Gender & Feminism

Mar 2013

The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem

The joke among my family and friends is that deciding is my superpower (well, that and working a room). In recent years, I figured out this has a lot to do with my family dynamics. At the dinner table, starting when I was tiny, my parents pushed me to have an opinion and firmly back it up. Turns out, this wasn’t a random game to create a difficult child. Women in our culture are pushed to go along and keep their opinions to themselves, and I was in for a lifetime of pressure to go quietly. These days, as a boss, I press my (female) employees the same way my parents pressed me: What’s your opinion? State it firmly. Back it up. Leave it on me to debate if I disagree. Given this, Sarah’s post hits close to home for me. Being a woman who makes decisions is hard. It’s something that has to constantly be relearned and is ultimately so important for our relationships.

–Meg

Sometimes the thoughts that pop into my head are so foreign and unsolicited that it feels as if they were put there by somebody else. I am pretty sure there is this other chick squatting inside of me, silently watching the drama unfold, waiting for some distracted moment to jump in and smack me upside the head with what she really thinks. A few weeks after my engagement, I am yawning at a stop sign, searching for my break in an endless parade of cars, when over the relentless clicking of the turn signal she suddenly utters: Well, I guess you’re never going to be single again. Better start figuring out what you want in a relationship.

Wait. What? Where did that come from?

At first I’m indignant. The “Yes” has already been whispered, the ring photos uploaded and subsequently “liked,” the congratulations envelopes emptied of their contents. The decision has been made. And now is the time to start figuring out what I want? It’s a little late for that.

I do see where she’s coming from, though. I have a history of getting into relationships and forgetting that I have opinions; in love, I fail to participate in making decisions that affect my own health and happiness. I can trace this habit all the way back to my (loving, supporting, wonderful!) family of origin. Along with an infamous punctuality deficiency, my parents, siblings, and I all share an inability to make a joint decision on even the most mundane matters. A typical Friday night in our house during my youth:

“Well. Nobody feels like cooking. Should we have Chinese or pizza?”
“I don’t care. Ask Dad.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. What do you want?”
“I dunno. Maybe pizza?”
“That’s fine, I guess. But didn’t we have pizza last weekend?”
“Okay…so…Chinese, then?”
“I guess. But what do we order?”
“Don’t ask me. Ma, what should we get?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Just…anything.”
“General Tso’s?”
“Well, we had that last time. But get whatever you want.”
“Maybe we should just order a pizza.”

(My fiancé Mark is baffled by this waltz of non-decision. As a point of comparison, his mother recently sent us both an email entitled “Gift Hints for my Birthday.” Her birthday is nine months from now. She just wants to make absolutely sure she gets what she wants.)

“Okay,” I say to the squatter inside my head, “so my family had take-out problems. So I’ve played the doormat in a relationship or two. That was then. I have since grown up, gotten a master’s degree, gotten all feminist, and gotten over it. Right?” Continue reading The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Wedding Undergraduates | 57 Comments »

Mar 2013

Buying A Guy An Engagement Ring

A few weeks ago in our new Saturday Link Roundup, I linked to the Dear Sugar‘s advice on the kids/no kids decision called, “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us.” Similarly, I think a lot about my “ghost feminist choices”: the fights I could have fought, but didn’t. Because as APW staffer Emily T. puts it, “If everything I did had to advance the cause of woman kind, I would pretty much just lie down.” Not every fight is our fight. So while I fought the hard fight on my (and my child’s) last names, the engagement ring issue just didn’t end up being my battle. But I think of it wistfully sometimes. Today, Rachel Wilkerson (who is changing her name, illustrating my point perfectly) is telling us about how she bought her partner an engagement ring (and the feminist angels sang).

I knew way before Eric and I got engaged that I had no desire to have a proposal. We all have those wedding traditions that just kind of squick us out, even though they are no less arbitrary, bizarre, or rooted in patriarchal bullshit than another tradition that we totally dig, and proposals are one of my squicky ones. “No one is going to be asking anyone any questions,” I declared to Eric. But what about the ring part? Oh, I was totally down with that.

You see, I am a gifter. I love that moment when I’m out shopping and I see the perfect gift you never knew you always wanted. If there isn’t an occasion coming up, well… so what? And before you think I’m just in it for the stuff, I should say that it has nothing to do with monetary value—you could bring me a pack of gum you thought I’d like and I’d feel like we just shared a magical bonding moment. I start planning for birthdays and holidays months in advance. So of course I’m going to be excited about engagement rings. And hell yeah I’m going to want an opportunity to buy one too! Is this even a question!?

