u/No_Honeydew201

A lot of us grew up with marriage framed as the natural conclusion of love: you fall for someone, you get married, happily ever after. That's not where marriage came from.

For most of recorded history, marriage functioned primarily as an economic and political transaction. Families used marriage to consolidate property, form alliances, secure inheritance lines, and transfer women between households, often with little to no input from the woman herself. Love had nothing to do with the arrangement; it was a business contract with a ceremony attached.

The legal concept of coverture made this explicit. Under English common law, a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's the moment she married. She had no independent legal existence. An unmarried woman could own property and make contracts; a married woman lost that the second she said "I do." This wasn't a fringe rule. It was the legal foundation of marriage across the Western world for centuries.

Coverture and laws like it were eventually dismantled, mostly by the late 1800s and early 1900s in the US and UK. But the legal end of coverture didn't end the cultural work that had been done in its name. Generations of women had been raised to see marriage as the natural goal, the proof of a life going right, the thing you organize your entire identity around. That messaging didn't disappear when the laws changed. It got rebranded as romance.

Once marriage stopped being enforced by law, it had to be enforced by desire instead. Women needed to want it, not just be forced into it. So the culture shifted: fairy tales, bridal magazines, "happily ever after," the idea that an unmarried woman is incomplete or hasn't been chosen. That's not organic. That's patriarchal messaging doing the same job coverture used to do, just through romance instead of law.

And it's important to say clearly: this shift only happened in some places. In many countries, women still don't have a legal choice about marriage at all. Forced marriage and child marriage remain widespread realities today, not historical footnotes. An estimated 22 million people were living in a forced marriage worldwide as of 2021, and roughly 650 million women alive today were married before the age of 18. The "romantic choice" framing common in the West is itself a privilege most women in the world have never had.

So the pattern looks like this: control by law, then control by culture, then in much of the world, still control by law. Different mechanisms, same outcome. Marriage has never fully belonged to women as a free choice; it's been managed, one way or another, for most of its history.

Sources:

• Coverture, Wikipedia
• Understanding Forced and Child Marriage, Walk Free

This is honestly one of the biggest things I value about being single. I don’t want sex to become an expectation attached to being someone’s girlfriend or wife. The idea that women are expected to maintain a certain level of sexual availability just because they’re in a relationship with a man really bothers me.

I want my sexuality to remain mine. If I want sex, I want it because I actually want it. Not because someone feels entitled to it, not because it’s been a certain number of days, and not because I’m someone’s partner and therefore supposedly owe them sexual access.

Some of you might be aware, but I frequently post about the sexual coercion (and rape) that many women face in relationships with men in particular. I implore you to PLEASE read the comments on this TikTok incase you ever question the benefit of being a SINGLE WOMAN BY CHOICE!

The freedom to say no without having to manage someone else’s disappointment, resentment, or sense of entitlement is so so so so liberating.

We’re raised from birth to want this. It’s in the movies, it’s in religious texts, it’s everywhere. Marrying a man is framed as the correct choice, the thing you’re supposed to dream about: the perfect romantic partner who sweeps you off your feet, who’s emotionally attuned, who gets you. Then women get married and slowly realize the romance was a performance. It was never real. It’s an act men put on to get access to sex and free labor, and once the ring’s on, the act ends.

The man from the movies suddenly can’t see the mess in front of him. He regresses into someone who needs to be told what to do, task by task. The “natural leader” turns out to just be weaponizing incompetence. The sweet, romantic guy starts acting like he’s entitled to your body, and you’re no longer allowed to say no to sex without it becoming an issue.

It’s the same thing with motherhood. Ask a mom how it’s going and you get “it’s hard but I wouldn’t trade it for the world” or “I love my kids more than anything.” What you don’t hear is “if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it.” They can’t say that. If enough mothers admitted the truth, fewer women would choose to have kids, and that would mean the ones who already did made the wrong call. So they lie and make it look like it was worth it, like it’s everything they wanted, because if they didn’t, they’d have to sit with the fact that they gave up their life for something they didn’t fully choose, while everyone else got to opt out.

Married women need other women to want this too. They need envy. Because if nobody envies them, it means they’re having sex they don’t want several times a week for no real reason. It means they’re coming home from work to clean up after a grown man and wash his skid marked underwear, also for no reason. So when single women ask what marriage is like, married women lie, the same way they lie about motherhood, so they’re not the only ones doing it. So it doesn’t feel like they signed up for unpaid labor for nothing.

Credit to: “@fashionablydivorced” on TikTok

Just kind of ranting here.

For some reason, watching this video and reading the comments shook me to my core. For a while now, I’ve known that marriage is essentially sexual slavery for most women in heterosexual relationships with men, but the comments legitimately made me so sad. Why is this so “normalized”? I’ve seen other TikToks where women make jokes about having to have sex with their husbands as their “last chore on their to-do list” for the day. The other day, a woman posted a #relatable 🤪 TikTok, and it was her making a joke about how her husband wakes her up OUT OF HER SLEEP to have sex??? And ALL of the comments were just women making jokes about how relatable it was??? HELLO?? I couldn’t believe what I was reading in the comments.

Like I said, I’ve known marriage was sexual slavery for a while now, because when I was younger, my mother essentially told me that it was super common and even expected for women to have sex with their husbands, even when they don’t want to! It made me look at my father so differently. 😔 It also makes me look at all married women differently as well. Whenever I look at a married woman, all I can think is that she’s likely, at some point, being pressured into having sex with her husband, and this is normal? Apparently everyone knows this, and this is just how marriage is!! I just can’t believe this. Why do mothers encourage daughters to get married when they apparently know this is the case? Like some sort of scheme?

Another thing that disturbs me is that so many men are having “sex” with their wives when they both know the other party doesn’t want to do it! “Duty sex,” as they call it. How can you live with yourself knowing your wife is only participating in the act because she’s afraid of you? The fact that she’s not having sex with you because she truly desires you, but because she’s otherwise been pressured into it?! I know this is a tangent/rant, but I just can’t believe so many women live like this!! Ugh. I will never ever get married.