Don’t Worry Darling…Love Is Supposed to Hurt (If You’re a Woman)

How women have been taught to lie to themselves…and why we must learn to tell the truth

(Spoiler alert: Don’t Worry Darling)

Imagine attending a dinner party and meeting an attractive young couple who can’t seem to stop laughing and touching one another. You can see by the rings on their fingers that they’re married. Their behavior seems like evidence of their love for and attraction to one another.

And your assumptions are proven correct when another dinner party guest, a friend of the couple, jokes that the two seem to be experiencing a perpetual honeymoon.

How would you describe them? Married: he, her husband, she, his wife. In a relationship. In love. Happy, and all that that implies.

Then you find out the story is not so simple as it first appeared. This dinner party that you attended took place in a utopian community — one in which the women are kept against their will. They have been restrained, brainwashed into submission, until they become the perfect, doting housewives.

How would you describe things now? They might be married on paper, but would you call this a marriage? Would you describe him as her husband…or her abuser? Her captor? Are they passionate about one another, perpetual newlyweds? Or is every sexual encounter they’re having actually rape?

You might flinch at that. We’re not supposed to talk about such things out loud. We’ve collectively agreed that a man and woman with rings on their fingers are experiencing “wedded bliss.” Or, at worst, he’s valiantly making his way forward while tied to the unnecessary and unwanted baggage of a wife (the old ball and chain) and family.

But the real story — the story that is most likely to unfold in heterosexual relationships forged in an oppressive patriarchy — is one we aren’t supposed to tell.

I have recently chosen to stop calling all the men with whom I’ve been entangled “ex-boyfriends” or “ex-lovers.” In fact, I find it hard to believe I ever did.

Boyfriends might break your heart someday, but they aren’t supposed to break you. Lovers seek pleasure, both to give and receive — they don’t experience pleasure from the act of hurting others.

So you see, I cannot use either of these words to describe most of my exes. In fact, I struggle to even use the term “ex.” What was between us that, at some point ended? Doesn’t there have to be a “something” in order for someone to be an ex?

If you think that’s splitting hairs, consider the example we just explored above. You might recognize it as the plot of Don’t Worry Darling. Or…you know…a familiar experience, figuratively speaking, that most women seem to have had in heterosexual relationships.

Did it matter to you that underneath the surface of that pretty marriage was a woman who had been forced to participate in it? Did it matter that all the sex she seemed to be happily enjoying was happening within the context of circumstances to which she had not consented?

Sadly, I suspect many (largely from one particular demographic) won’t see a problem with this.

But for the rest of us, we understand that accuracy is a critical component of accountability.

The terms “husband” and “boyfriend” are like diplomatic immunity. You can do anything under those labels and get away with it.

Which is why women cannot afford to keep using those terms when abuse and exploitation have occurred.

We’ve been brainwashed. We are not much different than Don’t Worry Darling’s Alice.

Telling accurate stories about our past relationships is the least of our problems. We’re struggling just to de-romanticize abuse.

We’re brainwashed to believe that having a man — a husband, a boyfriend — is the only way to obtain worth. The circumstances of having a man are irrelevant. He’s emotionally disengaged? So what? He shows little to no affection for you? Oh well. He doesn’t participate in the partnership in any meaningful way outside the bedroom? You’re so lucky to be having sex with a man, at all! He actively abuses you? Are you sure?

What woman is capable of telling her story accurately when she’s been taught that the only thing that really matters about her is her man?

I felt the pain of this so acutely as Don’t Worry Darling reached the end, the final scenes when Alice is running across the desert in an attempt to save her own life, and suddenly, she pauses. She is overcome with the memory of her husband Jack’s embrace, momentarily intoxicated by how good it had once felt.

She’s still in love with the man, which makes it even more apparent just how brainwashed she has been. We know by that point in the movie that Alice used to be a surgeon. She was a successful, skilled professional with a life of her own before her greasy-haired, unemployed husband dragged her, without her consent, into his fantasy world, where he was the one everyone admired.

Yes, she loved Jack 2.0, the successful 1950s husband who couldn’t wait to come home each night to ravish both her and the brisket she’d so perfectly cooked.

But that version of Jack did not actually exist. It was an illusion. The best version of himself.

And Jack’s best version of himself couldn’t exist without Alice being stripped of her talent, her skill, her desires, and her autonomy.

Small price to pay, though. Isn’t that what they told us?

Alice loved her husband. She loved him even though he literally kept her in restraints and subjected her to brainwashing.

I know so many women can relate to this, metaphorically speaking (and sometimes literally), which is heartbreaking to say.

Until I was in my forties, everything that happened to me in romantic relationships was acceptable to me. Or, at the very least, tolerable. Even physical abuse.

It scares me how extreme the brainwashing is. How much I was taught to endure. And not only that, but that enduring abuse (while pretending it was not abuse) made me a good person. A good woman.

It scares me how much I was socialized to love men unconditionally. To make up excuses for abusive behavior. To prioritize love and forgiveness above all else — even my own safety.

This is why I have always referred to my exes as ex-boyfriends.

But they are not ex-boyfriends. Today, I have come to think of most of them as hunters or fishermen, after the characters in old fairy tales who stole precious objects from the women they found enchanting. This is a far more accurate descriptor than “ex-boyfriend.” Unlike “ex-boyfriend,” it holds them accountable for their acts of exploitation and abuse.

The more that I explore these relationships and take a closer look at each one, individually, and the more I define each man in ways specific to his behavior, the more clearheaded I feel. In fact, I find that I keenly relate to Alice, as she begins to experience flashes of memory that remind her of who she really is.

Alice was not someone’s wife in a marriage between two people who just grew apart. Alice, like most of the women in Don’t Worry Darling, was the victim of abuse and exploitation. Jack does not deserve to be described as her husband, or even her ex-husband. He was her abuser.

Too many of us have a history littered with “hunters,” predators, abusers — perhaps more “Xs” than “exes.” Yet we are taught to call them “ex-boyfriends” and “ex-husbands,” labels that let these men off the hook and perpetuate our propensity to paper over the inherent dangers women face in heterosexual relationships.

If we want to escape this virtual reality, we have to confront it. We have to stop pretending that heterosexual relationships are a utopia for those who participate. We have to stop calling the men who hurt us our “husbands,” a tricky Band-aid of a word that often tries to conceal the wounds it creates.

Our stories have been stolen from us and retold from men’s perspectives, for men’s advancement, for such a long time now. And we were brainwashed into participating in the retelling.

But like Alice, we are waking up. We are no longer willing to smile and have dinner ready by five, pretending like nothing is wrong.

There’s only one way to save ourselves — and heterosexual relationships, for that matter. We have to start telling the truth.

© Yael Wolfe 2023

Yael Wolfe is a writer, artist, and photographer. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com. If you love her writing, leave her a tip over at Ko-fi.

Check out more on truth and accurate language by Demeter V Delune and Ali Hall here and here (respectively).

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