But Beyonce Has a Man...

Question: Tell me what you think about me
I buy my own diamonds and I buy my own rings
Only ring your cell-y when I'm feelin lonely
When it's all over please get up and leave
Question: Tell me how you feel about this
Try to control me boy you get dismissed
Pay my own fun, oh and I pay my own bills
Always 50/50 in relationships-Independent Women by Destiny's Child

Those are lyrics from a record breaking song by Destiny's Child. A song that my grandmother and probably yours would have cringed at when she heard it. Not because she didn't agree but before the late 60's women just didn't voice this type of opinion. It was a good song and I even kind of danced along to it. Besides everyone knows about my undying love for one Beyonce Giselle Knowles. But I digress. I think the attitudes that get songs like this made have really been a massive disservice to women.

It(the attitude not the song) causes a conflict in women's minds and hearts. Especially young women. With the feminist movement at it's peak in the 70's young girls were taught that they didn't need a man for anything. Women are strong and they can do whatever they want to do. Great. There's only one problem and I'll explain it using Beyonce and her backup singers again. They also had a very big hit by the name of Bills Bills Bills . In the song they ask over and over if a man can pay their bills and if they can't then they need to get lost because the next man will.

The problem here is that no matter how much you try to program little girls to not depend on a man it is a woman's nature to want to be taken care of and to have her man to lean on. Bottom line. I know it sounds sexist coming from a man but sometimes the truth hurts.

There are women all across this nation who leave their husbands and kids in a pursuit of this independent happiness while some single women get sick on their stomach at the thought of being married and giving up their freedom and yet both groups end up in the same space looking for love and wondering where their life has went. A woman who is afraid to give up their independence ultimately ends up realizing when they are in their mid thirties that they still live like they did when they were 18.

For when a woman postpones marriage and motherhood, she does not end up thinking about love less as she gets older but more and more, sometimes to the point of obsession. Why am I still alone? she wonders. Why can’t I find someone? What is wrong with me? Her friends who have married are getting on with their lives – they are putting down payments on cars and homes; babies are arriving. She may not like some of their marriages – she may think her best friend’s husband is a bit of a jerk or that another one of her friends has changed for the worse since her marriage – but nonetheless, she will think that at least their lives are going forward while her gearshift remains stuck in neutral. The more time that passes, the more the gearshift rattles, the more preoccupied the woman becomes with herself and all her possible shortcomings in the eyes of men until she can think about little else.

The pull between the desire to love and be loved and the desire to be free is an old, fierce one. If the error our grandmothers made was to have surrendered too much of themselves for others, this was perhaps better than not being prepared to surrender anything at all. The fear of losing oneself can, in the end, simply become an excuse for not giving any of oneself away. Generations of women may have had no choice but to commit themselves to marriage early and then to feel imprisoned by their lifelong domesticity. So many of our generation have decided to put it off until it is too late, not foreseeing that lifelong independence can be its own kind of prison, too.