Well, I’m a woman and I wanted to do something that felt right to me so… of course it’s a damn question.

Continue reading Buying A Guy An Engagement Ring

Posted in: Engagements & Proposals, Gender & Feminism, Planning | 126 Comments »

Mar 2013

Reclaiming Wife: Names and Blended Families

While you can obviously be a feminist and change your last name, not changing your last name is making a conscious choice that this is your fight. It’s also choosing to fight the good fight for a long, long time. While I hope we get to a point where women choosing to not change their last names, or to pass on their last names to their children, is unremarkable (or even admired), we’re sure as shit not there yet. I say this as someone in her fourth year of marriage, who is still constantly correcting people who passive-aggressively address the fact that the members of this household kept their names. If there is one message that I think needs shouting from the rooftops, it’s this one: you can be a family and have different last names. In fact, having different last names has zero effect on your being a family (other than making you a family living your values, if name change is one of your personal issues). It’s not even new. The Spanish do it. In Quebec it’s illegal NOT to do it. And blended families do it all the time. So with that, here is Kari Tipton talking about becoming a stepmom and keeping her name.

—Meg

I knew I was in it for the long haul with my partner well before we even started talking about marriage. One of the amazing things that my single-dad sweetheart did was tell me on our third date that I wasn’t going to meet his kids for at least six months—and as a child of divorced parents and blended families, I was very appreciative of that. Part of this appreciation stemmed from my own issues—I sure didn’t want to contribute to any one else’s abandonment complexes, nor did I want to screw up his kids in any other possible way. Mostly, though, I didn’t want to learn to love these kids and then never see them again.

[[TOP SECRET: One of the things that stepparents never talk about is the terror that your partner will leave, and take their children with them. That you don't have any legal rights to maintain a relationship with a child who might not like you at first, and that may require more work than you'd ever dream of investing to grow. It’s better to ignore this feeling most of the time. But when I met his kids, I wanted to make sure I was meeting them because they were going to be part of my life for the long haul, just like my partner was going to be.]]

After six or seven months of dating I met his kids as “Dad’s friend,” slowly progressed to staying over weekends, and even more slowly moved in. After about two years together the younger boy turned to me and said, “When you marry dad, you’ll be a ‘HISLASTNAME’ too!”

Oh my. You know, there’s a startling thrill in the tacit approval of your relationship by a seven-year-old. But then I had to explain to him about my name (T) and his name (G)—because I was really not going to change it.

Me: “Well, I don’t think I’ll change my name to G.”
Him: “Why not!?”
Me (terrified he thought I was rejecting wee seven-year old him and his daddy, striving for calmness): “Well, you really like being a G, right?”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “And you love having family who are also named G, right?”
Him: “Yeah!”
Me: “Well, I’ve been a T for so long, and I love my T family, and I love being a T just as much as you love being a G.”
Him: “So….”
Me: “So, I’m going to stay a T, even if we get married.” (Secret thrills for saying it out loud to someone not my partner for the first time.)

Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Names and Blended Families

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Reclaiming Wife | 225 Comments »

Feb 2013

Remember the Lesbians: On Finances

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading APW, it’s that finances are something we need to be talking about. Right now there are a lot of troubling conversations being had within our generation about finances, worth, and the division of wealth. And that’s the good news. Because the bad news, I’m finding out, is that there are lot of us who just aren’t talking about our finances at all (and that’s with our partners, let alone each other). I’ll admit, I don’t think Michael and I have exactly figured it out yet ourselves. It took us three years of marriage to fully merge our finances (I literally got the debit card for our joint account two months ago) and we still have a hard time saying “our money,” but we’re working on it.

So today, Carisa and Addison are sharing their model for managing finances in a same-sex partnership, complete with the added challenge of being in a relationship not recognized by the federal government. Would their model work for you? Maybe. Maybe not. But the point is, the conversations they are having about how and why they manage their finances as they do are the conversations we need to be having with our partners right now. In the meantime, for those of you just starting these conversations, I found these early APW posts from Meg on marriage and finances to be hugely influential when it came time for Michael and I to figure this all out. But as Meg said in her original text, our answer to family finances isn’t necessarily the right one. And Carisa and Addison’s might not be either. So if you’ve got a system you love, bring it to the table. Or if you’re still trying to figure it out, bring that too. The point is, let’s talk about this.

