I spent the first two decades of my life not knowing how to be in a relationship. In college, I once fumbled to find the word “commitment” and a friend told me it was because I didn’t actually know what the word meant. Because I never stopped liking guys, my whole “anti-relationship” stance led to quite a few issues when I wanted to date someone. I was totally averse to compromise, avoided the dreaded DTR like the plague, and never posted a couples picture on Instagram or Facebook (still don’t!). In my early 20s, I was seriously questioning whether I would ever want a committed relationship so, in a fit of panic, I decided to tackle it with a childhood boyfriend during our annual holiday reunion. His response: “You’ve always been like that.”
Eventually, I met someone who helped me to commit and compromise and actually realize the value of relationships. As a ~relatively~ mature person, I wondered why it had taken so long in the first place.
Of course, with distance and time comes clarity. Almost a decade after leaving my hometown, I realized that many of my views on relationships came from how and where I grew up. I usually try not to disparage my home state of Arkansas, but it was probably not the place for me to learn about equal partnerships. For those unaware, Arkansas is a part of the Bible Belt — that strip of the south where church is a social activity as well as a religious one, and traditional gender roles abound. While my parents’ dynamic is very loving and equal, it was hard to ignore my surroundings. The moms that were most praised seemed to be soft-spoken, obedient, and “Christ-like.” The most extreme example of this obedience culture came in the form of an extracurricular class I participated in as a preteen. A few friends of mine, whose families’ particular denominations veered more evangelical than my own, found out about a class for young women to learn about relationships. I attended so that I could get out of swim practice early, but along the way I learned some (highly questionable) things from the woman who led the group. It included — but wasn’t limited to — lessons on the sexual evils of winking, the perils of letting your husband see you without makeup, and the regrets that could come if you leave a marriage due to a partner’s infidelity. I am also pretty sure that the family that hosted this “class” was friends with the Duggars.
In retrospect, I should have left after the first night but peer pressure, free food, and an excuse to not exercise kept me through until the end. Thank god these weren’t the messages I came home to (shout out mom and dad!) but the culture made me overthink my own relationships and fear the compromises that might accompany any long-term commitment.
I’d also be kidding myself if I didn’t mention the implications of having sex in the south. All the people I knew and institutions I learned from warned against premarital sex, so I was acutely aware of how losing my virginity would be perceived…especially having learned lessons like the chewing gum analogy. The Catholic school I attended in elementary and middle school somehow forgot to teach my class sex ed and when I finally went to public school we were taught an abstinence only curriculum. The absence of a Planned Parenthood was just the cherry on top of the entire experience. What would it take to get an abortion without a parent’s consent or notice as a 17 year old — the age I left for college? Arkansas and all the surrounding states require the consent of at least one parent and, unfortunately, the tide doesn’t seem to be changing quickly enough for my home state. As of July 30th, four extreme anti-abortion provisions went into effect. While the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are suing Arkansas for these regulations, it doesn’t mean that the prior restrictions weren’t also prohibitive (they include 48 hour waiting periods and limited providers).
No matter how far west I move, the fears from my childhood stick. Only in the past few years have I started to unlearn my assumption that fully committing to someone means losing a part of myself. And I’ve recently had to think about my relationship with commitment more than ever before. It started because I have a few close friends getting married soon, but continued for another, much scarier reason. I got in a relationship that doesn’t have a set expiration date with which I can shield myself.
I mentioned earlier that I have never posted a “couple picture.” Of course there are a handful of photos of me and my exes online, but I’ve never felt the need to name them as a partner in my life because I haven’t felt that they were. But when you look at my boyfriend’s social media, it’s a graveyard of past girlfriends. Looking at each of the pictures, I can’t help but wonder what message he wanted to send about his relationships and his own happiness in them. At my weakest, I think about what he might have been like with other people. Were those relationships better or worse than ours? Because we haven’t taken our own relationship into the tricky social media space, I also envy his exes for not having to wonder the same about me.
While I didn’t fall victim to the sexual “purity” culture that’s pervasive in the south, I have definitely internalized the predominant narrative that there is one person for me to be with for the rest of my life. And for some twisted reason, this has manifested itself in my approach to social media. For me, posting couple pictures — i.e. publicizing my relationship to the world — feels even more risky than introducing my boyfriends to my parents (although that’s in part because my parents have MULTIPLE TIMES had to listen to me say that a boyfriend was “definitely not forever”). Now that I’m changing how I think about commitment, going public with my relationships feels a bit like setting myself up for failure. If something doesn’t work out, it isn’t because I don’t care. It’s because I tried and that just wasn’t enough. Watching a real relationship fail is admitting I could be “wrong” about something so important — either that I wasn’t the right person for someone or that I chose someone who wasn’t the right person for me. In reality, making (and sometimes breaking) commitments means you are trying, not failing, but somehow my mind settled on the latter and it’s taking a long time to change course.
I’m not really sure where to go from here, but my first step might just be to post the damn couples picture.
