https://annehelen.substack.com/p/blue-marriage-and-the-terror-of-divorce
This started as a response to the article above. I highly suggest reading this engaging article! If nothing else, this post will make a lot more sense if you do. Also, I am just trying to get lots of thoughts out and not “be perfect.” This is not perfect in any way-please kindly read it with that in mind.
Wow, yes. So many thoughts (as a single, queer, cis woman who is also an intersectional feminist researcher studying masculinity and has historically been attracted to men and also felt a lot of confusion, ambivalence, and grief about that), I have been dying for content like this!
a. never underestimate the power and perniciousness of patriarchy (so good at perpetuating itself), and socializing women that their value is yoked to "landing a man" and having kids (and then telling her how dreamy that life should be!) is an incredible effective way to staunch a revolution. Add in "and now you can work for money! And outside the home!" and you've just thrown another log on that fire. Neurobiologically, if I am overwhelmed/exhausted, I am definitely don't have the capacity to critically analyze the social implications of my situation or reflect at all on whether this was the life that I wanted. Those functions can only happen when we have access to our brain’s frontal lobe which is largely "off line" when we are chronically stressed. If the "ocean that we swim in" is white supremacist, capitalist, settler colonialist, cisheteropatriarchy, that ocean has structured a world in which every wave (interpersonal interactions up to social and economic policy) pushes women towards the shores of those values, thus it takes so much will and mental energy (not to mention money) to even imagine making deliberate decisions to move away from those norms. And to what?! There are not a lot of models (especially in the dominant narrative of bourgeois white womanhood, the dominant cultural construction that we all have to live in regardless of race or ethnicity) for other relationships/household structures/material ways of providing intimacy and care than traditional hetero (and homo) normative marriage. Authors Maggie Nelson and Amia Srinivasan talk about how much genuine energy freedom takes. Like, if we assume that singleness (especially without kids) is complete freedom and "we WANT that freedom!" we don't account for the energy that goes into the material realities of that life (paying for everything yourself, cognitive load of fully caring for dependents including pets and maybe a home, etc.). (To say nothing of the psychic load of the stigma of “doing femininity wrong” by virtue of being single and without children). And for women who are ALREADY so overwhelmed and overburdened from "having it all," that freedom can actually just feel like an additional burden. As the luminous James Baldwin writes, “freedom is hard to bear.”
b. relatedly, our federal government has been funding marriage promotion programs for ages (and continues to via state block grants channeled through social services, lots of the money goes to things like “relationship skills” classes populated by middle class folx! Not "bad" in and of themselves, but likely not what folx would generally prioritize for social welfare funding allocation by their state). Also, these policies were ostensibly "for the kids". There is research that suggests that having a two-parent household is better for kids. Because, duh! Life is hard and expensive and it’s nice to have some hands around (as many hands around!) to help. There are soooo many financial benefits to being married and costs to not being married (see also Anne Helen Peterson’s writing on this here and here here). Also, conveniently, marriage promotion continued to perpetuate the values of settler colonialism (eg private property ownership) and capitalism (eg individual "units" of consumers via "nuclear families"), and has also unsurprisingly been used by the political right to pass anti-LGBTQ legislation. It was also interestingly been used by the mainstream political left to help bolster support for marriage equality. This could be a whole other essay (most queer folx know that heterosexual marriage is not something to be aspired to! But they also know the social, political and economic rights that are tied to it). Lots of smart folx have written about this already, but among many things, it reinforces that research is never “objective” and that we are naïve and arrogant to think that it is/can be.
c. humans have a fundamental need for safety, love and belonging. It can be terrifying (especially for millennial women who have done "everything right" and that has resulted in material and emotional safety eg. their life is legible to others), to imagine jumping outside of that deep trench of the heteronormative timeline/life and now not "belong" in the same way that she always has. As feminist writers including Sandra Lee Bartky and Anne Cudd discuss, there are SOOOO many reasons to conform to normative femininity, which includes marrying a man and having kids. Especially for those women who can’t meet the racist, ageist, fat phobic, classist standards of idealized “beauty,” marrying a man provides some important social cache. As well, Susan Brownmiller talks about the ever-present threat of violence towards women and the “protection racket,” that men can extract (“marry me and I will keep you from being raped and murdered by those other men”). That protection (or the veneer of it), is powerful. NOTE: lest we never forget two things: a) more than half the women killed in the US are by current or former intimate partners and b) until relatively recently, women needed to be dependent on men because they were not able to earn their own money/open up credit accounts etc.
