Hard To Do

More than anything else, my uncertainty manifested as a physical sensation, a gut-level insistence I no longer had the option to ignore. I was privileged enough to recognize a value in my own happiness and the integrity in making a sacrifice to achieve it. I also knew that to do otherwise would be, at the act’s core, a selfishness of its own.

Above all, there was too much I wanted to do, too many windows that my sanity demanded I keep open.

The archetype of successful adulthood still rests on finding our ‘other half.’

I was privileged enough to recognize a value in my own happiness and the integrity in making a sacrifice to achieve it.

Women, by and large, have been socialized to fend for ourselves for centuries. Even as our domain has expanded beyond the home, we continue to possess a disproportionate command over the skills required to maintain it.

Though it seems that everyone these days identifies as a member of the middle class, those with the bank accounts to match the designation are the likeliest to tie the knot.

I tend to side with Barrett: patriarchy as an ideology doesn’t necessarily rely on capitalism – they just happen to be very complementary means of consolidating resource control in the hands of a select few.

Yet, there’s not total agreement on exactly how patriarchy and the market economy feed into one another. The prevailing thesis is, more or less, that capitalism relies on patriarchy and, by extension, a nuclear family wherein (traditionally) female-performed domestic labour is both necessary and monetarily unvalued. Patriarchy doesn’t need capitalism, the argument goes, but capitalism does need patriarchy.

Late capitalism has set the conditions for our relative autonomy, while also ensuring that we play by its rules. And therein lies the rub.

lingering hell-no that keeps people in unhappy relationships for months and years without pulling the trigger: recognizing, after the fact, that the self-preservation instincts urging you to get out were wrong.