I remember standing in my kitchen with my mom, having just told her of my recent revalation that I couldn't actually MAKE my husband happy. Despite years of effort and devoted self contortions on my part, he was still miserable. I had thrown myself into acheivng every thing he ever said he wanted, and I felt utterly lost.
I told her that I had decided to start to focus on my own happiness-not to abandon him- but to become strong and secure in my own spirit. Surely, I reasoned at the time, the best way to support him. I told her that he was seeing another woman "on the side", with my blessing, and that I hoped that he was able to find happiness with her that he wasn't finding with me. I asked her what it would look like to find her own happiness, as well. Her response, in the strangled voice of a woman who had committed 40 years of self contortions in the name of marriage: " But aren't you afraid of them leaving us?" I told her that I wasn't afraid of him leaving, and I wasn't afraid of him not loving me- he told me he loved me and that he would never leave me. I was so trusting that I couldn't fathom either of those scenarios ever happening.
That was five years ago. My husband DID leave me, for the gal "on the side". In our custody hearing, he told the judge that he never loved me- had never wanted to be with me in the first place. I won't lie and pretend that experience didn't turn me inside out. I sometimes feel that I don't belong on these threads where women find their power and leave relationships that are no longer serving them. I think its highly likely I would have stayed forever, if he hadn't left me first.
However, though I may have taken a different route to get here, I have indeed left behind all that wasn't serving me. I held tight to that knowing that I must fight for my own strength of spirit above all else, and I began watering that tiny seed in the darkness before even I knew what I was doing. In hindsight, in that conversation with my mom, I was right to not be afraid. Not because of any guarantee of love or commitment absolving me of terror, but because I contain within myself all of the worth and power to fuuuuuuuuuucking thrive after shedding the heavy, insiduous, soul sucking rot of being with someone who didnt care for my humanity.
God, I loved the complexity of this story. The truth is that all the stories, including my own, are full of contradictions — two steps forward, one step back, etc. that’s why we need to hear them, because there’s so much room for doubt at every step and the only thing we can be sure of is that to crouch in paralysis forever can’t be right.
I don’t think it’s any less powerful to find your peace and wholeness no matter who left who. It’s maybe less of the premise for some flashy TV pilot with a banging soundtrack, but we have plenty of those. Fuuuuucking thriving after someone you committed your whole self to tries to negate your relationship is punk as hell and very powerful. You belong everywhere you want to be.
I have never felt so seen and heard and encouraged by other women IN MY ENTIRE LIFE as I have in this group. I have never seen such discussion and open vulnerability by women as I have in this group.
I am a married 36 year old woman with two toddlers and at no point in time have I felt from MJ, or anyone else here, the encouragement to not have exactly that. I have only ever felt the courage to have exactly what I want--however that may look, or change, to me.
I have always been a wildly interested (nosy) and affected (sensitive) and intense (heavy) and MJ has always made me feel, through both her art and this community, that there is a place for me and that there is understanding.
I am going to envision the spew of hatred as confetti on a massive positive. Cheers to that, the art, the people!
Interesting, I am from a very progressive and secular part of the country and immediate community. We read your book in my book club, and I immediately loved it, and it resonated despite not having plans to leave my husband. But so many people in the book club were wondering if the protagonist was depressed, or couldn’t understand her motivations. This felt so bizarre to me as the character was incredibly relatable and I would have assumed all women and people could have related. To me it seems like the lady doth protest too much. If it’s that scary to relate to such a character what are you trying to convince yourself of?
