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- [00:00]
Anna
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- [00:32]
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- [01:00]
Listener
Hey. I honestly don't even know why I'm asking the question, but I'm struggling with knowing that I will be the bad guy if I leave this marriage. I'm heavily in the church community and I've come to the realization in my late 20s that I'm just not happy and I need to stop avoiding it. I'm afraid of what will be said. I'm afraid that I'll be the wife that gave up too easily. But I know the truth is I've been with this person since I was a teenager. They were much older than me. It was very inappropriate relationship. I've come to realize a lot of the emotional and mental abuse, and I know it's the right decision, but for some reason I'm just afraid of making it a reality. I've already voiced it finally to my husband. He's having a hard time accepting it and is being very performative, like he wants to change. But the reality is that it's not about him anymore. It's about me. I know that I'm unfulfilled. I've been in this relationship because though beautiful things did come out of it, like my two sons, I I've never been truly happy in it because I was always living for someone else.
- [02:29]
Expert/Advisor
Shame is a bitch, and women feel it disproportionately because we've been taught to feel it disproportionately. There's a big difference between being a bad person and being taught to feel like a bad person because you feeling like a bad person serves someone else. And who that someone else is is usually a man and broadly speaking, usually the patriarchy. So. So first of all, I just want to say you're not a bad person. But in order to actually feel like not a bad person, you need to understand why you feel the way you do. Because it's not enough for me to just say, hey, you're not a bad person. You deserve what you want. Like, you know all of that. Theoretically, you just don't feel it intrinsically. And the reason you don't feel it intrinsically is because of centuries of social conditioning where the patriarchy and men have realized that controlling a woman's sexuality benefited them. In most traditional societies, property, titles, wealth, land was passed down through the man. But in order to pass anything down, the man needed a child, right? And who was going to give birth to that child? Well, a woman. A woman knows if a child is hers because she gave birth to it and she carried it for nine months. But a man couldn't be sure back in ye olden days before DNA testing, that a child was theirs unless a woman's sexuality was strictly controlled. So instead of allowing women to just be human beings with autonomous rights, men decided in history that they needed to control women as a way to serve their lineage. Women's bodies and their behavior over time became a community asset, not something that they owned, something to be monitored and controlled because it was the only way we could continue the patriarchy. Female chastity and fidelity to the man became a symbol of lineage legitimacy. If you were a devoted wife and your husband was sure you were not sleeping with the milkman, it meant that they could be sure that the children you were raising were actually his. A woman who stepped outside of those roles wasn't just labeled bad. She was a threat to the family, to the lineage, the bloodline, and the entire social order. And nearly every major religion has reinforced this logic. So think about it. In Christianity, Eve caused the fall. In Islam, Judaism, and Confucianism, women were seen as either pure or dangerous, depending on how well they followed the patriarchal rules. And this didn't just exist in ancient civilizations. I would love to think that we've progressed past that, but this is still something we're dealing with today. On a much more aggressive level, honor killings still exist. On a less extreme level, you feel bad for wanting to leave your marriage. What we're saying as a society is that a man's worth comes from his accomplishments, and a woman's worth comes from her obedience. Throughout history, we have been the keepers of our family's honor, of our moral reputation, of our husband's Moral reputation. Some cultures where if the husband cheats or wants to divorce a woman, the woman is punished for it. How could you force him to do something like that? Which is why I think disproportionately women struggle with dating because they think, well, if he left me, I must have done something to do that. Not, oh, he's a jackass, it's I must have done something to drive him away. Which is why we diminish ourselves. We minimize. We say, I will be less, I will be out of the way so that when he needs me, I'm there smiling and ready to bake him a souffle. But when he doesn't need me, I will just be conveniently not in sight so that he can just go and accomplish what he needs to accomplish for his own ease. So now you can begin to understand why leaving your husband makes you feel like a bad person. And this goes for anybody who's trying to leave a long term relationship. He doesn't have to be Voldemort in order for you to want to leave him. The wanting to leave is enough. And I always preach that women should be more selfish. And that doesn't mean I want a whole generation of women in this day and age running around being self serving and not giving a fuck what anyone else feels or thinks or the repercussions of their actions. What I'm saying is we've gone so far to one side that we need to pull it back to the other extreme. If you say I need to be selfish in this moment, you're not actually going to be an asshole. Most of us at least, you're just going to bring yourself back to equilibrium. You're going to bring yourself back to a place where you realize I deserve to feel happy. Despite the fact that socially and culturally in history has taught me that I don't deserve to be happy. Because my worth historically has been tied to me being not happy. You don't have to regret your marriage to want to leave it. You don't have to regret being in a relationship with a man who you thought could be the one, but then realized a couple years in wasn't it to leave it. The wanting to leave is enough. When men want to leave, they just think I want to leave. It's not working for me. I'm not a bad person for wanting to leave. I know I can find someone else better for me. Whereas women are like, oh well, he didn't abuse me, he didn't do anything bad. He's, he's good enough so why do I want to leave? Girl, men don't settle and women shouldn't either. So you clearly want to leave. And leaving for you means that you're not just going to be leaving your husband. You're going to be leaving