screens).
There is this terrible moment, the memory of which I’m still shocked at. It stands out in all sorts of gruesome ways. I was raging about how all three of my very favorite men on earth could be nagged — nagged!— into taking their dishes to the kitchen counter, but felt above the task of putting them into the dishwasher just below. I told them in pain and fury, “new rule: you put them into the dishwasher, or they stay there forever. I. Am. Not. Your. Mom!”
I don’t expect anyone reading this to like me better for viewing in this my misogyny, or for my having inadvertently rubbed my adopted sons’ faces in their misfortune of not really having a mom, regardless of the deep and committed love of two dads. Yes, in some ways, in some moments, I am actually dreadful, terrible. But I share this as a rare glimpse into just how deeply gendered is the lot of mothers, wives, such that even a gay man who is gratefully privileged with parenthood, a father-husband with no female in the home, a mom-dad in the position of the mom-wife, feels lost and trapped, devalued and hurt, for being treated like a woman.
One of my sons “got it” before my husband. But my husband did get it; they all did, in time. I’m thankfully well out of the woods with my husb — I am feeling cherished in a way that I did not feel for a several years — but not without having stood my bleak and lonesome ground, and frankly having lucked out, I think, that he possessed the statistically probable attributes of a gay male husband and not those of a straight one. (Thank you, Gay Jesus!)
All that said, there’s another curious part of your article that I’m chewing on: the part about how the more wives there are in a marriage, the less likely that marriage is to endure.
Dan Savage has attributed that, less to the dreadful lot of wives, and more to the relative freedom that men have (in not possessing the reproductive burdens of pregnancy and child-bearing bodies), for entertaining various models and extents of non-monogamy, non-monogamy serving as a pressure valve for all sorts of challenges that arise in the age of longer life expectancies and thus the awful quirks of potentially longer marriages to finesse.
Maybe I resonate with both your and Dan’s attributions for the gendered patterns of divorce.
The last element of your article that I wonder about is a real head-scratcher for me. Yes, I agree that men-as-husbands and men-as-dads treat women-as-wives-and-mothers horribly. Horribly. I don’t understand this, but I have vague, distant memories from when I still imagined myself to be straight and foresaw for myself a future with a woman who I loved. What I’m thinking here is that I treated her as both someone who I was in love with, and as a typical man treats women. Yes, I was a feminist. And still I was instinctively and behaviorally selfish and shitty in our lovemaking, and probably in other ways. I think that I would have been a shitty husband in the way that even “evolved” men commonly are.
And still I carried a fear that, as the childbearer, she would have rights to the children that would leave me helpless. (She asserted she if we had kids and split up, they’d be hers and not mine.) That the kids would love her more, as children I observed seemed always to do. That I’d pay child support while being squeezed out of a meaningful role in their lives. That I’d be an expendable drone in the hive of life.
What I haven’t made sense of, and maybe you can, or maybe no-one can, because I don’t trust straight men to make good sense on this, or gay men for that matter, is how men feel so burdened, put-upon, imperiled, devalued, in their roles as husband-dads. I know they / we may be selfish, entitled, shitty, misogynistic troglodytes, by nature and by nurture, certainly by example. But I think there’s more to it than just that. I do. At least so far, I do.
Davie, you bring up so much good food for thought, and I really appreciate you sharing your experiences. As someone with many female mom friends in same-sex relationships (my daughter once asked me how come she didn't get to have two moms like everyone else in her daycare), I find the gender dynamics in these relationships both fascinating and instructive. My general takeaway is that if kids are introduced into the mix, and if one parent takes on the primary caregiving role, it's far more likely for people in any relationship, whether heterosexual or same-sex, to slip into more "traditional" gender roles. I'm not surprised that you found yourself to be taking on a mom/wife role in your home! (Honestly, I think part of the reason gay men may have the lowest divorce rates is that only 8% of married gay male couples have children, compared to 24% of lesbian couples.)
Anyway, so much more to chew on in your response... I may return with more thoughts once I have more time to process! Thanks again for sharing.
Yup. Did marraige twice. Have a wonderful live-in partner of 3 years now, marraige unnecessary. Don't know if he has clean underwear, what his meds are, when his kids birthdays are or what he ate for breakfast. If I let it, I would fall back into the wife role; never again. Ruins your life. And agree with others, was a MUCH better and happier mother alone. All the best to you. Bright days ahead.
