Women

There was a great post on Jezebel today about the depressing stereotype of the desperate single female.
It's interesting to me because I've known some women who hit 30-something and freaked out because they had a vision of themselves as wives and mothers, and a couple 20-somethings who preemptively freaked out because they had a vision of themselves as wives and mothers.
That always seemed to me to be such a difficult career path, such a difficult burden to put on yourself, because (it seems to me) that you're hanging your future identity on something you can't control. You're building a future for yourself that hinges on the presence in your life of a likely husband and father, and if you can't find that guy... hence self-help books for women that advise them to settle for somebody already, so the terrible specter of loneliness never darkens their door. How sad.
And yet those women are sad for me- they imagine my long lonely nights where I can't get a man, and they pity me. And social time with them is loaded with the unspoken question (the question my family gave up on a long time about) "what's wrong with you that you can't get a man?"

So yeah. What's wrong with me that I can't get a man?



What a ludicrous question, honestly. It's framed in a way that makes it unanswerable, even though that's how it's ALWAYS framed (even if people don't say it out loud).
Firstly, I'm willing to be alone. It's a natural consequence of making my own choices in life, of being willing to reject other people's opinions and judgments. When you give up on seeking other people's approval, you have to accept the possibility of loneliness. And it goes back to something I said early on in my other blog, about not having much leadership in my life, of having to figure things out my own way and venture into the unknown. When you do that, sometimes you find yourself on a path with nobody else on it, and that's okay if that's the path you've chosen, the path you want to be on.
And secondly, I want, like everyone wants, to be loved for who I really am, not for what I do for people or for what they want me to be. I don't want companionship for it's own sake, or to satisfy my ego, or for... whatever other reasons there are. In the same way that I want to have an authentic life, I want to have authentic relationships with other people; family, friends, coworkers, and lovers.
So here I am, a woman in my late 30s, with a career and friends and possessions, and no boyfriend, no husband, no lover, and no prospects. I have a life I really do enjoy, and a future I look forward to with pleasure and anticipation. And if I meet someone who has a place in my life, that's just fine. And if not, that's actually fine too. My ambition is to become always more fully Rebekah, to discover my unique place in the universe, to bear only my own burdens and bear them gracefully, to be honest and mindful. And I'm not sure quite how to get there- the journey is filled with false starts and detours and I don't always do it right, but I'm faithful to it and make my own slow, strange progress. So what's wrong with me? Nothing at all.

And back to the larger issue, the question of what Women are like, what Women should want and do and be like... good lord. Aren't we all trying to figure that out? I don't know anyone who is "Doing it Right" who has the work and the family and the relationship stuff entirely figured out. And sometimes she seems to have it worked out, but it falls apart a year or five later. And if she exists, and she's got it figured out, what works for her might not work for anyone else. We (women and men) don't have many role models- we're all pursuing happiness in our own ways, and making missteps along the way. And that's okay, dammit. Why are there a bazillion books telling us what we ought to do, buy, have, marry, and why do we take them seriously? Are we THAT afraid to embark on our own journeys and make our own mistakes?

It brings me back to my first point. In order to reach maturity, you HAVE to let go of the need to live up to the expectations of others, whether that's a boyfriend or your mom or Oprah or, yes, your idea of God. And doing that opens yourself up to risk, and among those risks is the possibility of being alone. And the reward of doing so is that you get to claim your own being, your own uniqueness, and you can return to those relationships as an authentic woman, a person of integrity, and be really present in them, belonging in them in a way that was impossible otherwise.

Wow, I just got all preachy. It's a good thing nobody reads this. ;-)