I had quite an experience today. Nobody told me that women were not allowed to have strong opinions and even if they did, they should under no circumstances express them. Do you know what society calls a woman with strong opinions? "Frustrated", "Troublesome". Such a woman is definitely from a troubled background or she has a troubled past. And you guessed right, that troubled past has to be man-related.
And such was my case today, when two well meaning male friends of mine tried to convince me, much to my confusion that there was something definitely wrong with me. The Genesis of this discussion? A tale told by another friend of ours; of how a woman stabbed her husband because she caught him cheating. And yours truly, without even hesitating asked a sincere question; why should a woman place so much value on a man, so much so that his attitude pushes her to such extremes? Why make him so important to you, that you loose yourself when he falls from the pedestal that you have placed him? In other words, why make your partner your source of identity?
You guessed right, I committed a taboo, an abomination. My really nice male friends went into theories and postulated several hypothesis for my uncommon attitude. They pointed at my family background, I said I had a beautiful childhood. Then they talked about my personal life. Of course like most human beings who have lived as long as I have, I have had my ups and downs; my fair share of disappointments. But I haven't attempted to kill anyone yet. I have just learned from my experiences and moved on.
The next statement I heard was, "you need to step out into the real world". And my question is, what...is the real world? I think that deciphering the "real world" might require a PhD. So I am just going to stick to talking about my world, my real world.
In my world, relationships are real and sincere. There is such a thing called trust. You can rely on your partner. There is partnership and each one strives for the betterment of the other. When mistakes are made, there is forgiveness. We might be partners but we are still two individuals and each is entitled to his/her opinion. In my world, everyone is heard and you are not judged for it. It is fine to be opinionated. We also listen to each other. We do not get our sense of identity from each other, that will be too much to demand from any human being. Our sense of identity is in Christ. Unfaithfulness does not exist because we are in Christ.
This and much more is my real world and it's pretty real to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment