The story that's haunted me: One woman's evil desires
There’s a story from my early 20s that has always haunted me. It depicts so clearly how the high-control religious world I grew up in viewed a woman’s desires and demonstrates why women from these spaces often have a complicated relationship with desires.
Let me show you…
I was acquainted with a woman a couple years older than me. We weren’t especially close, but we ran in the same circles, and I admired her spunk, adventurousness, and willingness to talk back to authority figures.
Her family wasn’t quite as strict as mine, but they still had very gendered rules. Enough that it was a bit taboo she wanted to go on adventures and see the world. Her feet were not exclusively turned toward home and family, as it were. She was the only person I knew who openly stated she didn’t want to get married.
Then one day she received a job opportunity to work in another country. Around the same time, her boyfriend, who had been pursuing her for a few years, proposed to her.
There was a moment of collective suspense in the surrounding community. What would she choose? Would she choose the job over marriage? Would she choose marriage and give up her dream of working overseas?
I do not remember one iota of possibility where both options were considered viable at the same time. It was understood that saying yes to one meant saying no to the other. There was no avenue for her to have both. Or to go overseas and postpone marriage until later.
There was also an unspoken understanding that if she chose the job over her boyfriend, she was basically closing the door on marriage forever. She had a bit of a rebellious streak, and there was no telling what she might choose.
Then she said yes. To her boyfriend.
You could almost hear the communal exhale of relief that she had chosen the right thing. The best thing. The godly thing. And everyone was very excited.
As sometimes happens, a few months into planning the wedding she started getting cold feet. Her very loving and patient boyfriend assured her that he wanted the same things she wanted. He wanted to see the world, travel, and live in different countries. He didn’t want the picket-fence life. They were going to take on the world together, he said.
So she got married.
And the community cried grateful, heartrending tears that this woman had given up her dreams and now, Look! God is giving her a husband who will also give her those dreams. It was such a wonderful, romantic fairytale.
And I remember my own complicated feelings. I remember this story, among others, becoming the origin of a life motto I developed in my early 20s:
“I never want to say what if.”
I knew that if I got married as young as this acquaintance did, I would always say what if.
What if I had gone to college? What if I had gotten a master’s degree? What if I had lived in another country?
Marriage would not have been my what if. But the other things would have been.
This woman’s story served as a cautionary tale. And it taught me two very important things about a woman’s desires:
One: there are only a few desires that are acceptable for a woman to have. (See: marriage and family)
Two: if she has unconventional desires, they must come to her through divine appointment or through the acquiescence of a man.
I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I only knew that I felt sorry for this acquaintance. I thought she could do better. I wished she had a different story, even if that wasn’t what I was supposed to think.
Some brief Facebook observations tell me that this woman is now living the picket-fence life with a couple kids, which is interesting considering she didn’t even want to get married.
But whenever she told people she didn’t want marriage, everyone responded with, “You just haven’t met the right man yet.”
Nobody responded with, “What would you like to do?” Or, “That’s perfectly okay. Not everyone gets married.”
Just “You haven’t met the right man yet.”
There’s so much implicit messaging in this response.
Because every woman wants to get married, of course. And if she doesn’t want it, it’s simply because she hasn’t met the right one.
There was no narrative for a woman not wanting marriage. There was no narrative for a woman wanting things besides (or in addition to) being joined to another person.
You see, it isn’t wrong for a woman to have desires as long as they are the right desires and sanctioned by a man.
And this, my friends, is why desire can be so difficult for women. This is why it can be so hard to know what we want and then, once we discover it, to allow ourselves to want it freely and passionately.
This is not our fault. High-control religion did this to us.
And one way we gain freedom is by letting our desires speak for the first time, listening intently, and slowly giving those desires the sunlight and water they deserve.
Your desires are good. And so are you.
If you’re an ambitious or creative woman (or both!) looking for trauma-informed support after the impact of patriarchy:
Use this link to book a free 20 minute consultation.