People Love to Play On My Domestication Anxieties
It started before we were even in the building.
“Ha,” my recently engaged friend said, pointing to Re-Boyfriend's and my last names, taped above our mailbox door. “Didn’t you guys forget the hyphen?”
Being blonde, it took me a second to get it.
“Oh my God.”
“Is that what you guys are going to do? Are you going to hyphenate?” she teased.
"Oh my God.”
“I just assumed we’d both keep our names,” Re-Boyfriend said, shrugging.
“Wow, she's going to let you keep your name?” my so-called friend asked Re-Boyfriend.
“Hey, CB, can I keep my name?”
I ran up the 4 flights of stairs (which was, sadly, no easy feat) to get to our apartment and avoid further conversation. Then I refused to talk to anyone for the next three minutes. Because I am very, very mature.
Perhaps when I'm feeling more introspective (read: bored at my job) I can try to do some self-therapy and figure out how much and why all this marriage and "bambinos" stuff is getting to me.
11 comments:
CB, it's normal for you to feel that way at this time. When people around you get married and you are within "Marriage" age, your internal clock gets louder. It also doesn't help when those around you start throwing it your face. Hang tough. You'll know when it's your time, if ever.
It's bothering you because it's scary shit. These are some of the biggest and somewhat irreversible decisions a person makes in life. I disagree with the fairy-tale love idea, it's a friggin tough decision and should be carefully weighed.
Take your time.
PS. I love your blog!
That's how it goes ... people who get newly engaged have marriage on the brain and want all their friends to go to the dark side with them.
You're stronger than that.
you are scared because deep down you want the marriage-and-bambinos thing, but it goes against the very grain of who you are, who you've been all your life.
at the very least, you want Re-BF to want the marriage-and-bambinos thing. from you.
i know, i know, it's fucked up. but it's true.
don't let your readers or anyone else make you feel ashamed. wanting those things doesn't happen to everyone, and it doesn't have to, but its a perfectly normal thing for a woman to want.
i'm just saying. i've been there. four years ago, i succumbed to the marriage thing, and in about 4 1/2 months, planned or not, the bambino will be here.
we don't have to be on separate teams, you know- those with husbands-and-bambinos vs. without. you can still totally be CB and just learn to bitch more about your husband and kids rather than work. trust me, it will be much more interesting.
Having all your friends around you get married/have babies is one of the worst things in the world... not so much the having kids thing for me...
but the married thing... because then your friends new wife starts talking about hooking you up with her single friends... saying bullshit like, "CJ... she's the one for you..." and it turns out that she's the direct opposite of anything you're attracted to and you'd rather swallow a box of tacks then allow your friends to set you up on another date...
ahem... kind of went off on a tangent there...
Just tell your engaged/married friends to shut the fuck up... and just because they miss the single life, doesn't mean that you're about to commit your life to misery...
stay single, strong and without bambino/a
Maybe it's that you don't like being forced into a box. Not everyone fits the same specifications.
[sigh] I didn't even read this before leaving the comment below. Obviously, I've become a one-issue commenter. Here's some more of the same sad song (and true, in my experience):
Two heterosexual people may marry for ‘love’ but sooner or later they find their ideal subsumed by duty to bogus culturally constructed expectations. ‘Love’ as it is commonly understood — a sense of unbridled benevolence toward one of your own kind — cannot withstand the pressures wrought by the power differential between dominator and dominated. Because all of society, not to mention the global economy, turns on the difference between two classes — oppressor and oppressed, man and woman, white and black, top and bottom — love, initially an affinity between two like entities, morphs into a class struggle. Couples struggle against the world and each other for fidelity, for money, for sex, for kids, for individual happiness or fulfillment. Thus, marriage is ‘work’, as patriarchybots like Oprah will tell you, but it is the woman who has to do most of it; the dude merely has to show up at the wedding.
Your Nigel is different, of course, but unless he is a woman (and sometimes even if he is), he enjoys a privilege that you will never see for as long as you live. I allude to the privilege of personal sovereignty. Deny this truth at your peril.
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Sorry for the wet-blanketism. It can be tricky to negotiate something different for oneself if one is a particularly well-trained pretty bauble (as I was). I wish someone had told me that the comfort I sought in marriage to a stand-up guy would not fulfill me, that in fact it would leave me empty and desperate, because after all, I was really just a prop for that atand-up guy, and not knowing what I wanted left me vulnerable to shiny, pretty things—like the promise of golden matrimonial bliss. It doesn't exist. You're afraid because your instincts are good. You can smell the lie.
I seem to have a link problem. The above quote should have been attributed to Twisty Faster, at IBTP.
yeah, you're just freaked out b/c you're not ready to do something you are expected to do and want to do my society.
i'm not ready for marriage either. it scares the hell out of me.
N hit the nail on the head.
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