Hey Miranda! I am from Birmingham Alabama. I blew up my life a few years ago. I was floundering around like a fish out of water and I threw myself right back in the lake. My son has already faced so much with his own father and moving a lot and he was begging me to go back, and so I did. My parents weren't supportive of me being alone either. I had tried to tell him all of these big feelings I was having then. When we got back together, one of his boundaries was that he never wanted to talk about an untraditional relationship ever again. And I agreed. My boundaries were that he work on becoming more of what I need. 2 years in and I am miserable. I have started bringing up ENM again and I actually read him a couple of your articles. He didn't seem angry or hurt. We haven't brought it up formally again, but I'll make comments. Priming I guess. We start back to couple's therapy next week and I plan on bringing it up at some point again. I really want to explore relationships with women and I always have. Never given myself the chance, but that's only a small part of it. I need some excitement and fun and my husband is...not. His main goal is to sit on the couch as much as possible, speaking and doing as little as possible. His comfort is #1. No budging. And I haven't been quiet about my needs. He knows that he's full and I am going hungry. But I don't know think he knows how to move forward. I'm here now and I plan on trying as long as I can until my son's a little older. I'm hoping by then we have made some progress. All my family are conservative evangelicals. When I blew up my life before, I lost several friends. And then lost some when I got back with my husband. No one understands around here. If you'll notice how far apart every one is in the South East in your group chat when I asked for fellow All Four fans...there are definitely more people around here who like react to that article than would understand anything I'm going through. I ended up in a depression that I am just now getting out of. I gained about 50#. I had been in excellent shape leading up to this. I feel like I just went against what my body and soul have been begging me for. I made myself a prison. I appreciate this group chat so much. I feel understood here.
Oh Jenna, it sounds so rough. Everyone's drive to stay the same is so strong, myself included (18 years is a pretty long marriage for someone who never yearned for marriage and seemingly had lots of other options.) I found the pressure to keep to things the same to be so strong I couldn't even see it, like gravity. So your will and strength and clarity is so impressive to me. The fact that you're noticing what your body and sould is begging for...anyone, anywhere tends to block that out. I'm rooting for you so hard.
When I was in high school, maybe 10th grade, a friend’s favourite joke was “when my wife is 40 I’ll exchange her with two of 20”. I was strongly anti-marriage and anti-patriarchy from witnessing my mom’s unhappy life, and these types of ‘jokes’ only reconfirmed my views. But these were (are?) the misogynist clichés we all grew up with. You better keep your man. You should be grateful you found one in the first place. Etc.
Obviously, this friend was repeating a ‘joke’ he had heard elsewhere - maybe his father? Maybe they all laughed about it around the dinner table!? I couldn’t believe he would make something like that up himself. We were at an international school in Germany, in the mid-80s, he was Dutch, it was all in all quite a liberal and privileged environment. And yet.
Shortly after, I heard my mom repeat a common disparaging phrase on women’s appearance (‘hinten 20, vorne 40’ - meaning ‘20 when seen from the back, 40 from the front’) referring to a neighbour. I was speechless. I held her to be an intelligent, modern woman, who would have by then understood that she didn’t need a man to be herself. But this whole thing of patriarchy and misogyny went much much deeper, it was a mesh of centuries old mangrove roots that would pull one back over and over. As soon as you freed one foot, your arm was ensnared again. As soon as you cut back in one place, it was already flourishing somewhere else. And all the while you were told that you were walking on a beautiful, fresh meadow. The exhaustion and gaslighting defeated even the strongest.
Which is why we need the relay race. (This was in AF I think). There’s only so far we can run before we collapse and we need somebody to take over, let us rest, maybe doubt ourselves, reconsider, and then run again. Thank you for creating that space here.
Wow, this post title felt like it was targeted specifically at me.
I grew up evangelical Southern Baptist and got married at 22 but it wasn't until my then-spouse realized her trans identity that I actually saw all the ways those restrictive religious gender roles were harming us both. It felt like we didn't have permission to imagine a different world, until my partner led the way.
We all need someone to show us a new vision for how life could look. My spouse did that for me. All Fours did too (for me and so many others). I wish I'd had that example a long time ago, but I'm so happy to have it now!
just reading this and the line "I found myself acting strangely territorial over womanhood. Possessive. I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet its exacting standards and feeling the shame of falling short." is so powerful.
i often feel like cis/straight people don't allow themselves to question and actually figure out who they are, whereas being queer or trans almost demands it. i hope we all find ways to unlock ourselves.
❤️ I'm currently on a month long away from home retreat. To be alone. It is awesome. I'm 63 and just healthy enough after 15 years of being VERY sick (hospital in and out, needing a lot of care at home, from my husband). I'm going back home, but with some changes in me. The funny thing was, my sister said that I was selfish for going away while having the energy to do so, I should be paying my husband back. But my husband said, I'm not going to like it, but please go, you need to stretch your wings again.
But my home studio that was invaded by our adult daughter, is in the process of being cleared and cleaned before my return. She found a new appartement for herself, and I get my studio back. A room of one's own is a basic necessity.
