Is It Love Or Just a Status Symbol?
When women brag about realtionships.
Nothing is better for comparing ourselves with others than posting on social media. Nowhere else are so many life paths displayed. Nowhere else is it easier to measure at which point in life we are currently at and how our score is.
From time to time we all tend to ask ourselves the question if we do what we do the right way. If we are on the right path in life and get good grades in the discipline of living life. When we think more thoroughly we discover, that there are no easy answers to those questions. Yet, certain kinds of status symbols seem to suggest the safety of wandering on the right path of life.
Symbols like: the higher paid job, the bigger house, the faster car, the vacation so far from home, farther than we have ever been. Social media is full of those pictures, which are prone to show the world who we are and how we live life.
And this exceeds the material things. We love to brag about our private life. Engagements, marriages, pregnancies, children, special dates — especially staged. It seems especially we as women like to share those “things”. We like to brag about those intimate moments as if they were some kind of accomplishment, some kind of status symbol.
It’s almost as if to say: “Just look how lovable I am. See how fantastic my relationship is.”
One might think we as women like to define our success in life by having husbands/life partners and children. Are we? Are we in some kind of competition about the best marriage, the most beautiful wedding dress, the most impressive wedding ring? Are those female status symbols? Do we as women live life right, only when we are married and have kids?
Obviously, not all those shared moments are an attempt to brag or be better than our friends, to impress or show what we have. Still, too often it does seem staged — it seems like a status symbol. This leads to the question, are we as women defining ourselves about relationships, marriages and kids? Does in the marathon of life always the married mother win, before the single lady handling her career and interesting hobbies? Do we still define ourselves about who will marry us? Who we can “get”?
We decide for ourselves, what we strive for in life but it seems, society views the married woman as more successful than the single one. And this can be dangerous because it implies ending an unhappy or unhealthy relationship is some sort of “failing”. At least for women. And this is a very unhealthy thought and not true.
I guess it is even courageous to end a relationship, that is not right for us anymore. When I think of women I know in relationships they endlessly complain about but don’t end, because they’re afraid of not finding someone else or “losing” something, I’m sad.
Who put this idea in our heads, that relationships are an accomplishment? Why do we automatically brag about our partner, as soon as someone else in the room starts enthusing about theirs? And why are predominantly women doing this?
Maybe those are just the times we live in, that push us to compare and outdo others. So when we see other women climbing the career ladder or jumping out of airplanes maybe we feel kind of threatened and want to show, how much more sense it makes to be a mother, how much more fulfilling it is to have a husband, a loved one at home. And vice versa. We fight over who has the more stressful, more meaningful existence, while men do not seem to even think about that.
The truth still is, we ourselves define, what success is for us and we decide which efforts fulfil us. Even in the 21st-century women live in the split between job and family and we still ask ourselves how we can meet the expectations. We waited long enough for the world to change its view upon us, to relieve us. It is time to do it ourselves. So let us stop this unhealthy competitive behavior. We only have to meet our own expectations — then we are more than enough, more than enough without any kind of status symbol.
In the end, status symbols are for the weak. And love does not suit as a status symbol.
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