In the twenty-odd years that I have been alive, never have I seen a true compassionate marriage. A ‘healthy’ relationship – let alone marriage – is one of the most sought after ideals in our generation, yet it remains the most elusive. All of my single friends, whether queer or straight, desperately seek a relationship; a true relationship primarily consisting of fun, enjoyable sex, and emotional intimacy – one that will eventually spur a joint Instagram account, quarterly couple portrait photoshoots, and a pastel-vomited outdoor wedding.
I’m not trying to embarrass folks who really want this dream package. I’m just trying to point out why you find yourself wanting it (hint: capitalist-fuelled heteronormativity), and exactly what might be wrong with it (hint, hint: the subtext of heteropatriarchy).
Think about it: for straight men, the female body is both a site of desire and disgust (what queer-feminist writer Jane Ward terms as the ‘Misogyny Paradox’). Men lust after women’s bodies, and simultaneously detest everything it stands for and its liveability. To be born a woman in our society has always been a burden — especially so for men who ought to provide for them. Women’s bodies must cook, clean and undertake all the ‘dirty’ work nobody else in the household can account for. (Most) women’s bodies also menstruate – which is the ultimate indicator of impurity and filth.
Meanwhile, men’s bodies evoke either distaste or conditioned indifference. A conventional trope of straight romance (popularized by Bollywood all through the 80s and 90s) is the ‘na mein bhi haan hai’ (there is a ‘yes’ in every ‘no’) game which includes routinised behaviour on both sides: women resist, men persist; women shy away from a kiss, run when their heroes near them, refuse, deny, are sometimes repulsed until finally, they cave in. Millenials and Gen-Z’ers, who are the direct products of this harmful straight romance script, now suffer the consequences. Men who do not know how to take a no in seriousness and at face value, women who are terrified of what that means for their safety. Extending that on a larger scale, men who do not know to how to communicate authentically with women, women who fear asserting their opinions before men. Men who know only to view women as conquests or a means to an end, women who believe they deserve just about any man who does not think so.
In our heteropatriarchal society, men and women are conditioned and required to live vastly different lives. We saw firsthand in our households how gendered division of labor takes place. Mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers take on most of child-rearing and household work (if not all), while men and boys continue to profit off of the free labor of said women and further their interests outside the household. But the truth is, that all of us profit from the unpaid labor of the women in our households – further deepening the system that limits them within the four walls.
Keeping this system in place is, I argue, the very basis of how heterosexual relationships have always been arranged and continue being so. Men and women supposedly emerge from different realms, worlds, even planets — and that logic is simultaneously used to justify difference in activities, responsibilities, and language assumed and assigned within these relationships. Men presumably work harder, longer and more ‘serious’ jobs so they must be served food at the table, while women might be ‘naturally’ inclined or systematically conditioned to cook so they must remain in the kitchen.
Regardless of whether the sandwich you make tastes good, is liked by all, is desired and appreciated by all, if you’re a woman, you are the only one who will make it.
For women, it is considered common knowledge from a very young age that men cannot be expected to fulfil our real emotional, sexual and spiritual needs. On television, in movies, in ‘family-centric’ comedy shows, through music and other mediums, and of course, in our own households we see how women continue to take humiliation, neglect and abuse from their husbands ‘in stride’.
Take for instance, the Kapil Sharma Show’s running gag about the comedian’s stage wife. I keep coming back to this example because the show, at one point, had most of India hooked onto it and became a definitive cultural artefact. The comedic set which left everyone in the audience and at home in splits was essentially how the comedian’s wife had an ugly face, a crooked nose, and could do nothing better than nag.
The wife would remain perpetually frustrated. Cursing fate that she married her husband, the wife would initially yell, throw a few tamed insults, and then walk off the stage (or be chased out).
Like I said in the beginning, most of my single friends seek a true relationship. With straight folks, the demands for what they want from a partner are inevitably stereotypical and limiting. For women, a man who can provide (primarily, materially), whose social status is appealing, and who is emotionally just distant enough to ‘fix’ him. For men, a woman who can affirm loyalty, can provide emotional care, and is eventually willing to rear (his) children.
And so the elaborate game begins: men and women groom themselves intensively, consume a million different products in order to enhance their inner and outer selves, earmark magazine columns with the ‘How-To-Land-A-Guy/Girl-In-Ten-Days’ section, present their most socially desirable personas on dating apps and voila, it works!
But once a relationship is entered into, the masks slowly begin to unravel. That’s what love does anyway: it can be messy and complex but it demands absolute honesty and respect. It is also supposed to be easy – something straight culture almost vehemently refuses to accept. All these elaborate setups, promises of progressiveness and modern love falter when confronted with intense, ingrained patriarchal abuse. Men and women set themselves up for deep disappointment and resentment, if not abuse. And once you’re in it, neither is allowed to leave.
Queer feminist women have always argued for a rearrangement of straight relationships along our principles. The point is not that heterosexual people have no hope of finding true enjoyment and satisfaction from their relationships. Or that they feel guilty for being straight! Jane Ward, author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, terms the antidote ‘deep heterosexuality’ – that men need to unearth how to really like women for all that they are and not just their services. Taking the idea further: straight men and women need to do away with pretence completely; forget the elaborate mating rituals, dating ‘games’, and come to each other with absolute honesty. Have honest conversations about needs and desires, and root your own identity not in your partner’s but in navigating your personal politics. What are the ways in which your gender/sexual identity presents in your straight relationship? How much of that is conditioning and how can that be unlearned?
For straight women, you might need to ask some tougher questions to yourself from time to time: is your partner truly your equal? Or is this an infantilized man whose behaviour you enable, whose abuse you endure? Is this a relationship wherein you are consistently respected, sufficiently appreciated and one you sufficiently desire and need?
If not, a better world exists.