the only world you've really ever known, this religious community you've been in. So you're breaking up. Not with him. You're breaking up with the people around you. And that's really freaking scary because you don't know a world outside of the community you're in. But here's the thing. I don't know the world inside the community you're in. So that just goes to show you how big this world is. I'm talking to you here, telling you that I have no idea what your life is like. I have no idea what your community is like. I have no idea what your religion is like and what you've been taught to care about and not care about. I don't know the people that you think matter. I guarantee you they don't matter as much as you think they do. So I'm telling you that if I can sit here at my house in Connecticut on a random Wednesday and be happy, despite the fact that I have no idea who any of the people in your life are, who any of the church elders or the authorities in your community are, like, you can, too. It's just you don't know it. And when we don't know something, we assume the unknown is horrifying. We assume that the road less traveled is a road of thorns and snakes and just creepy crawlies, when in fact, sometimes the road less traveled leads to flowers we never knew existed. The road less traveled leads to places so beautiful that you never thought you could see it in this lifetime. But you have to leave what you know. And that is the difficult part. And if you stay in this marriage, and you can, a lot of people do, so many people stay in unhappy or a little less than happy marriages because they don't think anything is better out there for them. What is going to happen is you're going to continuously lose yourself even more. And you're going to diminish yourself to the point where one day when your kids are out of the house and they're all grown and it's just you and your husband sitting in your house, you're going to wonder, where the hell did my life go? Because then at that point, you won't have your children at least to cling on to, to feel like, okay, well, at least I can make that a true part of my identity. Once the job of raising your children is done, you will be faced with the fact that you have led a life for everyone else in your community but you. And for what I want you to see this next chapter. Despite the fact that this next chapter is really scary and unknown and horrifying and divorce is no small thing, I want you to realize that it can also be an exciting thing that there are parts of you that you have yet to discover.
- [10:23]
Anna
And.
- [10:24]
Expert/Advisor
And at every stage of my life, I feel like that when I was in high school, I couldn't run a mile. When I was 26, I ran the New York City Marathon. As little as maybe two or three years ago, I only felt beautiful when I walked outside in full glam with a full set of lashes, smoky eye everything. Now, just a few years later, I've realized I feel beautiful with less on. I still love makeup. I still love a full glam moment. But I never thought I would get to a point where I would feel this comfortable in my own skin. Even if I'm not wearing any makeup, I'm wearing very minimal makeup right now. I still feel like I'm worthy. And I know that's such a trivial example compared to what you're dealing with right now, but sometimes the little things can help us understand the big things. I truly thought there was never a day where I would not feel comfortable going out without a full set of lashes on. That's where my insecurity was in my 20s. And similarly, I remember this so clearly from when I was a kid. I had a really hard time as a child replacing the toilet paper because at the time we didn't have those lever toilet paper holders, they were all the spring loaded ones. And my tiny hands, I didn't have enough grip. I always had trouble with this. And my parents were always there to refill the toilet paper roll for me, even though I tried to do it on my own several times. And I remember thinking I was maybe 7 or 8 wondering what's going to happen when I grow up and I have to be on my own and I can't replace the toilet paper. I was terrified of that. It was one of those weird neuroses I had as a kid that probably indicated I was going to struggle with mental health later in life. But it was a perfect example of I thought I was not going to be able to ever replace toilet paper. And then I grew up and I realized it's just not that fucking hard. And also technology caught up because now we have a leverage toilet paper holder rolls. And I don't care what any of you think, but I think spring loaded toilet paper holders should be banished forever. Death to the spring loaded ones. Because once you go lever you don't go back. It is so much easier. I sort of joke, but I sort of don't because at 34 I feel like I've learned a lot about myself and I've surprised myself in so many great ways. But I know there are so many other things that I've yet to learn. In 10 years I'll maybe think, oh my God, I never thought I would feel like this. I do. So I think you need to be more selfish. I think you need to say I deserve to be happy even if it comes at the expense of someone else's happiness. Because what's happening right now is everyone else around you is happy at your expense. And so sometimes we have no choice but to be selfish and self centered. Sometimes there is no way to have both. And in this case you can't have both. I wish you were happy and your husband was happy and your community was happy. But you're not. And so you can either choose to be happy or at least start on the path to feeling happier even if it doesn't happen right away, or you can choose to be miserable forever and let your husband and community live in this fairytale delusion of this life that you were never meant to live. And I want to leave you with this quote today that maybe can become your mantra as you embark upon this next horrifying but beautiful stage of your life if you choose to leave. It has certainly become my mantra whenever I feel like I'm choosing an unconventional life, but a life that feels truer to me than what convention is. And it goes like this. It's from an African American proverb and it says, I am my ancestors wildest dreams. Because every time a woman chooses her own truth, she reclaims something that was taken from the generations before her. Make your ancestors proud. And I don't know if you've seen Mulan, but if you have, make Mushu proud. That's all for this week. Thanks so much for listening as always. You can leave me a voicemail to answer on next Week's episode@speakpipe.com brutallyannapodcast that's speakpipe.com brutallyanna podcast and don't forget to rate review. Subscribe like all of the things, share all the love.