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