Thank you Diane! That's my biggest fear -- slipping into that role again. I'm not even sure I can handle cohabitating with a future romantic partner. But good for you for being completely oblivious to the state of your partner's underwear! 😂 That's progress.
Congratulations to you. This next phase of life is a joyful one, where you get to re-discover yourself and your dreams with the freedom to pursue what works for you and your child.
I’ve been enjoying playing with words as a way to make sense of my life and our world at this time. The origins of “hus” appear to relate to house or dwelling, while “band” can mean to close around. I am a divorced woman and I consider myself to be a “husband,” for I am taking care of MY household. Looking back at my marriage, I can see that both the man I was married to for 17 years and I could equally be considered a “wife” during that time. We BOTH paid the “why fee” on that arrangement. He was so pressured in his career and the narrow range of acceptable life choices seemingly available to him (by society more than my own standards) that he was very harmed by the arrangement. And I never felt “wifely” pressures in the three years we lived together before our wedding, but all the years after—OH MY (although we had an abundance of strange and perhaps somewhat unique challenges related to death, health and children). Also, wedding… like “eddy” and being trapped in a whirlpool that was so difficult to extract ourselves from. And the mirage of marriage. I could keep on going…. It’s all a danger zone, in my current opinion. We need creative ways to move forward, especially for the children, but for all the exhausted adults too, so there is a vast array of useful, practical and enticing options. I think once we can all work less hours and stand up for the fact that raising children (and ourselves) is THE WORK, things WILL SHIFT. If no adult is asked to contribute more than 20 hours to “work” in society, that might go far to help us all. This would be equivalent to one “breadwinner” and one SAHM. Our jobs can be better too, since we won’t be so sick and rushed—a lot of the current need for unsatisfactory work falls away. As I learned from classes in Organic Intelligence, “the job is enjoyment.” Thank you for helping shine light on these tricky relationship nuances. I know every little bit of the collective work being done on this helps humanity as we bring creative solutions to these complex (and common) situations. Everything you write gives me great hope. Thank you!
I've been thinking about this so much lately, about how so many of us are trying to force gender equity into systems and spaces where it just doesn't fit because these systems and spaces were specifically designed to be inequitable. We need to move past the pipe dream of an equitable marriage in the context of extractive capitalism and start reimagining what family structures and work demands would look like if they truly served our shared needs. I think there is a future story in there! Love your wordplay :)
Twenty plus since I physically separated from the ex, but actually divorced him twenty nine years ago and haven’t looked back. Even at my young 20 years of age I had already figured out that signing a paper to commit to society’s norms and expectations was not something I wanted to be part of. But I still went ahead and did it anyway. As soon as I saw a way out I undid that and never looked back. I did both the partnership and the marriage thing with the same man and didn’t like either. The expectations are the same in either case in any committed relationshit. Or maybe I just haven’t met a man without role expectations. Society has groomed both men and women to play certain roles and we see that even in same gender relationshits where in a lesbian partnership one women plays the more feminine role and the other the more masculine one. Same for gay male relationshits, one takes up the feminine role (some innerly hating themselves for it and the women they try to replace; mysoginism at its best in that community) and the other taking the more masculine role. Even many vindictive narcissist men calling themselves heterosexual secretly cheating on their wives playing sexually degrading submissive feminine roles with other more masculine men and anonymously bragging about it. Reddit is full of stories of all these kinds of interactions. I like to read them sometimes just to remind myself of what’s out there and of the shitty nature of many human beings.
I’m longing for this freedom and to extricate myself from the burden of wife. I’m reeling from being discarded/blindsided by my (please God, make it soon-to-be-ex) who decided to push the restart button on his life and replace me with wife 2.0 (25 years younger than him)- but I can glimpse the freedom he has gifted me on the horizon, and hope that the clouds part for me when the a-hole finally stops getting in the way of the divorce. I never want to be a wife again, even though i know I’ll have to fight the urge to return to the ingrained pattern every day for the rest of my life.
I'm so sorry, and I'm also glad you're already seeing the silver lining. He is indeed giving you freedom; meanwhile, I can't imagine wife 2.0 has much happiness in store. I hope a finalized divorce is in your near future!
I, too, swore to never marry again when I finally left my very difficult marriage in 1996.
