Life without a man for a woman
This recent Sunday, the longest night since I was born was also bitterly cold. Feeling like a sloth struck by seasonal affective disorder I asked my friend, single like me, if she fancied going out for a hot toddy to cheer us up. I wondered aloud if it were bad form to be seen at a boozer looking like Statler and Waldorf of the Muppets on a Sunday evening, not that it was going to stop us. Most "respectable" women and their young are curled up near their oil heaters like good cats before school nights.
A good number of my friends are now married or in "steady" relationships and have commitments to all sorts of things which oppress and append them, or indeed liberate and please them. And as much as pictures on Instagram and Facebook conspire to tell us otherwise, marriage and motherhood are not all metaphorical cupcakes and sunny picnics.
The point is not what different women do on certain nights of the week. It is for the first time that some of us single friends have begun to feel single. With doubt but also elation we have come to terms with waiting for love, but if it ain't coming, that's just fine. The quantum of our fears and worries varies from how sad it is that no one's available to turn the reading light off when we fall asleep, to "what if I must die alone?" and a few other things in between, of course. Looking at my friends' list on Facebook, a good majority of the girls I grew up with have become distanced by geography, some have changed maybe not for the better, but the greatest distancing factor has been the birth of children.
It is at school reunions where one tends to run into a certain type - women in their thirties, blessed with husbands and children - let's call them "mainstream". At one of these events, a particularly hot ex-schoolmate was getting a lot of attention when she walked past a group of women and was complimented for how good she still looked. And as soon as she had turned her back, a particularly vile individual commented: "You know that's all she's got, right? She's divorced." WTF?
When good friends, after they marry and have children, stop hanging out except when they feel like getting drunk or smoking a sneaky cigarette during pregnancy: I know they don't mean to do it, but I know the time is coming when they will see you less and less. They are spending more time with a demographic more similar to their own. They like you, may be even like you a lot, but I know the rift has already begun. Why do women that breed and those that do not, not get along?
The theory goes that we choose to be with people in whom we see bits of ourselves. And that this is only natural. Except, I don't think it is. Things are the way they are because of existing power structures. India, despite its pretensions of democracy, does not freely allow women to remain single: whether they are unmarried, divorced or widowed. And while a number of these problems can be blamed on lack of education or gender inequality and other large socio-economic evils embedded in patriarchal society, I have been granted this word count to reflect on women's cattiness towards other women, as a special form of prejudice and cruelty which is as ironic as it is insidious.
Why this lack of solidarity among our kind for the choices we make, or more empathy and tolerance for the situations we find each other in, when one definition of feminism is the possibility, at all, of choice? Moreover, what business do we have of expecting men to support our economic advancement, or become better feminists, if we in the first instance are alienated and unsympathetic to each other's experiences? Isn't it enough that women are expected to compete in sexist environments where they must be good at everything, lovely all round and beautiful? And you know there is no shortage of such locations in the industrialised world. One would expect a little more camaraderie in a world supposedly marching towards gender equality.
Please be charitable enough to challenge the myth that motherhood "completes" a woman. That single women are any more likely than not to steal your mate than your married family friend. Usually such mainstreaming occurs after the baby. I like children, too. I love to nurture and play with them, talk to them. Sometimes, I actually enjoy their company more than of the grown-ups, but so far at the end of it I am happy to return them to their parents. Women say insufferable things are made less unpleasant because of the children. This certitude reflects meanness of spirit - don't let your conservative reflexes get the better of you. It is a sad remnant of sexism when our worth is still seen in the context of our mating and child-bearing abilities. And it is possible that one day, like them, I will want little kinder of my own, but at the moment, I am happy aspiring to be Übermensch.