I needed this. I’m 36, left evangelicalism a few years ago, recently divorced, I have two girls ages 7 and 6. I’m lucky to live in the Bay Area where dating and love is more on a spectrum culturally, but I’m still learning how to make friends and create a community outside of church, and learning how to engage my daughters with curiosity whenever they express concern that I don’t go to church or believe what the church says about God or Jesus (they still go to church with their dad).
Much to the chagrin of all the women I grew up listening to, I have a corporate career and am now divorced from my immigrant husband, and I’ve been on the craziest dating apps for learning experiences (boy, have they been plentiful- some beautiful- some pure nonsense).
It’s weird to go from black-and-white thinking to living in the gray and embracing curiosity.
One of my outlets now is writing comedy, and performing at open mics to make it funny and hear people laugh with me about it. And then I still go to bed crying. It’s lonely in the part of the journey. I’d love to connect with more people like me in the Bay Area.
“It’s very hard to have faith in something that can easily be described as selfish nonsense … Everything crumbled – not the love, but every right/real/rigorous concept I had built my life around: rubble at my feet. And it just keeps on falling! Which has become less of a crisis or revelation and more of a practice. When I get too convinced of the right way to approach a morning, a conversation, a meal, a relationship, I start to feel kind of swimmy and off, almost carsick. So I get out of the car and in doing so, realize there was no car.”
There was no car! I love this. The notion of “security” that patriarchal social constructs offer comes at too high a price for this once-married mother of 2 girls. After 12 years (25 in relationship), getting out of the car was the most terrifying, exhilarating, and — ongoing — practice I could give myself as a mother dedicated to my own self-realization, motivated less by selfishness (that,too, as my caretaking hormones wane), but mostly by the desperate sense that I must model a way of living into adulthood that my now-teenage daughters will see as a tantalizing mix of power, bravery, and possibility for redefining femininity/womanhood/personhood.
I know my performance of this practice has been riddled with error and painful consequences for them, and hopefully they won’t make them again BECAUSE I/we’ve made them already. Or maybe they’ll repeat these patterns in order to more fully learn/reject the hardest lessons. This IS the feminist project IMHO. Messy, flawed, yearning. Getting “selfish” and getting the hell out of the car was the best I could do for my daughters. Of that, I am sure.
“I must model a way of living into adulthood that my now-teenage daughters will see as a tantalizing mix of power, bravery and possibility for redefining femininity/womanhood/personhood. ” — aaaaaagghhh yes! My daughter is 5 and I’m thinking about this so much too.
I live in a very conservative community, a rural county in the red state of TN. It is assumed that women will get married, have children, go to church, etc. But as some of my female friends have told me, "This just didn't work for me." The husband had affairs, etc. Or he was abusive and scary. So now they're not married. Maybe they date sometimes, but usually they drop a man after about six months because he's abusive and scary, or just selfish. He wants you to understand him FIRST.
I DON'T get that! Aren't they even a little curious about us? No. Monologues on first dates are the rule rather than the exception. So I just stopped dating them, and now I have more time for things that are more rewarding.
I have lived in the same rural neighborhood for 40 years now. At first I was married, then I was in two long relationships of more than ten years, and now I am happily and permanently single (and kind of old). When some very Christian new people moved into the 'hood, they were puzzled that I did not have a man around, but later the mom told me that her daughter is a feminist and admired my independence. Now these people are pretty good friends, after several years of not exactly trusting me. They do get it.
I think Christian evangelical women are as aware as anybody is of the problems of marriage. They have privately told me about their struggles. But they think it's because somehow they're not doing it in a Christian ENOUGH way, that they aren't praying enough or something. But many of them are quite unhappy, although they usually stay married. Their daughters see it and sometimes run as far away as possible.
I'm glad to know about the "clean girl" thing, but I will never be able to do it right!
“He wants you to understand him FIRST” is a beautiful summary and doesn’t feel much different in queer relationships. We repeat the same bias and structures, even while calling them new and open. There is a power dynamic still present in all engagement that is not built on equality, but power.
That's interesting. I had not thought about the fact that this could be the case. What if most or all of your relationships were built on equality? Then would you just politely take turns understanding?
Quickly wanted to tell you that your comment about [or we’ll be finding our lonely selves taking care of an old man] was the single most transformational sentence I’ve read in the last five years.
