New Project: Chapter 20
Twenty
Marriage is a living thing, a river carving a path, an ocean hitting the shore. Every interaction is a collision, every moment a choice. The minutes, hours, days and weeks of breakfasts and dinners, laundry and chores, missed communication and passionate exchange carve a landscape that is testament to misery, complacency, or joy.
It is not a document, ring, or vow. It is a commitment to rend – through fight and conversation, heartache and lust – the best version ourselves, the people we were before the world and its expectations of who we should become destroyed our confidence. To marry is to see someone for who they are and not let them hide behind cultural norms. It is to bleed in the light, to reveal every flaw, to comfort and scold and hold through terrible nights until dawn breaks cold and pink and the coffee steams, warming the mugs. It’s unlearning everything we’ve been taught and throwing the recipe out and knowing the raw ingredients might make a meal, but being unsure where to start. Marriage begins the moment the contract falters, the vow is broken, or the promise is undone. Until then, it’s a mirage, a social expectation that helps us feel we belong.
Feminists have long decried marriage as an institution. They have been blamed for the rise in divorce, chastised for weakening the family unit, and threatened for their unwillingness to embrace something many believe is a principle tenet of our civilization. Until recently, I didn’t share their view. Now, I do – at least in regard to the idea of marriage we’ve been sold.
Early in our relationship, but after I rejected the liberty he offered, Steve and I talked a lot about marriage. Both of us had been deeply scarred by our prior divorces and the events preceding them. We had failed at marriage, missed something crucial, didn’t do it right. We broke our vows to the spouses we thought we’d have for life and understood that somehow marriage as an entity was at least partially at fault, though neither of us knew how.
We discussed the patriarchal roles assigned to men and women, marriage equality for the LGBT community, and staying engaged. We spent long hours trying to envision a different kind of marriage, one that wouldn’t consume us whole. We failed. Our marriage became a thing of its own, a stage upon which we, as players, acted the roles. Steve would provide. I maintained the home.
We both worked to preserve our individual identities, to behave as if the marriage had merely cemented our union, but our scripts were written in stone. I became someone I didn’t know – needy, jealous, controlling. Though a self-described feminist, Steve behaved like an entitled boor.
He called me crazy. I called him oblivious, insensitive, and more. We were both right because we had an idea about marriage that was wrong. Marriage, we discovered, must be about the liberation of souls.
For that to happen, we must feel each other’s pain. Take it in, believe it, hold it as our own. Empathy is the language true love knows. Steve could not just call himself a feminist. He had to become one all the way down in the darkest recesses of himself. He had to recognize his contribution to the toxic, misogynistic stew that is our culture and learn what it felt like to be on the receiving end of sexist jokes. He had to get intimate with assault, objectification, and how women police themselves. He had to start having conversations with other men about it, had to witness with fresh eyes how men perpetrate horror on their wives and girlfriends every day in small, micro-aggressive ways and recognize himself in their actions. He had to feel, like a visceral blow to his body, what I felt when I heard Trump bragging about sexual assault and understand that every nude photo shared between men, every off-color remark, every up and down the body evaluation was a knife in my heart.
To me, his job seemed easy. He only had to learn what it was like to be me. I had to learn to let him go.
Marriage between two people is like freedom. It requires liberty, empathy, and the economic independence of each person. In most instances, Steve possessed all three. He had all the liberty white, male privilege affords. Empathy, once understood, came naturally. Economic independence was his from the start. He was all the things I was not, had all the freedom I could imagine or want. As a woman, I was inherently at risk because he would never need me as I needed him. He was all I had and I peppered him with questions in an attempt to hold on tight.
“Where are you going?”
“Who are you talking to?
“What time will you be back?”
The difference between us is that he already had it all. I could step up to meet him, but he didn’t need to step down. His empathy was a choice. Mine was imperative. Women feel deeply because we lack the luxury of apathy. Our emotions are a means of survival in a patriarchal culture that prefers to use us as objects for its own end. We can’t be apathetic or oblivious because at any moment some man might decide we’re expendable. Used, tossed away, left for a newer model, beaten because he’s had a bad day, raped, murdered for rejecting him, murdered for disobeying, drugged, dragged, kicked, addressed with contempt, condescended to, ignored, disrespected, interrupted, bullied, harassed, ridiculed, checked out, found good enough or wanting, a thing at his beckoning lest we endure yet another attack, women must never let their guard down. We must always know what men are thinking and feeling because our safety depends on it.
As a privileged man, endowed with freedom from birth, Steve couldn’t validate my low self-worth, couldn’t see the damage his coming home late without calling did to my heart or feel what I felt when he called me drunk to tell me he and a buddy were bar-hopping.
My empathy did not extend to his liberty because I had none. Though self-imposed in response to stigma dictated by cultural norms, I felt I couldn’t go bar-hopping with a friend. A chaste dinner, a single glass of wine, and I was done. I had to get home to my man. I couldn’t imagine not calling if I were running late, couldn’t posit the repercussions that would have.
Not only did I not want him to feel what I did, I didn’t believe I had the right to act with impunity or focus solely on myself. That province belonged exclusively to men.
Letting Steve go meant taking responsibility for the liberty freedom demands by experiencing the liberty I denied myself after we became a couple. It meant being strong, healing the wound that I had become, and running fierce and free in the mornings with my dog. Only then, only after I had claimed my place at the men’s table in all the ways I wanted, could I find the empathy that a living marriage demands.