Next year I will celebrate 20 non-married years with my partner (in the full sense of the word). I can't see any reason to spoil it by getting married. Living together suits both of us just fine.
Happy 20th partnership anniversary! 🎉 And so glad it's *actually* a partnership!
I'm so happy for you!! No complaints about the multiple divorce posts. THIS, so much this. I remember being a newlywed and believing that the role of wife would just be like the role of girlfriend or fiancée, only BETTER. More time together, more commitment, more love, more cute tea towels and family Christmas cards. Lol. That's a nope from me.
Not to oversimplify, but I went from an ambitious, happy-go-lucky, sociable person to a person primarily worried about the feelings and moods (and OMG were there SO MANY feelings and moods) of a man. And the saddest part is that I thought it was just me. I thought if I could be better, then the moods would be fixed! And I could have what I actually expected and wanted. I feel so validated by your experience and your writing.
YIPPEE CONGRATULATIONS! 🎊🎈🎉 This is a wonderful piece and I’m right there with you. I’ve been divorced for a little under 2 months now and it’s wonderful. I grew up watching my mother be an unhappy wife, and both of my marriages became familiar prisons and the behavior of the men is depressingly similar. I’m no longer interested in romantic relationships at all. Friendships are where it’s at for me and I’ll never make a legally binding commitment to anyone again.
Thank you, and yay for friendships! That's where it's at for me right now, too. :)
Yes! I often wonder if I am the only woman who is not delighted at the idea of being less important than everyone else in my own life!
I mean - like really? And yet I’m holding myself back from countless assurances that of course I love and care for my family. But it’s tough. We ALL only get one wild and precious life. When did I agree to give up mine? The answer is when I became a wife/mother.
That moment your lawyer called you and the sun broke through the clouds…I call that my “thank god it’s over” moment.
And like you, I had my “never again” relationship and never looked back. Life really is better on the other side, and I’ve never regretted my decision to be single for as long as I damn well please 🙏🏾
Although there’s a lot of language bullshit going on in my home province of Quebec, one of the things they got right was to insist that a woman’s birth name (in absence of a court decision) would always be her legal name. It is not legal to change a last name to a spouse’s last name, although one can petition the court for an official name change for other reasons.
I was expected to change my name and assume the role of wife and mother. I really sucked at being a wife and only partly sucked as a mother.
All of this. Yes to it all. So glad you are almost at the finish line (though if you read my content, you will know that doesn’t promise as much freedom as you hope). But I am so glad you are one step closer. Thank you for this post.
I saw your recent post and haven't had the stomach to read it yet. I'm well aware there will be more drama in store. But hopefully I'll be in a much better mindset to handle it than I was while contending with the drama of marriage. 🤞
Kerala, thanks for sharing - keep it coming! Divorce IS the ultimate interruption! It was satisfying when the ink was dry and I could finally breathe, or sob, like Uma Thurman in the bathroom at the end of Kill Bill. We have to fight so hard to end it, to untangle everything, and there's a beautiful release when it's finally over.
In my experience, when you have children with someone, “‘til death do us part” holds true long after irreconcilable differences cause the irremediable breakdown of the marriage, and long after the divorce is finalized. I'm 7 years post-divorce, and happy to report that co-parenting with an ex is preferable to sharing a life with him.
I'm not sure I want to be someone's wife again, or "a wife" again. I've been joking lately with my partner, that if we decided to formalize our union, we should both be the husband :-)
I'm glad you've found a co-parenting arrangement that works, or at least works well enough! Co-parenting during the separation/divorce has not gone well for me, but I'm cautiously optimistic that once the dust settles, we can find a way forward.
Thank you, Kerala.
How odd and terrible that an institution that was (I think?!) set up to protect women (or at least men’s daughters :-/ ) from your unequal perils of fertility and hit-and-run fathering, also managed to set up women for lives of servitude, dependence, and disdain.
Seems a lot of my close women friends have paths and conclusions quite like yours on why a former wife would have zero intentions of becoming a future one… including one of your readers’ comments about focusing forward on friendships with other women, without romance with men. And when I hear what my women friends have to say, I believe I truly get it. It seems natural as shit, to be frank.
Your article sparks so many thoughts and questions for me, _none_ of which are about doubting your PoV.
One thing I deeply appreciate about your analysis is how you take into account non-hetero folks. Considering only the world of heterosexual men and women leaves out much wisdom, not to mention leaving out many people. For instance me, and my family.