Unless my relationship with an already old man is reciprocal I’ll be gone from it. And he now knows this and is stepping up and evolving daily to retain this person in his life, me, whom he loves.
Your sentence released me from my “sentence” and started our mutual evolution.
Haven’t even read your entire piece above, yet, but wanted to tell you this before I lose WiFi lol
There’s no surprise the focus on the family group came for you (as a child I was inundated with that stuff). I weirdly have been surprised by the amount of people, especially including women, who say they didn’t like the book because the narrator was so selfish. How is fighting to understand your life selfish? Loved loved it. Favorite of your books so far.
i’ve never married or had a child but am a looong time lover of your books - NOBHMTY got me thru college - and my southern, conservative, christian family has broken my heart throughout life: moving to a big city, not being a christian anymore, coming out as queer, educating them on anything their misinformed about.
i’m sorry these CCs are threatened by your work and your inspiration to so many women/people, but if it’s helpful to anyone reading, i will ALWAYS see their fear and hatred as coming from ‘inside the house’. i’ve never witnessed a more ‘out-of-touch with themselves’ group of people. it’s sad enough to witness their self-disconnect but it often makes them harm others. wish they’d keep that part to themselves.
I feel this so deeply. It’s so uncomfortable to be around people so out of touch. It’s cringe. It is coming from inside the house. There’s a great quote that goes, “it does not take great malice to do great harm, the absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact a man convinced of his virtue, even in his vice is the worst kind of man” -Charles Blow. This is how I have experienced evangelicals.
I’m impressed with how gentle and thoughtful you are towards this writer. Classy.
"But what if he stops loving you?"
I remember standing in my kitchen with my mom, having just told her of my recent revalation that I couldn't actually MAKE my husband happy. Despite years of effort and devoted self contortions on my part, he was still miserable. I had thrown myself into acheivng every thing he ever said he wanted, and I felt utterly lost.
I told her that I had decided to start to focus on my own happiness-not to abandon him- but to become strong and secure in my own spirit. Surely, I reasoned at the time, the best way to support him. I told her that he was seeing another woman "on the side", with my blessing, and that I hoped that he was able to find happiness with her that he wasn't finding with me. I asked her what it would look like to find her own happiness, as well. Her response, in the strangled voice of a woman who had committed 40 years of self contortions in the name of marriage: " But aren't you afraid of them leaving us?" I told her that I wasn't afraid of him leaving, and I wasn't afraid of him not loving me- he told me he loved me and that he would never leave me. I was so trusting that I couldn't fathom either of those scenarios ever happening.
That was five years ago. My husband DID leave me, for the gal "on the side". In our custody hearing, he told the judge that he never loved me- had never wanted to be with me in the first place. I won't lie and pretend that experience didn't turn me inside out. I sometimes feel that I don't belong on these threads where women find their power and leave relationships that are no longer serving them. I think its highly likely I would have stayed forever, if he hadn't left me first.
However, though I may have taken a different route to get here, I have indeed left behind all that wasn't serving me. I held tight to that knowing that I must fight for my own strength of spirit above all else, and I began watering that tiny seed in the darkness before even I knew what I was doing. In hindsight, in that conversation with my mom, I was right to not be afraid. Not because of any guarantee of love or commitment absolving me of terror, but because I contain within myself all of the worth and power to fuuuuuuuuuucking thrive after shedding the heavy, insiduous, soul sucking rot of being with someone who didnt care for my humanity.
God, I loved the complexity of this story. The truth is that all the stories, including my own, are full of contradictions — two steps forward, one step back, etc. that’s why we need to hear them, because there’s so much room for doubt at every step and the only thing we can be sure of is that to crouch in paralysis forever can’t be right.
This resonates with me a lot. ❤️
I don’t think it’s any less powerful to find your peace and wholeness no matter who left who. It’s maybe less of the premise for some flashy TV pilot with a banging soundtrack, but we have plenty of those. Fuuuuucking thriving after someone you committed your whole self to tries to negate your relationship is punk as hell and very powerful. You belong everywhere you want to be.
Wooaaahhh.
I have never felt so seen and heard and encouraged by other women IN MY ENTIRE LIFE as I have in this group. I have never seen such discussion and open vulnerability by women as I have in this group.
I am a married 36 year old woman with two toddlers and at no point in time have I felt from MJ, or anyone else here, the encouragement to not have exactly that. I have only ever felt the courage to have exactly what I want--however that may look, or change, to me.
