Maybe her sarees and her fine jewellery isn't for a trousseau. It's an investment into building a personal textile library that is a testament to her taste, her patronage of the arts, her passion for uplifting creators of traditional heritage. A personally handpicked, deeply researched collection she will pride herself on or even lend to a museum later in life.
Maybe she's an educator because she was born an educator, maybe mentoring is her spirit's calling. Not because 'teaching makes it easy to manage a husband and family.'
Maybe she likes to be self-employed or have a flexible job in order to cultivate the sacred feminine essentials of expansive time, space, rest, beauty in her life for herself, for her hobbies, her passions, her me-time. Not to be a ripe candidate to create time for everyone else's domestic chores.
Maybe she loves to cook because she wants to be equipped to live independently, as everyone should be, and finds joy in the ancestral, primal connection to creating cuisine. Not because she's aiming to be "wife material" for a male who lacks basic life skills.
Maybe she'll end relationships that do not serve her at any and every age, instead of 'settling' with any scrap sent her way, because she learnt to have high standards and take exquisite care of herself in a world where women learn to compromise before they learn to come (Thomashauer)
Maybe she's intentionally single because she's committed to her personal growth, expansion and quality of life, not because she's waiting for a 'One'
Maybe she isn't scrambling to 'settle' because she operates from love instead of scarcity, fear and lack.
Maybe we've created a world where women no longer need a mandatory transactional legal relationship for survival, a largely unnoticed development.
Maybe, as succinctly and beautifully said in Dakota Johnson's recent Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's 'Persuasion,' a woman without a husband isn't a problem waiting to be solved.
Maybe the tragically limiting worldview of the people who ask women highly personal marriage-normative questions in everyday settings online/offline as if our existence must revolve around this milestone are the problem 🌝
I often think about how, honestly, I’m such a wifey.
I love good men. I love being the babygirl. I love the masculine. I love being protected, I love being provided for. I love the idea of being a stay-at-home wife. I love to receive. I am teaching myself how to receive without instantly planning how to ‘give back’ to ‘make it even.’ I am playing with the idea that maybe, sometimes, I am inherently worthy in being, not doing.
I love being feminine and feeling worthy just as I am, in a world that constantly tells me that my masculine ‘performance’ in a ‘career’ and my list of ‘achievements’ is my worth, because the patriarchy says that worth can only be defined in masculine parameters, never in the mysterious, subtle, sensual, nourishing, nurturing aspects of the feminine energy that created us all and lives within us all.
And then I think about how most of us are wounded in our feminine to the point where we actively hate, shame and degrade women who want their life’s work to be to build a home. How we think that domestic labour is inferior and dumb and silly and not worthy, because it is not salaried by a corporation of men.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to circle dance around a bonfire to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.