Aside from the ubiquity of real and potential violence, turning towards the everyday banalities of ascribing to normative femininity, I want to say that I 1000% get it! I feel so much genuine compassion for this. It is vital to our survival and sense of self and takes so so much courage and imagination (sadly, given the lack of models and public alternatives) to imagine, create, and choose a life (divorce, singleness) over and over again, that could result in no longer feeling belonging (or the perceived belonging that we can construct when we, at least, "play the part" to fit in). This is where AHP’s discussion of "being like"' others is so vital. It isn't just "I care what others think of me" it is "my nervous systems is convinced that my survival is dependent on being “like” others.”
d. also grief…the grief of the life that you thought you were going to live (and the one that was “sold” to you via every book/rom com/article in YM etc) said that you were going to have one life and it is really difficult to turn towards the one that you actually have and not feel deep and profound grief. I recently said to my therapist that being an adult feels like constantly grieving “the life not lived” (Adam Phillips has a great book about this in all its forms, not just our partnerships called “Missing Out: In Praise of the Life Not Lived”). I joke (but also seriously), that this is how “women like me” (other old millennial white educated women who are single) are like “incels” (without the dangerous anti-feminist rhetoric) or like non-college educated white men in declining industries. We were sold a bill of goods that we were going to get a good life and be proximal to power (ie not feel helpless and to feel purposeful!). Yet, that was a bill of goods that still ultimately serves those few white men in power (we were just the proximal pawns in a system that was designed for us to perpetuate it, in so many ways, one of them being via that “hope” which we then internalize to never critique those very systems). Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, their eloquent critique of the harms of capitalism and neoliberalism, lays out this out. This is the sort of “cruel optimism” described by Lauren Berlant-the double-bind of desiring something that ultimately inhibits one’s own flourishing. Women like me were sold a story that said that we could “have it all” (while it was not encouraged to reflect on whether you wanted “it all” because of course you did!). “Having it all” (which our foremothers worked REALLY hard for!) included a job, outside of the home, that felt meaningful, and which paid you “good money” (ie not be required to be married to a man to survive). However, proportionally, nothing culturally, civically, or politically shifted to grow and support the emotionally attuned, connected, engaged, justice-oriented, empathic men that we wanted and thought that we were going to marry (and were taught that “we deserved”). This is also to the enormous detriment of men themselves (literally what my research focuses on!) Surprise! You actually have to dismantle the archaic and inequitable gender norms that built this house before we can ever hope for it to be equitable or fit the narrative that millennial straight women were sold. Of note, it is also very much worth examining the differences and similarities in those aspirations (equitable marriages and “aligned with a narrative”) as well as how they are harmful to those within and outside of them. See also the already mentioned, massive, vital work of critiquing the institution of marriage itself that has been undertaken by many feminist and queer writers and activists-but which is beyond the scope of this scree.
Naming that I am coming from a place of financial privilege-I don’t need another income to support myself, and this is from a US cultural (read: settler colonial, white supremacist, capitalistic) context. This context provides me with so many material and social benefits allowing me access to that financial privilege and also the many ways in which I am subject to less state and interpersonal violence by virtue of my whiteness, education levels, that fact that I “pass” as a non-disabled person, and so on.
These same oppressive structures also enable me to have the “privilege” (air quotes because I think it is not healthy for my own and most nervous systems) of denying my own (and all of our) deeply interdependent nature. I CAN live on my own and do. Across time and culture, there have also always been folx living in and building networks of care and mutual support in formal and informal ways including intentional communities and some peoples’ experiences in polyamorous relationship stuctures. Other models of intimacy, care and support are those that many queer and trans folx have created and maintained throughout time especially during the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s. These networks extended far beyond normative constructions of “family,” and were often in direct opposition to the value Christian hegemony and neoliberalism that informed “nuclear” families. And most of us, to any given extent rely on someone outside our birth or nuclear family for things (eg your friend brings your kids home from school twice a week because you are working late or have therapy or need an f’n break!) It is imperative that we continue to cultivate these networks and learn from them! And also…beyond the scope of this post.
So, given all of those caveats, I think a lot of women feel like they are stuck-I certainly do. I feel like I have a few options (which maybe inherently says “hey, you are not stuck!), but going with it:
1. I can either stay in my own feminist integrity and do a lot of emotional, mental, and physical work to construct a life that is aligned with that with very few models of what that could look like and how I could get my needs for safe touch/intimacy/sex/care met. Note, staying in that philosophy of deep connection and interdependence still includes cis straight men (ie this is not a “world without men,” but one where, we are/I am fully aware of the ways in which they are socialized and have appropriate expectations of their capacity while always expecting that they are doing the crucial inner and relational work necessary). Honestly a world without cis straight men sounds great right now! And also, that is misaligned with my own integrity/philosophical commitments and has limited practical application.
2. I could hope and pray (if I were the praying kind) that a pansexual trans masculine person who grew up with 7 sisters comes my way! Enabling a dissonance-free partnership that will of course have its own problems, but at least it’s not “doomed from the start,” the way a partnership with a cis straight man feels for me. (Whether “true” or not given my own personal experiences and knowing the plethora of literature, it feels hard to imagine being open to the possibility that my life would be enriched within that kind of relationship).