—Maddie

****

My partner and I were together for roughly five years before we moved across the country together. Before we moved we kept a fairly meticulous list of who owes whom what and would pay out at the end or beginning of each month. When we moved, even after buying a car for the move, we never discussed any other financial plan. Then reality hit. I was making double her income working ten to fifteen fewer hours a week, and we had to have our first real discussions about finances that were not just, “Hey you owe me this.” We wanted to do things as a couple and needed to figure out a system that kept some sort of balance around money despite an unequal income.

As discussed a number of times on APW, finances are less than sexy. Unfortunately, finances become a whole different ball game when the federal government sees you as no more than roommates, when marriage isn’t a tangible marker of relationship stability, or if you aren’t down with marriage at all. We had to come up with our own way of dealing with money.

I was terrified because even the act of tallying what we owed each other was abhorrent to me. It was the opposite of the care and generosity we show each other. To add fuel to the fire, I grew up with a horrible model of finances. My parents fought when my dad made more money than my mom, they fought when my mother made more than my dad, they fought when there was no money and when there was lots of money. I wanted a different pattern of existence around money when I grew up.

Addison, on the other hand, grew up with her mother in control of the finances and significantly fewer battles in the house around money. I had always liked the idea of pooled money, but I was afraid of being taken advantage of, or worse, letting my mother down because she worked so hard to keep her finances her own.

What I found was…it wasn’t awful! Combining our finances meant we both have so much more room to breath and make big decisions together. Our way of combining finances also took into account the cultural mania around money, even in intimate relationships. Both of us come from women and gender studies backgrounds, so we started every conversation with what makes both of us feel the most valuable, from there we got the following setup.

Our accounts stay separate, but we have a joint credit card. This allows us to surprise each other and treat ourselves sometimes. Eventually (when we have more money all around) we want to be able to have a truly pooled account and separate fun money.
In order to make the separate account situation work we have a single spreadsheet of all family incomes and expenses. The money we make is in separate accounts but tallied as one amount when talking about what our finances look like. Continue reading Remember the Lesbians: On Finances

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Marriage Equality, Reclaiming Wife, Thoughts & Action | 79 Comments »

Feb 2013

Google Won’t Pop The Question For You

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of the ways that our culture is slowly progressing towards a more egalitarian view on weddings and marriage. Like when I get a photography email from a couple, and they refer to each other as “partner.” Or when women propose to men and it’s a non-event. (Also, basically anything Tina Fey wrote for the last season of 30 Rock. Let’s be serious…) Like Kelly today, I too hope that these things continue to happen so they are not perceived as merely a “trend,” but a fact of life that occurs. (Also, as an added bonus, Kelly will be back this afternoon with her am-az-ing Las Vegas wedding featuring Polaroids on the Strip and a pantsless groom).

—Maddie

I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life. I gave up my dream job for a chance to move to Japan. I’ve eaten unidentifiable food on the dusty red highways of Cambodia. I’ve careened down mountains in Costa Rica going 110 kilometers per hour on a rickety old bus. These have all had varying levels of success, but I think the biggest source of pride associated with taking a risk was proposing to my now husband.

I’ll admit it—like many of the readers of A Practical Wedding, I’d never had a dream proposal in my head. No hot air balloons or a restaurant string quartet or a “romantic moment” in some “romantic place.” I never really even thought I would get married, so I was somewhat surprised to find myself starting to have “those” thoughts.

The day I made my mind to propose to my boyfriend was a beautiful one. It was 2008 and we were in Bangkok, one of my favorite cities in the world, and we had just finished an amazing dinner near the end of an extended trip through Asia together. It’s always been my opinion that it’s not really living together, sleeping together, or anything but traveling together that will let you get to know the inner personality of your mate better or faster. And this trip happily exposed a wonderful man to me, someone I knew I wanted to be with for a long time.

After getting home, I carefully worked on a small set of blank wooden matryoshka dolls purchased on Etsy, handpainting them with a theme from our trip, and a secret message. I finished them quite quickly, surprising for someone who is not really that crafty. But then I waited. And waited.

