Maybe it's not romantic love, but just boredom.
Maybe it's not that we're in love with love, but that we need strong emotions.
Maybe we're not falling in love with men, but with how they enjoy life.
Why do we get bored?
Because all our basic needs are met. If we had to spend the day searching for food, clean water, shelter, warm clothing, then we wouldn't have time to get bored, nor would we be invaded by existential emptiness.
We get bored because our day-to-day consists of producing, reproducing, and consuming: it's a cycle of routines where it's hard for us to find meaning in life.
We get bored because our lives are monotonous and with very little change, which is why we enjoy watching the crazy lives of celebrities through screens: parties, dinners, dances, travels, romances, weddings, baptisms, divorces, inheritances, family feuds...
We love novels and movies where characters are constantly facing death, risking their lives, passionately loving, living on the edge, and transforming throughout the journey.
We're hungry for emotions and change: we feel like robots and dream of an intense life because we're numbed, hibernating on the couch, living everything through a screen, especially during this year of pandemic: our family, social, sexual, and romantic relationships have been minimized. So have our horizons: being within four walls leads us to yearn for something magical to happen that completely changes our lives.
Women who feel bored
Boredom is political: patriarchy wants all of us bored, entertained with beauty, and obsessed with romantic love.
The more bored we are, the emptier our lives become, and the more dependent we are.
The more dependent, the more vulnerable we are to romantic addiction, and therefore, the more submissive we are and the more obedient to patriarchy's mandates.
To understand why women get so bored, take a look at the toys girls play with. Everything is pink: they've taken away all the other colors of the rainbow, our world is small and monochromatic, revolving around money and beauty, romantic love, and motherhood.
Girls as young as six already know that boys are the geniuses,
and within a couple more years, they realize that their greatest passion should be the love of one of them.
Women fall in love with men who are in love with life and know how to enjoy it.
It's possible that we might not even fall in love with them truly, but with their freedom, their energy, their ability to savor life, to have fun, to learn, to meet new people, to carry out their projects, and pursue their dreams.
Perhaps we don't need a man to escape boredom: maybe what we need is to find pleasure in things other than romantic partnerships and the ideal family.
Men's Passions
Men cultivate their passions and find pleasure in countless areas of life: music, art, sports, knowledge and science, technology, spirituality and religion, magic, culture, politics, and economics...
The great geniuses of Human History are men who were obsessed with what fascinated them, men who forgot about the world while composing music, painting pictures, sculpting, writing novels, searching for fossils, climbing mountains, diving into the depths of the sea, flying in contraptions, researching exciting topics, advocating for human and animal rights, forming unions or political parties, exploring the boundaries of nature, discovering new stars and planets...
Meanwhile, we have few examples of passionate women. The only women we see in movies and novels are women obsessed with a man, and who are miserable if the man mistreats them or ignores them. They are always alone and bored, have no emotional bonds with other women, and if they do interact with others, it's to make them suffer.
Women Who Suffer for Love
They don't let us enjoy life because they tell us that we were born to suffer, to give ourselves up, to sacrifice, to endure, and to give up everything for the love of a man.
Most girls are educated to dedicate their time and energy to looking beautiful with the ultimate goal of being chosen by a man as a wife.
Girls who don't fit into this role quickly realize that their passions are not "girly things": patriarchy makes us believe that "normal" women enjoy shopping, reading fashion magazines, and spending afternoons at the beauty salon.
This is the feminine model they offer us: egocentric and narcissistic women who spend all day looking at themselves and taking care of their beauty, their only treasure. Their only goal is to be loved.
That's how the Disney princesses we idolize in childhood are portrayed. They live alone and waiting, locked up and bored, sighing and combing their golden hair a thousand times until the most important moment of their lives arrives: when the prince comes to rescue them.
How are we educated for boredom and suffering?
Firstly, we are taught that pleasure is for men: for us, it is considered sinful.
