S4, Account 1: Noelle
I foolishly thought that the older I got, the more I’d be allowed to get on with the life EYE want to live. Instead I’m pursued by broken records reciting in a demonic loop “When will you marry?”. I’ve just turned 28. Why would that be my concern at this point? Furthermore, I dare not tell my hounders that as far as I’m concerned anyway, marriage is overrated and I’m not really interested in it at all. I enjoy steady relationships with men, but marriage I don’t require, and I’m not seeking it. Why would I need it?
I’ve been VP of Sales at a global banking company for 2 years now, the only way is up. Naturally as a result, I have been living in abundance, and for several years before that. I was an excellent student, finished university with a first class in Economics, entered a fantastic grad scheme straight after, and from then on, I Noelle, did what I always do; I excelled. It’s why I’m the youngest ever VP of my company. I have countless awards, I’m invited to speak on panels, I mentor, I have lunch and dinner dates with the best of my field and collaborate on exciting ideas — I have mostly everything I wanted and more. I have a beautiful apartment which I have made a home, and still it’s not enough for these people. Always “When will you get married?”, “Where is your husband?”, like everything I have bled and nearly died for up to this point, is utterly redundant in the face of the absence of a spouse in my life.
It absolutely enrages me. God did not put me on this earth for my light to be dimmed in deference to a fellow human being with a penis. How ridiculous and utterly bizarre. Because if for a second I had slacked in any of my educational achievements up till graduation, my parents would have emotionally blackmailed me into familial shame and humiliation at daring to be so basic. All my life they impressed upon me not to be basic, I did what they wanted, I even found my own fulfilment in it, and now they want me to revert? Switch ‘on’, switch ‘off’, just like that. Why tell me to be exceptional, if all you ever wanted of me was to tow the line and yield to (more likely than not), an existence of servitude and submission to an intellect and capacity likely to be inferior to what I have achieved? Is that not what my mother did? She was a star, a fucking meteor in fact — training to be a pilot and passed her exams just before she got married to my father, and you know the rest of the story. Her family convinced her to give up her sky’s-the-limit dreams, something she had trained years for, so she could “be a better wife to [her] husband, he needs [her] home”. What a loss to society. My mother thinks I don’t know that she has been living vicariously through me up to this point; I saw the absolute pride on her face when I got promoted to VP, and yet she still tags in to the parrot party asking me where my husband is and letting me know that my dreams need to die now. Is that not a sickness?
I don’t need a husband for where I’m going. I have made the life I want to live, and the only thing missing from it is a child, and I will do what I need to, to make that happen.
Originally posted: October 29, 2021