As college women living in 2017, dating can be a tricky subject. Women are bombarded with a wide range of voices when it comes to matters of the heart. Don’t have sex on the first date. Make yourself a priority. Let him know how you feel. Play hard to get.
While we have certainly come a long way from the 1950s standard of raising women to be perfectly submissive homemakers, we still haven’t figured out how to talk to the “independent woman” about love. All of our talk on the subject eventually seems to condense itself into two main messages. There is one voice in modern society telling women how to dress, act, and look if they want to land a man. The other is aggressively reminding women that they don’t need a man, and that seeking out male approval invalidates female independence. Women figuring out relationships in today’s social context often feel as if they can pick between two roles. They can become confident, independent, and strong, repelling any man within a fifty-mile radius… or they can fall in love and lose sight of their strength and independence throughout the course of their relationship.
I found myself facing this dilemma first-hand a few weeks ago. In facing uncertainty about the prospect of dating someone, I heard voices on one side begging me to abandon my instincts in lieu of preserving what could have been a relationship. On the other side, I heard others laughing at my prospects of entering a relationship, assuring me that to do so would be a gigantic waste of time. Neither stance seemed personal. Both seemed to prove my theory.
Feminism has taught our generation of women to pride themselves on discovering independence from within without the validation a relationship provides. However, we are often forgetting the piece of the puzzle that reminds us that it’s okay to make our own minds about whether or not we want to be in a relationship. Sometimes, we confuse female empowerment with isolation by choice. And this is not to say that being independent is a bad thing. It’s an amazing thing—if that’s what you want. If flying solo isn’t what you want, society pressuring you into isolation is no more feminist than society was when it was pressuring you into companionship. And that’s not to say that we have progressed so far as a society that telling women to stay away from relationships is adopted dogma. Even though we have gotten past forcing women to stay at home, we still talk to women about relationships and skip a key point in the discussion: choice.
If I want to stay away from a relationship to focus on my education or my career, I should be able to make that choice without facing backlash for what others consider to be possible ramifications. Similarly, if I feel like I am at the place where I want to be in a relationship, I shouldn’t face backlash for what others imagine this will do to my education or my career. After all, I can’t imagine one situation where I heard men being lectured on how dating someone will impact their education…or how focusing on their education and not dating someone will impact their wellbeing. We owe it to today’s women to stop treating them like they are incapable of making decisions—even about their interpersonal relationships.