After my sons were well into their teen years, I being the “mom-dad” and my husband being the “dad-dad” (in my son’s words), I was defeated and bitter, and realized I had to go through the dreadful and solitary toil of what I called “de-mommification”. (I know, there is deep dreadfulness in how I thought of this.) It was lonely. And the words I described to decry my reviled place in the family were all awfully gendered. When I stood up for myself. In my perception of how I was then treated, I became the “bitch”, the witch, the shrew, the nag; the one who was nastily punished for no longer allowing my precious moments to be considered expendable so the other men in my family could do shit (for the younger ones, shit like spending more time on screens).
There is this terrible moment, the memory of which I’m still shocked at. It stands out in all sorts of gruesome ways. I was raging about how all three of my very favorite men on earth could be nagged — nagged!— into taking their dishes to the kitchen counter, but felt above the task of putting them into the dishwasher just below. I told them in pain and fury, “new rule: you put them into the dishwasher, or they stay there forever. I. Am. Not. Your. Mom!”
I don’t expect anyone reading this to like me better for viewing in this my misogyny, or for my having inadvertently rubbed my adopted sons’ faces in their misfortune of not really having a mom, regardless of the deep and committed love of two dads. Yes, in some ways, in some moments, I am actually dreadful, terrible. But I share this as a rare glimpse into just how deeply gendered is the lot of mothers, wives, such that even a gay man who is gratefully privileged with parenthood, a father-husband with no female in the home, a mom-dad in the position of the mom-wife, feels lost and trapped, devalued and hurt, for being treated like a woman.
One of my sons “got it” before my husband. But my husband did get it; they all did, in time. I’m thankfully well out of the woods with my husb — I am feeling cherished in a way that I did not feel for a several years — but not without having stood my bleak and lonesome ground, and frankly having lucked out, I think, that he possessed the statistically probable attributes of a gay male husband and not those of a straight one. (Thank you, Gay Jesus!)
All that said, there’s another curious part of your article that I’m chewing on: the part about how the more wives there are in a marriage, the less likely that marriage is to endure.
Dan Savage has attributed that, less to the dreadful lot of wives, and more to the relative freedom that men have (in not possessing the reproductive burdens of pregnancy and child-bearing bodies), for entertaining various models and extents of non-monogamy, non-monogamy serving as a pressure valve for all sorts of challenges that arise in the age of longer life expectancies and thus the awful quirks of potentially longer marriages to finesse.
Maybe I resonate with both your and Dan’s attributions for the gendered patterns of divorce.
The last element of your article that I wonder about is a real head-scratcher for me. Yes, I agree that men-as-husbands and men-as-dads treat women-as-wives-and-mothers horribly. Horribly. I don’t understand this, but I have vague, distant memories from when I still imagined myself to be straight and foresaw for myself a future with a woman who I loved. What I’m thinking here is that I treated her as both someone who I was in love with, and as a typical man treats women. Yes, I was a feminist. And still I was instinctively and behaviorally selfish and shitty in our lovemaking, and probably in other ways. I think that I would have been a shitty husband in the way that even “evolved” men commonly are.
And still I carried a fear that, as the childbearer, she would have rights to the children that would leave me helpless. (She asserted she if we had kids and split up, they’d be hers and not mine.) That the kids would love her more, as children I observed seemed always to do. That I’d pay child support while being squeezed out of a meaningful role in their lives. That I’d be an expendable drone in the hive of life.
What I haven’t made sense of, and maybe you can, or maybe no-one can, because I don’t trust straight men to make good sense on this, or gay men for that matter, is how men feel so burdened, put-upon, imperiled, devalued, in their roles as husband-dads. I know they / we may be selfish, entitled, shitty, misogynistic troglodytes, by nature and by nurture, certainly by example. But I think there’s more to it than just that. I do. At least so far, I do.
Davie, you bring up so much good food for thought, and I really appreciate you sharing your experiences. As someone with many female mom friends in same-sex relationships (my daughter once asked me how come she didn't get to have two moms like everyone else in her daycare), I find the gender dynamics in these relationships both fascinating and instructive. My general takeaway is that if kids are introduced into the mix, and if one parent takes on the primary caregiving role, it's far more likely for people in any relationship, whether heterosexual or same-sex, to slip into more "traditional" gender roles. I'm not surprised that you found yourself to be taking on a mom/wife role in your home! (Honestly, I think part of the reason gay men may have the lowest divorce rates is that only 8% of married gay male couples have children, compared to 24% of lesbian couples.)
