When you want a husband, but not a relationship
Women's romance and erotica is simply objectification of a different kind
You reach a point in life when porn becomes too gaudy to do its job - so having made the mistake of looking up erotica on Amazon, I’m now pummeled with book covers of firefighters and the like.
Having shamelessly clicked, I discover that the plot beats are largely the same. A ruggedly handsome man has been made emotionally unavailable by [pick one: trauma, family history, bad past relationship, dedication to his job]. He meets the female protagonist. She is gorgeous and witty (but doesn’t know it, silly thing!). She is the most brilliant thing that the good lord has ever conceived, but relatably crippled by garden-variety insecurities (and a fear of vulnerability which makes you feel so, so seen). Some contrived circumstance (which will make a great wedding story one day!), like a forest fire or an emergency C-section on a horse, will bring the two of them together.
Over the course of roughly 300 pages, all attachment issues melt away, the man keeps getting promoted at work despite somehow having infinite time and energy to dedicate to this budding relationship, and the unstoppable power of love brings the two together to manifest that most ultimate of human glories: a marriage, a baby, and a nice house in a good school district.
This made me think back to a dating story that a friend once relayed. Over the course of dating a woman he gradually came to realize that she already had a life path all laid out: a house in a nice suburb of Princeton; a baby, to check her mother’s box of “doing the next life thing right”; all within the requisite wrapper of wedlock, to ensure that social legitimacy would be conveyed to all friends, family, and anyone who cared to look on Instagram. He seemed to fit the bill, but he got the sense that any Ivy-League educated, high-earning male with a pulse who didn’t look like Jabba the Hutt could have been swapped in, and nobody would have blinked. She didn’t want a relationship with him: she wanted someone with the right product features, who wouldn’t put up too much of a fight, to slot into the role of husband, sperm donor, and ATM.
It was an interesting role reversal. The traditional lament is that men will say anything to get into a woman’s pants and use her for sex. I realized from this conversation that a dude could feel equally objectified: that a woman might pursue a relationship not because she was interested in the shape of his consciousness, but in order to shoehorn him (or rather, the idea of him) into the contours of a domestic life, already designed.1
The idea that “love” will overcome all obstacles to manifest the perfect relationship is nearly universal in wedding vows - and it’s a relationship therapist’s worst nightmare. Any therapist worth their salt will immediately dismantle this notion by beating you over the head with one simple truth: you cannot control others. You can only choose your own objectives, communicate them clearly, accept the other person’s response, and proceed in a way that is consistent with your values. The universe, to put it politely, doesn’t give a damn about your plans.
To become willful in the world is to forget that you, too, would be morbidly unhappy if someone were to come along with a pre-baked life story and attempt to slot you into it. Such disregard for the complex of thought processes, ambitions, hopes, and fears that form another human being is already rampant. Most of us don’t see each other at all.
To legitimize and emotionally launder such negation by calling it love is a tragedy, not a fairy tale. No wonder fiction is all that it’s good for.
#157
Funnily enough it was also a woman, writing fiction, who first poked fun at this whole trope of using men for their properties of husband-ness in 1813:
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.