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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was raised by a mother who sacrificed everything for her husband, even leaving her country and family behind to be with him. She has always made him the center of her world because of the religion they converted to when they met in college.

[b]I wished I had a female role model growing up that told me to be independent and live the life i wanted.[/b] I also centered my life around a man and now I regret it. I have so many things I compromised on because he is a selfish person and his career is so important (according to him).[/quote]

I wish I’d had that in early childhood or even middle childhood, too.

What I did have was a widowed great aunt who was quite clearly the happiest female relative in my family. I have no memory of her husband who died when I was very young, but I spent a fair amount of time with her as a young child and she was clearly strong, independent and very content with her life. She was childless and had been a teacher. Her happiness impressed on me because so many of my married relatives including my parents and grandparents were clearly not happy.

I also spent a lot of time with another childless aunt whose life I very much admired, and whose marriage I thought was wonderful because they never seemed to fight. Years later when I was in my late teens they divorced, and as circumstances played out I ended up spending a little over a year living with this aunt at the same time I was in my first year of college commuting to classes. She was a much more encouraging (mothering) presence in my life during that year than my mother had ever been- my mother had spent the majority of her energy during my childhood trying to please a personality disordered and abusive husband who didn’t really want kids, and she spent a fair bit of time abusing us kids in attempt to make us disappear so she could please the husband.

While I was with this aunt she ended up opening up to me about her 20+ year marriage experience, from the falling in love to the falling apart. I then realized how very different a marriage can be from what it looks like to others on the surface, and it taught me fairly young (20) to be risk averse about the institution. My aunt had essentially wasted the very best years of her life on a man who lied to her about his life goals - primarily by asserting he wanted children when he didn’t, thus robbing her of her opportunity for motherhood until it was too late. I suspect this is why she was so lovely to me whenever I saw her in early childhood and during the year+ I lived with her. Sadly after encouraging me to move on campus and then us keeping in touch sporadically as I got very busy with school, she was diagnosed with late stage cancer and passed away fairly quickly after diagnosis - in her very early 40s.

I continued to spend far too much energy wishing and trying for a male partner as I continued my education and then built my career, and as I posted before it wasn’t until perimenopause that I realized how much this was hormonally driven and not in alignment with my rational mind.

My rational mind was the one who saw the happy widowed great aunt and the lovely but heartbroken auntie who died young, divorced and childless not by choice but by marital betrayal, and which always ended up rejecting the proposals because I didn’t want to find myself giving my life to somebody who didn’t cherish the gift, which was what I saw in the great majority of marriages in my life and again later in my career as an advocate and then attorney.

I think it’s wonderful that younger women are questioning the value of marriage as presently constituted, as it is primarily a patriarchal institution that robs them of their lifeblood with often very little regard for the health of their spirits. We need a revolution in how we understand marriage, which given its religious roots is probably only likely on an individual basis. [/quote]

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