Anyway, so much more to chew on in your response... I may return with more thoughts once I have more time to process! Thanks again for sharing.
Thank you so much!
And about gay male couples not having kids? Really good point!
Yup. Did marraige twice. Have a wonderful live-in partner of 3 years now, marraige unnecessary. Don't know if he has clean underwear, what his meds are, when his kids birthdays are or what he ate for breakfast. If I let it, I would fall back into the wife role; never again. Ruins your life. And agree with others, was a MUCH better and happier mother alone. All the best to you. Bright days ahead.
Thank you Diane! That's my biggest fear -- slipping into that role again. I'm not even sure I can handle cohabitating with a future romantic partner. But good for you for being completely oblivious to the state of your partner's underwear! 😂 That's progress.
Big congratulations! The freedom of no longer being a wife is amazing, IME
Congratulations to you. This next phase of life is a joyful one, where you get to re-discover yourself and your dreams with the freedom to pursue what works for you and your child.
I’ve been enjoying playing with words as a way to make sense of my life and our world at this time. The origins of “hus” appear to relate to house or dwelling, while “band” can mean to close around. I am a divorced woman and I consider myself to be a “husband,” for I am taking care of MY household. Looking back at my marriage, I can see that both the man I was married to for 17 years and I could equally be considered a “wife” during that time. We BOTH paid the “why fee” on that arrangement. He was so pressured in his career and the narrow range of acceptable life choices seemingly available to him (by society more than my own standards) that he was very harmed by the arrangement. And I never felt “wifely” pressures in the three years we lived together before our wedding, but all the years after—OH MY (although we had an abundance of strange and perhaps somewhat unique challenges related to death, health and children). Also, wedding… like “eddy” and being trapped in a whirlpool that was so difficult to extract ourselves from. And the mirage of marriage. I could keep on going…. It’s all a danger zone, in my current opinion. We need creative ways to move forward, especially for the children, but for all the exhausted adults too, so there is a vast array of useful, practical and enticing options. I think once we can all work less hours and stand up for the fact that raising children (and ourselves) is THE WORK, things WILL SHIFT. If no adult is asked to contribute more than 20 hours to “work” in society, that might go far to help us all. This would be equivalent to one “breadwinner” and one SAHM. Our jobs can be better too, since we won’t be so sick and rushed—a lot of the current need for unsatisfactory work falls away. As I learned from classes in Organic Intelligence, “the job is enjoyment.” Thank you for helping shine light on these tricky relationship nuances. I know every little bit of the collective work being done on this helps humanity as we bring creative solutions to these complex (and common) situations. Everything you write gives me great hope. Thank you!
I've been thinking about this so much lately, about how so many of us are trying to force gender equity into systems and spaces where it just doesn't fit because these systems and spaces were specifically designed to be inequitable. We need to move past the pipe dream of an equitable marriage in the context of extractive capitalism and start reimagining what family structures and work demands would look like if they truly served our shared needs. I think there is a future story in there! Love your wordplay :)
Twenty plus since I physically separated from the ex, but actually divorced him twenty nine years ago and haven’t looked back. Even at my young 20 years of age I had already figured out that signing a paper to commit to society’s norms and expectations was not something I wanted to be part of. But I still went ahead and did it anyway. As soon as I saw a way out I undid that and never looked back. I did both the partnership and the marriage thing with the same man and didn’t like either. The expectations are the same in either case in any committed relationshit. Or maybe I just haven’t met a man without role expectations. Society has groomed both men and women to play certain roles and we see that even in same gender relationshits where in a lesbian partnership one women plays the more feminine role and the other the more masculine one. Same for gay male relationshits, one takes up the feminine role (some innerly hating themselves for it and the women they try to replace; mysoginism at its best in that community) and the other taking the more masculine role. Even many vindictive narcissist men calling themselves heterosexual secretly cheating on their wives playing sexually degrading submissive feminine roles with other more masculine men and anonymously bragging about it. Reddit is full of stories of all these kinds of interactions. I like to read them sometimes just to remind myself of what’s out there and of the shitty nature of many human beings.
Yes. Yep. You bet.