Week #42: The Ignorance
As I prepare to get married, I stare down the bizarre and glaring truth that I’ve never been taught how to actually love a man.
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💍💍💍This Week’s Highlight/Lowlight Dish💍💍💍
Highlight: We have a new sketch for the ceremony look! Thanks to everyone who chimed in and helped me clarify the direction.
Lowlight: This week was pretty good for a fat bride-to-be. So, no complaints.
As I prepare to get married, I stare down the bizarre and glaring truth that I’ve never been taught how to actually love a man.
I’ve been taught how to feel like I’m less than a straight, cisgender man. I’ve been taught how to hate men. I’ve been taught how to tolerate them, fuck them, withhold emotionally from them, to organize them from “high quality” to “low quality,” to presume that everything they do has an ulterior motive, to baby them, to feed them, to give up on them, to give them lectures about their privilege, to read books about why they’re so inept, to become rigid and inflexible when they mess up, to worship them, to be disappointed in them, to leave them because I and all of us deserve better.
I know there is damn good reason I have not been taught how to love Andrew.
I know the anger, the hurt, the betrayal, the past, the present, the feeling that our great-great-great-grandmothers and elders passed down to us that we can’t give an inch or we’ll lose more than a mile: we’ll lose years of our lives, we’ll become housekeepers, babysitters, second-class citizens.
I’m no stranger to why I have not been taught how to trust Andrew, how to see past his faults, how to soften into him, how to gush over his accomplishments, how to be proud that I love him, how to see his dreams and hopes, how to have fun with him, how to believe in him, how to see him, how to let him see me.
I know why - and all the reasons are righteous reasons - and yet here I am - trying to build a life with a man. So, something’s got to give. I know the cost of forgetting the vast privilege that men have and hold, but I also know the pain of never forgiving, never softening, never releasing that sense of vigilance.
This is a challenging crossroads, and until recently, I had accepted that my role in a relationship with a man was that of vigilant guard. That is, I accepted a certain level of unhappiness and alienation as my fate.
A few unexpected moments in the last two years began to help me question that role.
One of those moments happened when I was on a trip with a group of plus-size travelers in Bali. One of the travelers on the trip is named Hutch (they’re also a subscriber to FGGM. Hi, Hutch!), a fat and queer performance artist who uses they/them pronouns and who has rad politics. Hutch was about to get married to a man/masc person, and was so unbelievably stoked about it. Whenever they talked about their future spouse, Hutch gushed and got visibly swept up in the lovie dovies. It was so fucking sweet, and also it challenged me: Hutch, a person with politics that were a lot like my own, was openly swooning over a man? This was new territory for me. The rules I learned in college - and that have been affirmed in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-subtle ways throughout my life - were: 1. Men suck, 2. If you’re with a man, you should definitely know you’re being exploited and 3. If you’re with a man, you should never be proud of it or into it, at least not publicly. These things were not only rules, but points of pride. Even though they’re a recipe for misery if you’re a straight woman, you accepted that you were fucked and that was that. I found Hutch’s gushing to be sweet and inspiring, and near the end of the trip I thanked them for showing me this other way that was possible.
Another moment happened in therapy. My therapist, whom I affectionately referred to as “Dr. J” to all my friends, was always a huge advocate of my relationship with Andrew. Whenever I became dysregulated, I would tell Dr. J that I needed to leave the relationship, and he would patiently and kindly tell me that he thought Andrew was a great fit for me, actually. I’d never played this game before! My friends are all loving, wonderful, fellow coastal-dwelling liberal, educated feminists through-and-through, and we’re all basically from the “He’s Not Good Enough For You” Generation, an over-correction for the centuries that women have been taught to put up with horrible and abusive male behavior. That is to say - and I’m sure many of you can relate - that for most of my life, when I complained about my relationship to a woman friend, her advice was, “You can do better.” And I participated in this, too, of course.
To have a therapist I loved and trusted not fall into that pattern with me was revelatory. It literally changed the architecture of my brain. I started to see Andrew differently because of those conversations with Dr. J. I started to see emotional investment - rather than a constant sense that I had one foot out the door - as a possibility.
Having learned from Hutch and Dr. J, I began to want something different for myself and for my relationship with Andrew. If vigilance wasn’t the goal anymore, then what else was possible? I was so curious!
It was at around this time that I chose to let my guard down a little. He had earned that, not through being the exact partner I wanted him to be, but through showing me he was willing to grow and change and not be defensive when I told him, “When you don’t clean this, it doesn’t make me feel mad, it makes me feel humiliated, and when I feel humiliated I do not want to let you in.”
And then one day, around January of 2022, I decided that I was going to do an experiment.
“I decided that I’m just going to try going all-in with my relationship for a year and see what happens. I’m calling it my Year of Going All In,” I said to Dr. J.
He smiled and said, “I think that’s a great idea, Virgie.”
The experiment went really well and was easier than I thought it would be. I stopped questioning the motive behind every single thing that Andrew did, just trusting that he loved and respected me. I made the decision that I wasn’t going to tabulate all of our tasks and efforts and labor anymore, and just trust that it would overall even out and that I could just tell him if things felt unfair. These decisions led to an enormous amount of emotional and intellectual labor being lifted off my shoulders.
All of a sudden - as if by magic - there was an enormous amount of space for joy and play and fun to emerge. Our sex life got better. Our time together became something I looked forward to more. I was a better listener. We fought less. He did more chores. We both smiled more. I felt closer to him, which was - I think - deep down my desire all along.
Though it is so obvious in retrospect, the decision to let my guard down became an invitation for my relationship to succeed.
I think I want to end by saying that I am grateful for the feminism I inherited. I’m grateful that I am part of the “He’s Not Good Enough For You” Generation. I will die a feminist who sends up little prayers of gratitude to all the women and femmes who came before me and who taught the world how to talk about and see toxic masculinity. I don’t fault the feminism I learned in college for not teaching me how to love a cisgender straight men because that wasn’t the point, and besides, no great idea is a solution to every problem. Truly the feminism I learned in my early twenties wasn’t really designed for women like me - the kind who date and marry straight cisgender men. The feminism that many coastal, college-educated women of my generation learned was born from a queer dream - a utopia where cishet men were absent. They weren’t in our inner circles. They weren’t our friends, our co-parents, our spouses with the hope that this would create a world where we could all be safer. A part of me will always long for that dream, too.
I knew right away as a young woman that I was unbelievably lucky to have been born into a period of history where queer women and femmes had done so much to help us all understand how toxic masculinity works and how much it’s taken (and keeps taking) from the world. And it took me 40 years to understand that that knowledge of harm cannot pre-emanate how I relate to my partner if I want the joy in my relationship that I truly deserve.
xo
,
This is simply, by far, the very best article I’ve ever read explaining how it works to me, and giving me pure joy for you at the same time. Thank you for so many people. People such as yourself are me, of so many thinkers and feelers! I never knew I felt quite this way about cisgender men, but I feel exactly this way and I’m straight female. Always thought of myself as a woman who just couldn’t really love or completely care for men because of the way I was treated. Cisgender men that is. You really helped me understand some things. Thank you for that.
Rebekah Donohue
Aw this was so lovely to read!!! I can also really relate. Thank you so much for sharing such an honest an intimate perspective as you approach your wedding, it is such a refreshing contrast to the mainstream narrative of “once you find the one it’s happily ever after” that SO MUCH wedding content is saturated in!