3. I can feel really disappointed that what is most commonly on offer (monosexist, traditionally monogamous relationship with cis straight men) is not a great option for me and, according to endless research, for most women generally. No shade to others who have chosen this, truly, and this is not any commentary on your specific partnership-maybe its great and egalitarian and that is terrific! I am minimally concerned about your specific partnership and maximally concerned over the ubiquity and increasingly obvious “emperor has no clothes-ness” of compulsory heterosexuality. A) I think the possibility of a nourishing partnership with a cis, straight man is small and diminishing and B) the white noise of always knowing that I have thrown another log on the fire of normativity is psychic energy that I don’t want to take on. (Sidenote which requires more time/vulnerability than this essay has to give: I have a lot of grief both around feeling ‘left behind’ which is informed by bullshit ideas about “successful adulthood,” but also from the aching loss of having less intimacy/connection/shared experiences with my dear friends post them being in committed romantic and sexual partnerships which often also involve kids. Naming out loud as a part of my feminist commitment to owning my positionality and making my feelings meaningful). There are so many examples of folx who are lovingly devoted to friendship-I have many in my life! And also, I have yet to meet someone (who is NOT a cis straight man), who is more available to their friends/community after they have been married and especially not after having kids. I get it, those folx need you, absolutely! And it can leave friends like me feeling some ambiguous loss at the change of a friendship that I wouldn’t have wished for and paradoxically am culturally required to celebrate because “MARRIAGE! and KIDS! You’re doing it right!” Those are massive things to celebrate and we overpriviledge them in what philosopher Elizabeth Brake calls “anatonormativity”).
And, returning to what feels like the options for me and others like me, if I feel up for it, I can look down, to the side, and all around, at the simmering and ubiquitous rage and sadness (that we “shouldn’t ever feel”) that inevitably comes when we realize the systemic gaslighting that characterizes our gendered socialization in the US.
And while we should never blame individuals for fundamental structural problems, it does feel important, and can liberate from the sense of helplessness to name, that for many women who feel like they have the capacity, you could choose to in many ways, disentangle yourself from the grasp of compulsory heterosexuality and its normative trappings.
It is also on us, all of us, but especially other millennial women to police or judge the lives of other women. Forgive me if this sounds trite on the heels of the previous paragraph. Multiple truths can and always DO exist at the same time. My intention is not to judge others and also notice and nudge people towards making more life affirming, aligned, nourishing choices. It seems like amatonormativity is not the “thing” that does that for most women, so this is an offering…
Surveilling and punishing women for “not being feminist enough” (or for any number of other perceived slights) is one of the oldest tricks in the neoliberal states’ book for disciplining bodies (per Faucoult) and ensuring that those made marginal by oppressive systems (women, BIPOC folx, queer, trans and gender-diverse folx, and so on) are not able to revolutionize.
And, after all of this, the “problem of desire,” that feminists have been grappling with for ages, remains. Again, this is where Berlant’s “cruel optimism” can be instructive. If you’re a woman or femme person and you’ve experienced a heterosexual relationship, know any femme person who has online dated, read literally anything about gendered divisions of labor, and/or lived through the pandemic and knew a mom with a male/masculine partner during that time, this theories’ applicability is tragically obvious.
To provide some measure of “what do we do about it,” because critiquing normative structures can make me feel powerless, I will return and complicate the ocean metaphor a bit. Firstly, grief and anger are vital. For me, all of this feels really maddening and if I can slow down enough to feel it…deeply sad. It can feel sad and maddening that you are not living the life that you thought you’d have. Same goes for acknowledging the pressures and constraints of oppressive structures-including those for masculine people, what a tragically rigid and unrelational box we have all been complicit in creating for them. It can also feel sad/scary/groundless to think about making decisions that risk the benefits of normative heterosexual culture. Further, if you start questioning these assumptions, buckle up! I personally am so exhausted by my own mind’s machinations…the world has told me that I should want a partner and has created few ways to get needs for care and intimacy met beyond that, but what is on offer seems like a bad deal, what should I do?” As a neuroatypical person, it can be really tedious and futile to listen to “all the cooks in the kitchen” on this issue or, more difficult still, to quiet the cooks in the kitchen and connect to my inner knowings and desires. So do whatever work (therapeutic, somatic, relational, etc) to be with and lovingly acknowledge, over and over again, those difficult feelings that can arise when we turn towards the tragedy of heterosexuality.
