It’s romantic
My colleague and I were discussing romantic companionship. I explained to her that while I was in love with the idea of a sturdy and loving partnership I felt almost always incapacitated to participate in one. As a former ardent game of thrones fan(former because the last season was so shit it broke my heart), I remember I decided to make their high Valyrian response to all men must die, a theme to my life. Valar dohaeris, which means ‘all men must serve’ is so emblematic back in my Oprah fandom days I know it would have been something I could have practiced knowing that one day as I rose to a capitalist society’s ideal of success I could have shared it with her audience to a rapturous response.
This was a philosophy I wanted to cultivate when sharing myself with someone but alas I was always and still am rather unsuccessful. I battled with patriarchal dogma that felt like a manuscript to all my romantic encounters. It felt like more was expected from me as a woman. Mostly trivial things like whose job it was to cook or ‘make a house a home’. I have watched men who I thought were level headed brag about the things they loved the most about their wives or girlfriends and it has often been stuff like ‘She makes the best lasagna, she is an amazing cook’. That I have to be someone’s domestic goddess is something I can never reconcile within myself.
My compatriot wholeheartedly agreed and sent me this idiom, ‘Ask a Zulu man to define his dream wife and he will define a slave’. I thought like any tribalist vitriol this was unfair. Most patriarchal societies have men like this. In essence serving a loved one is okay. I would be okay with it if it felt commensurate to that of the person I am sharing my life with.
It is not just the cleaning and the cooking. It’s other things as well. Moulding myself into something else for someone whom I accepted as they were. I had a friend who loved braids but said she stopped wearing them because her boyfriend hated them. She religiously wore high heels which she found uncomfortable because she said he canonized flats as birth control. I have heard other girls preach to others to ‘submit’. Things like this. Just the other day my one friend, as I was complimenting her gorgeous twins declared I had to stop liking my independence so much in order to land a man. My whole being seems to be hardwired against this.
I think any girl is lucky who loves being all these things for their partner but I am not and it makes it really hard to participate in traditional romantic love. It is crazy to me that I have to be something I am not to be considered eligible and so unless I can wholly be myself it is unlikely I will ever be in such a partnership.
