Is a Feminist Marriage possible?

I am scared to get married. I thought it was because the man was not right for me. I picked him apart. I found every single thing that could be a potential blowup in the future and patted myself on the back for finding them. My fear was grounded in reality it seemed.

And then I talked to friends and family. Even acquaintances at bridal showers and get togethers. I asked them about their marriage or their upcoming marriage. How did you know, I asked? I hate it when people say, I just knew. And thankfully, most did not respond like that. They talked about various obstacles that had come up and how they had overcome them. I became more bold. I started to divulge very private fears about what I thought was the matter with me and the man. I confided my concerns over possible sexual deviance, mental disorders, family of origin. My dad even told me his perspectives without being prompted on what he thought about my perceived problems in the situation.

And you know what I came back with? Some people, all women, thought there was serious validity to what I was talking about. They said, in the end if you feel like something is wrong in your gut, then you are probably right.

And then there were others, some women and some men this time. They said, these are all normal and absolutely manageable problems you are talking about. You are not a freak and neither is he. These friends patiently sat through every single dirty problem I could think of, observed them, probed them, listened some more, and then announced, yup, that's normal. perfectly normal. everyone has these issues. bottom line, he's a great guy.

I've reached a place where I can accept him as a perfectly well suited candidate for marriage. I don't think his psycho self is going to jump out at me from behind the bushes during our marriage. OR as my happily married male friend M. would say, "Sure marriage is crazy, but LIFE is crazy!" Yes, life is crazy. We can't expect marriage to be predictable. (And I know, as I write this, I know that everybody else has good reason to believe that I may be the psycho one in this relationship)

But damn. Now that I've got that out of the way, here's a new one that I've been able to freshly articulate with the help of this article and this related website. The feeling of chaos, of anxiety and mess, that the women Judith Warner describes is all my own. And I'm not even a mother! But I can relate so desperately to the feminist angst she describes, and I've definitely looked into the future and only seen this angst magnify with motherhood and years of marriage.

As I was processing all of this, I realized that when I think of getting married without having achieved success in my career, I feel like an absolute failure. It seems far more glorious to have travailed on your own, risen to the top, and then married a man on your own terms once you've proven that you can do it. And only if you can still continue that within the marriage but that doesn't seem as important to me.

I see myself walking down the aisle now and it just seems really awful and pitiful. Hanna, writer and editor of dinky rink bible college, no graduate degrees, getting married so young (she probably doesn't know what she is doing). Hasn't gotten in anywhere, moving with her husband so he can go to school, becoming domestic wife follower of husband's more important career. Probably make baby soon. Too bad. So much wasted talent.

To choose a fulfilling career over marriage, especially when I'm only in my mid 20s, seems far more satisfying. I can do it all on my own terms. I don't have a partner with his own needs and demands that tend to obscure mine. But I do this by leaving a man I love. In the ideal world, I could have both. I could have a fulfilling and happy marriage and a fulfilling and happy career. Why does it feel so damn impossible?

Judith Warner talks a lot about how society tends to create these impossible situations for women, promising them that they can have it all and yet not creating the structural support to really make it possible. So women enter their careers and marriage truly believing that they can be the feminist they have always wanted to be yet it never comes to pass and they start feeling rage and anxiety and confusion and are utterly unhappy. The worst part about it is that most have no idea why they feel like this and their children start wondering why they have an unhappy mother and their husbands start tiptoeing around them and rolling their eyes.

Read this first from Warner's Q & A section:

3. You note that most of our notions about contemporary motherhood come from images of upper middle class life – the reference point for what the American good life is supposed to look like and contain. How has that affected how we raise our children?

It means that our notion of what’s necessary and what’s desirable have become conflated. It means our notion of what’s desirable has been ratcheted up and up – so that we aspire to the lifestyle and the things that before were considered the spoils of real wealth. It means we often feel that we are failing, because we simply can’t have all those things, and in our collective psyche that failure to have things translates into a general sense of unworthiness.

Perhaps my sense of failure is directly connected to what I have been raised to expect and what I have seen in the media. All those upper middle class women in the NY Times who marry later and seem to have it all--the education, the career, the money, the husband, and children. It seems so grand. It seems empowering yet domestic. The perfect ideal. The perfect setup for feelings of unworthiness?

Is it possible to marry young, to marry before achieving all the vocational success you have longed for and that you know you need, and achieve it while married? Is it possible to get married and be a feminist?