I
’ve recently noticed that when I talk
to someone I’m just getting to know
— a new classmate or coworker — and
I tell a story that involves my boyfriend,
I’ll refer to him as “one of my friends” or
“this one guy.” It’s funny, and I feel a little
strange after I say it, but it’s as if there’s a
standard I can’t defy. This elusive standard
keeps me in line with the expectation for
young college women: Don’t appear too
tied down, over-committed or like your
relationship is the biggest part of your life.
Even writing that — that my relationship
is one of the most important things in
my life — makes me feel embarrassed.
Ashamed, even. As a woman in college,
there is the subliminal expectation that
one should be unfettered, untethered and
unencumbered. I’m supposed to be focused
on school, friends, finding myself and
figuring out what I want to do with my life.
If I was following this ideal, I’d be
“playing the field,” exploring my options
and would be unconcerned with serious
romantic relationships. If I was adhering
to the expectation, I wouldn’t have to
worry about replacing “boyfriend” with
a less antiquated identifier in casual
conversation. If I was doing college
right, I’d be single, because that’s what
young, well-educated, driven women are
supposed to be at 21 — at least that’s who
they are in the media and, it seems, who
they are in contemporary feminism. It’s
hard to ignore the seemingly limitless
Odyssey, Her Campus and Elite Daily-
esque headlines shared on timelines that
describe six, seven, 28 or some arbitrary
number of reasons why you should stay
single in college.
Before I was in a serious relationship,
I tried all the things that I thought
were supposed to make me feel sexually
liberated and powerful: messaging with
potential partners on apps, dating around
and hooking up with different people. My
closest friends had no problems doing it
all — they even kept lists of former lovers
on their phones in case any STI sourcing
had to be done. But the more dates I went
on and the more hookups I had, the lonelier
I felt.
I eventually stopped and took time to
just be with myself, but I still felt pressure
to try again. Friends told me I should get
back out there. We’d gloomily joke around
about how long it had been since I’d last
had sex. It seemed like the common mantra
was that I was missing out on something
— that I wasn’t fully embracing all my
sexuality had to offer — but I felt better and
steadier on my own than I’d felt when I’d
been “exploring all my options.”
And even though I’ve been in a happy,
healthy and loving relationship with a
person I truly consider my best friend for
over a year now (this, too, somehow feels
like something I should not publicly admit
to — a significant other should never be the
best friend), I still feel like I have
to prove my feminism when it
comes to relationships and love. I
still feel like I have to prove I’m as
modern a woman as the next one,
despite choosing to be in a long-
term relationship at a young age.
Whether it
be
deliberately
not mentioning my boyfriend in
conversation or feeling hesitant
to write about just how important
our relationship is to me, there
exists a pressure to be a certain
kind of woman when I’m young,
and ironically, that ideal woman
and her construction has roots in
liberation.
The sexual revolution of the
1960s, 70s and 80s formed the
modern woman as we know her
today. With widened access to
birth control, the mainstreaming
of sex in popular culture and
the empowerment of women in
education, careers and the home,
women felt liberated from the former
ideal of getting married at a young age and
resigning themselves to life as a housewife.
Before the sexual revolution, post-war
ideal
womanhood
involved
marrying
young,
having
and
raising
children
and keeping house. Some 30 percent of
women dyed their hair blond — which
was considered more feminine — and
department stores started to sell dress
sizes three or four sizes smaller to match
up with expectations that women have
thinner physiques. Sex was reserved for
marriage, and when it began to appear in
the pop culture of the 1960s, there was
widespread panic about moral upheaval.
But changes that began as freedoms
have today narrowed into unattainable,
unfair expectations for young women.
That blooming sexuality of our parents’
generation has become twisted into a
seemingly ideal image for girls: Being
liberated and strong only happens when
one invests wholly in herself — and that
investment gets lower returns when it
involves committing to someone else
too soon. It sometimes feels like having
sex has become a kind of currency: the
more a woman has, the more sex-positive,
progressive and feminist she is. She’s not
held back, and her future is not jeopardized
by commitment or, even worse, by a man.
Not only are these ideas not true,
they’re harmful — to single women and
women in relationships alike. But it’s
hard to ignore their prevalence: In a 2012
article, Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic
writes, “To put it crudely, feminist
progress right now largely depends on
the existence of the hookup culture.
And to a surprising degree, it is women
— not men — who are perpetuating the
culture, especially in school, cannily
manipulating it to make space for their
own success, always keeping their own
ends in mind.”
In the same piece, she writes, “For
college girls these days, an overly serious
suitor fills the same role an accidental
pregnancy did in the 19th century: a
danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get
in the way of a promising future.”
In a 2013 interview with The New York
Times, University of Michigan sociologist
Elizabeth Armstrong explained that
“increasingly, many privileged young
people see college as a unique life stage in
which they don’t — and shouldn’t — have
obligations other than their own self-
development.”
In the same article, a young woman
with a serious boyfriend told the Times
that she felt “as if she were breaking a
social taboo,” saying, “Am I allowed to
find the person that I want to spend the
rest of my life with when I’m 19? I don’t
really know. It feels like I’m not.”
T
here is certainly an element
of privilege in being able
to
write
this:
I
am
able
to choose whether I want to be in a
relationship or not. I am able to choose
who I want to share myself with, whether
that be in a long-term relationship, a
hook up, a date or with no one at all —
choices that were all afforded to me by
the work of the feminist movement of
the 20th century.
But those choices fail to erase the
feelings of guilt that sometimes bubble
up when I spend a Friday night with
my boyfriend instead of my girlfriends.
They fail to explain why I feel like I’m
somehow outside the range of good,
liberated,
feminist
behavior
when
instead of giving the guy at the party my
number I unintentionally apologize to
him, saying, “Sorry, I have a boyfriend.”
I am not desperately searching for a
space to complain, nor am I questioning
my decision to be in a relationship.
Instead, I’m looking for a way to explain
how frustrating it feels to have my
decisions questioned for the supposed
sake of my own womanhood. Am I not
capable of choosing a life and a love
for myself? Am I not a well-educated,
driven, intelligent, young and modern
woman who is able to decide for herself
what her sexuality should entail?
These are not isolated feelings. I spoke
to three other women at the University
of Michigan who are in long-term
relationships. The final question I asked
each of them was this: Do you ever feel
excluded from the feminist ideal of a
woman because you are in a relationship?
I let them individually define what they
viewed as “the feminist ideal of a woman,”
and as might be expected, they each had
a different answer. Yet all three shared
a similar feeling that they might, in
some way, be dismissed because of their
relationship status.
LSA senior Daija White, who met her
significant other the first weekend of her
freshman year, told me, “No, not at all. I
am confident and capable on my own, I
know what I want, and I am capable of
achieving it with or without my partner.”
She emphasized her own choice of being
in a relationship, as well as her respect for
every woman’s choices, but in the last few
lines of her email to me, she wrote, “Maybe
other women might think I’ve sold out or
something, but that doesn’t matter much to
me.”
3B
Wednesday, January 29, 2020 // The Statement
3B
BY ELLIE KATZ, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
In the long run
ILLUSTRATION BY DORY TUNG
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com