I have always been a wildly interested (nosy) and affected (sensitive) and intense (heavy) and MJ has always made me feel, through both her art and this community, that there is a place for me and that there is understanding.
I am going to envision the spew of hatred as confetti on a massive positive. Cheers to that, the art, the people!
Interesting, I am from a very progressive and secular part of the country and immediate community. We read your book in my book club, and I immediately loved it, and it resonated despite not having plans to leave my husband. But so many people in the book club were wondering if the protagonist was depressed, or couldn’t understand her motivations. This felt so bizarre to me as the character was incredibly relatable and I would have assumed all women and people could have related. To me it seems like the lady doth protest too much. If it’s that scary to relate to such a character what are you trying to convince yourself of?
Yes. This.
Hey Miranda! I am from Birmingham Alabama. I blew up my life a few years ago. I was floundering around like a fish out of water and I threw myself right back in the lake. My son has already faced so much with his own father and moving a lot and he was begging me to go back, and so I did. My parents weren't supportive of me being alone either. I had tried to tell him all of these big feelings I was having then. When we got back together, one of his boundaries was that he never wanted to talk about an untraditional relationship ever again. And I agreed. My boundaries were that he work on becoming more of what I need. 2 years in and I am miserable. I have started bringing up ENM again and I actually read him a couple of your articles. He didn't seem angry or hurt. We haven't brought it up formally again, but I'll make comments. Priming I guess. We start back to couple's therapy next week and I plan on bringing it up at some point again. I really want to explore relationships with women and I always have. Never given myself the chance, but that's only a small part of it. I need some excitement and fun and my husband is...not. His main goal is to sit on the couch as much as possible, speaking and doing as little as possible. His comfort is #1. No budging. And I haven't been quiet about my needs. He knows that he's full and I am going hungry. But I don't know think he knows how to move forward. I'm here now and I plan on trying as long as I can until my son's a little older. I'm hoping by then we have made some progress. All my family are conservative evangelicals. When I blew up my life before, I lost several friends. And then lost some when I got back with my husband. No one understands around here. If you'll notice how far apart every one is in the South East in your group chat when I asked for fellow All Four fans...there are definitely more people around here who like react to that article than would understand anything I'm going through. I ended up in a depression that I am just now getting out of. I gained about 50#. I had been in excellent shape leading up to this. I feel like I just went against what my body and soul have been begging me for. I made myself a prison. I appreciate this group chat so much. I feel understood here.
Oh Jenna, it sounds so rough. Everyone's drive to stay the same is so strong, myself included (18 years is a pretty long marriage for someone who never yearned for marriage and seemingly had lots of other options.) I found the pressure to keep to things the same to be so strong I couldn't even see it, like gravity. So your will and strength and clarity is so impressive to me. The fact that you're noticing what your body and sould is begging for...anyone, anywhere tends to block that out. I'm rooting for you so hard.
Thank you l! Your book means so much to me and so does this community. I feel so understood. Thank you for writing.
Hi, friend. I’m actually Imogen. And I live in Birmingham too. Let’s meet for coffee soon.
Ok! Thank you Imogen (your name is amazing 😍)
When I was in high school, maybe 10th grade, a friend’s favourite joke was “when my wife is 40 I’ll exchange her with two of 20”. I was strongly anti-marriage and anti-patriarchy from witnessing my mom’s unhappy life, and these types of ‘jokes’ only reconfirmed my views. But these were (are?) the misogynist clichés we all grew up with. You better keep your man. You should be grateful you found one in the first place. Etc.
Obviously, this friend was repeating a ‘joke’ he had heard elsewhere - maybe his father? Maybe they all laughed about it around the dinner table!? I couldn’t believe he would make something like that up himself. We were at an international school in Germany, in the mid-80s, he was Dutch, it was all in all quite a liberal and privileged environment. And yet.
Shortly after, I heard my mom repeat a common disparaging phrase on women’s appearance (‘hinten 20, vorne 40’ - meaning ‘20 when seen from the back, 40 from the front’) referring to a neighbour. I was speechless. I held her to be an intelligent, modern woman, who would have by then understood that she didn’t need a man to be herself. But this whole thing of patriarchy and misogyny went much much deeper, it was a mesh of centuries old mangrove roots that would pull one back over and over. As soon as you freed one foot, your arm was ensnared again. As soon as you cut back in one place, it was already flourishing somewhere else. And all the while you were told that you were walking on a beautiful, fresh meadow. The exhaustion and gaslighting defeated even the strongest.