Secondly, we are made to believe that one must sacrifice to find happiness, and that one must give up oneself to enter the realm of romantic paradise.
Thirdly, we are taught that happiness is individual, when in reality it is collective: we cannot be happy if those around us suffer, and if we do not all have the same rights.
How are our passions extinguished? They inject us from a young age with the Great Passion of Romantic Love, which flourishes and grows inside us, becoming the center of our lives and overpowering all other passions.
They make us addicted to romantic love, which is why when asked, we do not know what gives us pleasure, and we do not know what makes us happy. For some women, it takes years of therapy to discover what they truly need to live well.
We are educated to worry and occupy ourselves only with our physical appearance, promising us that love will come to us through beauty.
This is how they manage to focus women on themselves and their great romantic passion, and not worry about the rest of the world.
They make us believe:
- that we have come into this world to be beautiful, to love, and to care for others.
- that love always comes first.
- that it's normal for us to give up our affections, our projects, and our hobbies when we enter into a partnership.
- that nothing we do matters.
- that we must dedicate our time to superficial things that are of no importance to society.
- that women who pursue what truly interests them must pay a high price: they end up alone.
- that women who have succeeded in doing "men's things" are unfeminine, lonely women, odd women that no man desires as a wife.
- that if you deviate from the norm, you will end up alone, and no one will want you - this is a constant threat.
- that men do not want women engrossed in their own dreams, but rather engrossed in them.
- that men want women who are good wives and good mothers.
What models of femininity are offered to us?
We barely know about the women activists who fight for human rights, nor do we have role models of women who care about their community and their planet.
Women who struggle to survive each day amidst the exploitation, poverty, and violence of patriarchy, and women who are building a better world, remain invisible.
What do the famous women in our culture do? Generally, they sing, dance, act, pose, fall in love, get married, have children, and get divorced. They are role models for the girls who idolize them.
Dreaming Women
When we are asked what we desire, what gives us pleasure, many times we don't know if these are our own desires or ones we have learned.
When we see women who haven't made romantic love the center of their lives, that's when we realize that maybe our dreams aren't really ours. They've been manufactured to make us believe that happiness lies in the love of a man and in motherly love.
We invest tons of time, energy, and resources into these dreams, shaping our lives around them.
Our dreams enslave us because in them, the most important thing is a man. Without them, we cannot be happy. Our emotions depend on a single man, and they change according to his behavior.
Not just our emotions, but also our self-esteem and life projects depend on relationships with men.
What happens when we are without a partner, or when we don't find a partner?
Our life loses its meaning, and we are terrified of the emptiness. We don't know why we're alive or what to do with our existence. We feel incomplete because we've been told a thousand times that we are halves, and without the other half, we are nothing, we are nobody.
Rebellious Women
Feminism advocates for the right of all women to pleasure, enjoyment, and living a good life.
That's why we want to educate girls to be autonomous, to not become addicted to romantic love, to learn to enjoy life just like boys, to feel equally free as them, to unite with each other, and to find the meaning of life in their dreams, passions, and networks of affection, rather than in a single person.
Feminist women are working within ourselves to better understand who we are, to connect with ourselves, to discover our own passions, and to find spaces and time for our own pleasure.
And we know it's important because patriarchy wants us to be sufferers, embittered, and frustrated.
We also know that life is more than just work, caregiving, and consumption: we have the right to have fun, to immerse ourselves in other worlds, to share our passions with other women, and to celebrate that we are alive.
That's why we are working to demystify the ideal of the couple and the happy family, to remove men from the center of our lives, and to place ourselves there instead.
We have so much love within us, and we don't have to waste it on just one person. We have an enormous capacity to love many people at once, to enjoy life, and to bring joy to others as well.
So if they want us to be bored or in love,
they will find us passionate, joyful, and in rebellion,
because life is too short!
Coral Herrera Gómez
Artículo original: Igual no es amor, es aburrimiento