I spent hours Googling “asking man to marry you” or “proposing to boyfriend” then meticulously deleting my search history. The great Oracle that is Google held little. In fact, most of the suggestions were to do things to get him to ask you, not to grow a pair and ask. There were a lot of recipes for engagement chicken. Some even suggested you had to wait for Leap Day on February 29th or Sadie Hawkins–every four years–to ask, like it was some sort of novelty and that you needed an excuse or permission to ask.

Hell to the no, that wasn’t going to happen. Mostly because the leap year had just passed and it meant waiting another four years. That didn’t really jive with my long term plans. Continue reading Google Won’t Pop The Question For You

Posted in: Engagements & Proposals, Gender & Feminism | 77 Comments »

Jan 2013

Changing Your Name in the Age of Google

We’ve got a really great ongoing discussion here at APW about what it means to change your name (or not) when you get married. We’ve discussed changing it as a feminist choice, choosing not to change it (and not being quiet about it), changing your name and then changing it back, and even men changing their last name to yours. And just when I thought we’d exhausted all possible angles of this conversation (who am I kidding? As if that could happen…) we received a post from Rachel Wilkerson about the implications of changing your name in the digital age. And guys, it hadn’t even occurred to me that page ranking could now be a factor in this discussion. So here’s Rachel, giving the name change discussion a twenty-first century spin, highlighting the fact that this conversation never seems to get any easier, but damn if it doesn’t get more interesting.

—Maddie

Unlike a lot of women, the choice to change my name when I got married was a pretty easy one. Or at least it was until the internet happened.

Back in 2010, I was just your average happy, healthy, slightly promiscuous twenty-four-year-old girl with a blog about health, happiness, and, uh, romantic adventures. After I retired my college sorority girl blog, I started a new one about girls gone healthy (…and maybe gone wild). While I loved it, I was starting to feel a bit stifled by the niche and wanted to break out a bit. It was time for a new site name and URL. After going around and around with a good friend and fellow blogger, I finally decided to just make my full name my URL. “This will be perfect!” I said. “It will be a strong URL no matter what I want to write about! Theoretically, I can use it forever; it would only be a problem if I were to get married!”

Notice I said “if.” Because at this point in my life, despite the fact that I was ready to find a wonderful, amazing, big relationship, it still seemed like it was a ways off. I had felt for most of my life that I’d be the perpetually single friend. And honestly, I didn’t even mind. I loved dating.

Despite the fact that I was totally cool with being single, I still knew—and had known for a long time—that if I ever did get married, the last name had to go. To begin with, my last name was my father’s last name. I didn’t have a good relationship with him (he basically abandoned me when I was young and he died when I was thirteen). I certainly wished that I had a strong tie to him or to his family to make my decision harder, but that’s not how my life worked out, and I had made peace with that. But as a young feminist, I determined that if I was going to be stuck with a man’s name—either my father’s or my future husband’s—I’d go with the man who was making a conscious choice to be in my life. I’d forgiven my father for the way he self-destructed—he had a lot of demons—but I had no qualms about replacing his last name with the last name of a man who was making a conscious and public choice to love me forever.

I was mildly concerned about my name as it was attached to my career as a writer. At the time that I was changing my URL, I had just finished turning my college blog into a book and I had an agent who was shopping a proposal around to publishers. If I sold the book, I figured, okay, I’d keep my name. I also figured that having a new husband and a book deal in the near future was literally the best problem I could ever imagine having, so I didn’t dwell on it.

So I bought the URL and started my new blog. And what happened next is honestly a little ridiculous.

The same friend who encouraged me to make my name my URL also decided to introduce me to her friend Eric, who lived in Houston. As a blogger and frequenter of Match.com, I found nothing weird about meeting people on the internet, so I was fine with it. I emailed him. He emailed me right back. There was flattery. There were the right pop culture references. There was the right amount of exclamation points (not too few, not too many) and he didn’t use “lol” as punctuation like the last guy I had dated. I emailed back. Then I couldn’t stand it and I just IMed him. “What are you doing?” I said. “Oh nothing, just reading an email from my future wife,” he said. Which would have been cheesy or creepy (or both) if it weren’t actually true.

So after that first IM, changing my URL became an issue way sooner than I expected thanks to two little things that were completely out of my control: love and Google. Continue reading Changing Your Name in the Age of Google

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Wedding Undergraduates | 113 Comments »