After and within feeling those myriad feelings, another step we can take, if we are feeling brave, is to ask ourselves, in the most compassionate way, to take responsibility for our lives and, by extension the lives of others that we do and even that we don’t know. The ocean that we swim in creates waves that push us towards that normative shore, and then, at some point, we actively and agentically walk up onto those shores. Yes, at some point, women, no matter how heteropessimistic they were, still often made the choice to partner with that dude and have those kids (and I know, federal care infrastructure needs shoring and cultural shifts around how we meaningfully value care work is crucial! All of that absolutely is a symptom of the larger oppressive structures that harm us all especially moms! So vital and beyond the scope…Also, I can’t even begin to start on the forced births that so many women and others with uteruses have in the past with structural inequities in health care and reproductive justice, and will increasingly be forced to bear with the fall of Roe). And so, turning towards the realities of our socialization as well as the reality, that, for the women in this financially privileged position, to the extent that you believe in any level of human agency, a few things come up for me. Firstly, we may feel like we “did it to ourselves,” and feeling complicit in our oppression is deeply painful. And secondly, choosing to be, at least in appearance, fully invested in the capitalistic norms of “nuclear family” and heterosexual marriage, is not neutral. It throws “another log on the fire” of amatonormativity, making it more difficult for those without the financial and social privilege to make different choices. Again, I don’t think it is useful or kind to as individual women to solve structural and deeply entrenched systemic problems, and also, the women that AHP references in her article, do have some agency and the luxury to challenge these norms. There can be grief in living a life that looks different than we planned and also grief (or at least ambivalence) in feeling as though we are harming ourselves and others and/or living out of alignment with our own ideals and philosophical commitments. And making deliberate choices in our private lives in meaningful for ourselves and for the larger project of gender equity and also maybe the only hope we have to make it to shore while we work to dry up the ocean of cisheteropatriarchy.
My practice-our practice as social workers has helped fuel this imagination. Social work entails sitting with so much suffering. It is also incredibly optimistic because working to help improve individuals’ lives, communities, and social policy inherently implies that it could be different and better! Our practice demands a willingness to turn towards social problems to imagine better futures. This is inherently activism. Just as “someone imagined handcuffs, someone imagined guns…” as Patrisse Cullors suggests, we need to use our collective imagination “…to imagine something different.” We know that we currently exist in a cultural context that struggles to turn towards and address the inequities that it has long constructed. These inequities are not secrets as many of us feel the more obvious harms of racism or sexism or ageism or ableism every day. We all live with the implications of those inequities; the belief that we are all separate and not interdependent. This foundational false belief has informed social policy and cultural attitudes in the US since its inception via colonization, and has imperialized our individual and collective experiences. So you too, as Angela Davis implores “have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world! And you have to do it all the time.”
And to that end, many many mannnnyyyyyy brilliant Afro-futurists, Womanist Futurists, and queer theorists have imagined a world beyond the oppressive constraints of our current one. How can we imagine a culture of gender justice and liberation?! What could this world be if rather than simply responding to (relentless) oppressions we used a more joyful and liberatory framework to actively build the world that we want to live in.
I am exhausted and fully acknowledge the following:
a. I am not a “better feminist” that I have disinvested from heterosexual norms.
b. There are so so many ways that we can and folx are challenging these norms in their personal lives that does not entail divorcing/decoupling from their male partner.
c. We can only do so much in our lifetimes for the sake of a better world. It is CRITICAL to center and prioritize pleasure in our lives (especially as femme folx who have been socialized that our pleasure is dangerous, not important, not existent, “a problem,” etc. If some of that pleasure comes, in any way from relationships that look and/or are heteronormative, I get it! Annnddd, continuing to check in on our ever-changing experiences of pleasure in the myriad forms that it can take. No I am not talking about orgasms or even sexual pleasure exclusively, and I am also talking about sexual pleasure (and while I am here, can we focus on pleasure and not orgasms generally in our sexual lives!? Please!)
d. These offerings of “what we can do” is entirely incomplete and non-specific both deliberately and because I am tired and need to do work that I actually get paid to do. Sorry about this…I may add if I get more bandwidth.
Works cited here:
Bartky, S. L. (2015). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. Routledge.
Berlant, L. (2020). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Brake, E. (2011). Minimizing marriage: Marriage, morality, and the law. Oxford University Press.
Cullors, P. (2019). On Being podcast. https://onbeing.org/programs/patrisse-cullors-and-robert-ross-the-spiritual-work-of-black-lives-matter-may2017/
CUDD, A. (2012). RESISTANCE IS (NOT) FUTILE: Analytical Feminism’s Relation to. Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, 15.
Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.
Hay, C. (2020). Think like a feminist: the philosophy behind the revolution. WW Norton & Company.
Nelson, M. (2021). On freedom: Four songs of care and constraint. Random House.
Seresin, Indiana. 2019. “On Heteropessimism.” The New Inquiry, October 9. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/
Srinivasan, A. (2022). The right to sex. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ward, J. (2022). The tragedy of heterosexuality (Vol. 56). NYU Press.
*Angela Davis quote is from a lecture at Southern Illinois University.