The Unspoken Aspect of Privilege in Traditional Gender Roles

Are we as women holding more privilege than we realise?

Since stepping away from a long term committed relationship a couple of years ago, for the first time I really started to pay attention to the relationships the people around me were having. I wanted to better understand what went wrong in my own and what I could change in the future to build a strong, balanced connection that would fulfil both sides and last. I noticed a few things that surprised me, and the one that challenged my thinking the most was on the subject of privilege.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m going to jump on the man-bashing, down with the patriarchy bandwagon but I’ll leave that for another time.

No, I started to wonder at the unspoken idea that even though women rightly expect more agency and equality in their relationships and rebel against traditional gender stereotypes, large amounts of us still have an expectation that we will be ‘taken care of’ financially and that the freedom to choose what we do with our time is our right.

We want our partners to invest time and energy in doing the work to heal past traumas, to learn new ways of communicating and move past outdated ways of thinking, but is there a balance of time to achieve that?

In relationships without children, and for same sex couples I would imagine that there would be more focus on each other and greater awareness and understanding of the other’s needs, but it seems as women begin to find themselves drawn to the spirituality movement and begin embracing practices that allow them to unravel their own programming and trauma responses, there is a level of importance that it placed on the self which dips into a sense of privilege.

I’ve started to wonder if the element of privilege that as women we most need to look at and evaluate our role in, is the idea in gender roles that equality only goes so far. Do we take the time in our relationships to step outside the norm, or the habits we wake up to one day and realise we have fallen into without conscious thought? And by those, I mean the expectation that there will be one breadwinner rather than two who find ways of sharing that role. Or the expectation that if one person in the relationship has been fulfilling that role, they should continue to do so without questioning if there is anything else they would like to do with their life.

All too often we fall into careers and get boxed in by the needs of a growing family and mortgages, but we all started with aspiration and ambitions, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if those embers are still burning?

Over the last two years I’ve developed a practice with my children and for myself in which each quarter as the season changes, we make the time to look at what is working for us and what we’d like to change. As a home educating mom, that could be changing a class, changing something in our environment like needing the blackout blinds to go up as the sunlight gets stronger and earlier, or perhaps realising there is a different direction they want to head in.

For myself, it’s a seasonal check-in with what makes me happy. Am I surrounding myself with the right people? Am I still pursuing the same goals? Life often blows us off course and sometimes that brings unaffected jewels, but it can also need a quick realignment.

It is easy to become complacent and for years to go by without ever really asking yourself if you are the happiest you could be. The daily grind of life takes over and we forget to ask, do I really like this town, this house, this partner, this life. We forget that the ties that bind us to people and places are ones which we tie ourselves, and we can untie them whenever we like. We often think about writing a letter to our younger selves, but what about the version of you who existed as little as two years ago and the life she imagined, are you on course?

People grow and change we all know that, but when do you take the time to ‘re-meet’ your partner?

Do you allow them and yourself the space to be who you are today rather than the person they loved years ago?

Making space in your relationships to accept each other for who we are today instead of an idea that has been built up over time, gives you the opportunity to be together out of genuine want, rather than need or the holding to a promise a different version of you made in the past.

Maybe that is in itself another form of privilege, another way we hold expectations unjustly and fail to realise the benefit we gain from keeping those beliefs in place… this there some truth to the idea that once you ‘have’ someone you no longer need to try?

Privilege in relationships undoubtedly has many layers, I just wonder if sometimes we stick to the biggest and loudest topics so that we don’t have to explore the uncomfortable layers underneath.

This piece was written in response to the Modern Women May prompt on the topic of privilege, let’s start a conversation in comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts and if the muse is calling take a look at the questions for this month and get writing!

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