Cruella was right when she said, “More good women have been lost to marriage, than to war, famine, disease, and disaster.” Is it any mistake that Disney decided to make an older single woman who would disparage marriage in such a way a villain? I think not.
On the one hand I get that it's hard to take me seriously when I say to discard marriage as a dream, considering that I have a fiancé. On the other hand, I had and have already done what I am advising other women to do.
I get why women love the idea of romantic love. In a way it's like a perversion of the social order, in which men range from being thoughtlessly inconsiderate to outright cruel toward women. Instead of being treated horribly by a man, he'll care about you instead :) How sweet.
But what I've always hated the most about this romanticization of romantic love is the way it suggests that other forms of love, especially platonic love between friends, is somehow insufficient. Implicitly I think a lot of women feel this too, like when they complain about their girlfriends no longer wanting to spend time with them after they begin romantic relationships with men. But still, very few women I know are willing to explicitly view romantic love as being on the same level with platonic love.
I recently tried to encourage my friend to consider marriage as something optional to her happiness, as in, she could be just as happy unmarried/uncoupled as she could be in a marriage/couple. The more I tried to make my point the more upset she became. Through the conversation, it seemed that marriage/couplehood represented something more than it was for me. Some sense of care and intimacy, more elevated and eternal than one could have with a friend? As though so many marriages between men and women aren't horrendous, slow-working death traps for the wives.
I do not think one can decenter men until one decenters couplehood and marriage as well. I get why people would want to be married. I myself want to be married. But that doesn't mean I need to believe that marriage/couplehood is a prerequisite to the best live I could have.
There's a version of me out there who never met my fiancé, or met him and decided not to date him, or decided to date him but eventually broke up with him. I don't know how she made her decisions but I know she is just as happy as I am. She had more freedom in choosing where to start her post-grad career. Maybe she lived alone with her cat again while attending graduate school. It's possible that she is even more content with her life circumstances than I am. I say all this knowing that marrying my fiancé is the right decision for the version of me that I am.
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