Which is why we need the relay race. (This was in AF I think). There’s only so far we can run before we collapse and we need somebody to take over, let us rest, maybe doubt ourselves, reconsider, and then run again. Thank you for creating that space here.
Yeah I really believe in that relay race (which wasn't in AF but it should have been.)
Wow, this post title felt like it was targeted specifically at me.
I grew up evangelical Southern Baptist and got married at 22 but it wasn't until my then-spouse realized her trans identity that I actually saw all the ways those restrictive religious gender roles were harming us both. It felt like we didn't have permission to imagine a different world, until my partner led the way.
We all need someone to show us a new vision for how life could look. My spouse did that for me. All Fours did too (for me and so many others). I wish I'd had that example a long time ago, but I'm so happy to have it now!
No pressure but if you happen to be a writer… this is one of those stories that expands each person who reads it. Even in this comment form!
Ha ok obviously I wrote my comment before I saw this link! You’re on it
That means the world to hear! 🥲
If anyone's interested or can relate, I wrote more about that experience here: https://longreads.com/2024/06/25/creation-of-woman-raised-in-the-bible-belt-evangelical-and-transgender/
i just read it, and am now crying. so wonderfully written, so important. 🧡
Thanks for reading and for these words, Kara! Means so much. 💗
just reading this and the line "I found myself acting strangely territorial over womanhood. Possessive. I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet its exacting standards and feeling the shame of falling short." is so powerful.
i often feel like cis/straight people don't allow themselves to question and actually figure out who they are, whereas being queer or trans almost demands it. i hope we all find ways to unlock ourselves.
Beautiful piece!
This is beautiful writing. Thank you for sharing it
Talk about a masterclass in choosing curiosity above all else. Miranda July, I admire everything you make.
❤️ I'm currently on a month long away from home retreat. To be alone. It is awesome. I'm 63 and just healthy enough after 15 years of being VERY sick (hospital in and out, needing a lot of care at home, from my husband). I'm going back home, but with some changes in me. The funny thing was, my sister said that I was selfish for going away while having the energy to do so, I should be paying my husband back. But my husband said, I'm not going to like it, but please go, you need to stretch your wings again.
But my home studio that was invaded by our adult daughter, is in the process of being cleared and cleaned before my return. She found a new appartement for herself, and I get my studio back. A room of one's own is a basic necessity.
I am getting my own room finally!
What I find borderline offensive is the wild popularity of this book. Aren’t MY sensibilities and humor more niche?!
Legit lol to this
I needed this. I’m 36, left evangelicalism a few years ago, recently divorced, I have two girls ages 7 and 6. I’m lucky to live in the Bay Area where dating and love is more on a spectrum culturally, but I’m still learning how to make friends and create a community outside of church, and learning how to engage my daughters with curiosity whenever they express concern that I don’t go to church or believe what the church says about God or Jesus (they still go to church with their dad).
Much to the chagrin of all the women I grew up listening to, I have a corporate career and am now divorced from my immigrant husband, and I’ve been on the craziest dating apps for learning experiences (boy, have they been plentiful- some beautiful- some pure nonsense).
It’s weird to go from black-and-white thinking to living in the gray and embracing curiosity.
One of my outlets now is writing comedy, and performing at open mics to make it funny and hear people laugh with me about it. And then I still go to bed crying. It’s lonely in the part of the journey. I’d love to connect with more people like me in the Bay Area.
“It’s very hard to have faith in something that can easily be described as selfish nonsense … Everything crumbled – not the love, but every right/real/rigorous concept I had built my life around: rubble at my feet. And it just keeps on falling! Which has become less of a crisis or revelation and more of a practice. When I get too convinced of the right way to approach a morning, a conversation, a meal, a relationship, I start to feel kind of swimmy and off, almost carsick. So I get out of the car and in doing so, realize there was no car.”
There was no car! I love this. The notion of “security” that patriarchal social constructs offer comes at too high a price for this once-married mother of 2 girls. After 12 years (25 in relationship), getting out of the car was the most terrifying, exhilarating, and — ongoing — practice I could give myself as a mother dedicated to my own self-realization, motivated less by selfishness (that,too, as my caretaking hormones wane), but mostly by the desperate sense that I must model a way of living into adulthood that my now-teenage daughters will see as a tantalizing mix of power, bravery, and possibility for redefining femininity/womanhood/personhood.
I know my performance of this practice has been riddled with error and painful consequences for them, and hopefully they won’t make them again BECAUSE I/we’ve made them already. Or maybe they’ll repeat these patterns in order to more fully learn/reject the hardest lessons. This IS the feminist project IMHO. Messy, flawed, yearning. Getting “selfish” and getting the hell out of the car was the best I could do for my daughters. Of that, I am sure.
Riddled with error, me too. Whenever you try to do anything new.
“I must model a way of living into adulthood that my now-teenage daughters will see as a tantalizing mix of power, bravery and possibility for redefining femininity/womanhood/personhood. ” — aaaaaagghhh yes! My daughter is 5 and I’m thinking about this so much too.
I live in a very conservative community, a rural county in the red state of TN. It is assumed that women will get married, have children, go to church, etc. But as some of my female friends have told me, "This just didn't work for me." The husband had affairs, etc. Or he was abusive and scary. So now they're not married. Maybe they date sometimes, but usually they drop a man after about six months because he's abusive and scary, or just selfish. He wants you to understand him FIRST.
I DON'T get that! Aren't they even a little curious about us? No. Monologues on first dates are the rule rather than the exception. So I just stopped dating them, and now I have more time for things that are more rewarding.
I have lived in the same rural neighborhood for 40 years now. At first I was married, then I was in two long relationships of more than ten years, and now I am happily and permanently single (and kind of old). When some very Christian new people moved into the 'hood, they were puzzled that I did not have a man around, but later the mom told me that her daughter is a feminist and admired my independence. Now these people are pretty good friends, after several years of not exactly trusting me. They do get it.
I think Christian evangelical women are as aware as anybody is of the problems of marriage. They have privately told me about their struggles. But they think it's because somehow they're not doing it in a Christian ENOUGH way, that they aren't praying enough or something. But many of them are quite unhappy, although they usually stay married. Their daughters see it and sometimes run as far away as possible.
I'm glad to know about the "clean girl" thing, but I will never be able to do it right!
“He wants you to understand him FIRST” is a beautiful summary and doesn’t feel much different in queer relationships. We repeat the same bias and structures, even while calling them new and open. There is a power dynamic still present in all engagement that is not built on equality, but power.
That's interesting. I had not thought about the fact that this could be the case. What if most or all of your relationships were built on equality? Then would you just politely take turns understanding?
Quickly wanted to tell you that your comment about [or we’ll be finding our lonely selves taking care of an old man] was the single most transformational sentence I’ve read in the last five years.
Unless my relationship with an already old man is reciprocal I’ll be gone from it. And he now knows this and is stepping up and evolving daily to retain this person in his life, me, whom he loves.
Your sentence released me from my “sentence” and started our mutual evolution.
Haven’t even read your entire piece above, yet, but wanted to tell you this before I lose WiFi lol
You rock, Miranda July
And thank you
There’s no surprise the focus on the family group came for you (as a child I was inundated with that stuff). I weirdly have been surprised by the amount of people, especially including women, who say they didn’t like the book because the narrator was so selfish. How is fighting to understand your life selfish? Loved loved it. Favorite of your books so far.
i’ve never married or had a child but am a looong time lover of your books - NOBHMTY got me thru college - and my southern, conservative, christian family has broken my heart throughout life: moving to a big city, not being a christian anymore, coming out as queer, educating them on anything their misinformed about.
i’m sorry these CCs are threatened by your work and your inspiration to so many women/people, but if it’s helpful to anyone reading, i will ALWAYS see their fear and hatred as coming from ‘inside the house’. i’ve never witnessed a more ‘out-of-touch with themselves’ group of people. it’s sad enough to witness their self-disconnect but it often makes them harm others. wish they’d keep that part to themselves.
I feel this so deeply. It’s so uncomfortable to be around people so out of touch. It’s cringe. It is coming from inside the house. There’s a great quote that goes, “it does not take great malice to do great harm, the absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact a man convinced of his virtue, even in his vice is the worst kind of man” -Charles Blow. This is how I have experienced evangelicals.