i came across a youtube video that claimed it could tell you if you were into women, based on an online quiz. the buzzfeed personality types. my first thought was that it’s probably made for fun. being the curious human i am, i started watching it and realised it was pretty serious.
been consuming work by the lgbtq+ community recently and even though i may not agree with all of it, i’m genuinely mindblown at how much they’ve unlearned societal conditioning. the questions they ask are usually thoughts that never occur to me since i’ve internalised it as ‘thats how things are supposed to be.’
i am a twenty year old woman living with my parents in india, and i want to be upfront about something before i go any further. i know exactly how a piece like this could land with the people around me, my family, the people i work with, and i thought about that for a long time before deciding to write this anyway. it is so funny that even privately turning this over in my head, just thinking about it, felt risky. if simply questioning how i learned to love someone feels dangerous, that alone tells you something about how deep this conditioning actually runs.
disclaimer : i am not telling you that what i am about to say is the one correct way to see romantic relationships, and i am not telling you to distrust every man who has ever loved you or to blow up your life over a youtube video. what i am telling you is that somewhere in that video, underneath all the questions, was a thread that had nothing to do with sexuality at all. it was about how we define romantic love in the first place. and once i noticed it, i questioned every single romantic interaction i thought i’ve had.
here we go
a lot us women have learned to eroticize being picked, pursued, desired, being provided for, being cared for, being safe with someone as we’ve grown up. is it wrong? not really. any human would want that regardless of gender, right?
apparently, no.
the first part of the assessment asked the following questions :
did your last partner want you first, after they showed initial interest? was the idea of them wanting you more pleasurable than actually being with them? does the potential of the relationship and the life it’ll provide you in the future excite you more than the current reality of it? do you like what they do for you and how they make you feel about yourself or do you actually like them for who they are? have you ever romantically tolerated a guy even though you weren’t attracted to them? do your feelings feel like a choice rather than natural instinct? do you think more about practical benefits than emotional fulfillment? do you find it easy to end relationships with men that no longer serve you? during breakups, was your pain more about rejection or abandonment than losing that specific man?
nobody sits down your disney princess movie watching ass and explicitly tells you that you’re being trained to seek a provider that’ll automatically elevate your life. over the years, marriage starts to feel like a personal desire instead of what it actually is, a survival strategy. i’m not against marriage, if anything i’d love to marry, have kids, my own little family BUT only if i’m marrying for the right reasons. (reasons i believe are right)
think about why you were told to study hard. think about why financial independence got drilled into you specifically as a woman, more than it ever seemed to for the men around you. underneath the language of empowerment is a much older and much quieter instruction. do not end up dependent on the wrong man. get the degree so you are never trapped. build the career so you always have an exit. become capable so you are never at someone else’s mercy. why is this advice specifically for women?
this advice has genuinely protected a lot of women. but notice the shape of it, it is precaution. it’s not for active construction of a life you want. it is a defense mechanism, an armor built against a bad marriage rather than a life built for its own sake. even our ambition, for so many of us, was never fully our own. always some kinf of contingency planning for men we had not met yet.
life changes when you realise the rules are made up.
the next time you feel that unmistakable pull toward someone, before you call it love, before you start picturing an entire life around it, ask yourself one honest question, with nobody watching your answer.
do you want him, or do you want to be wanted by him?
you cannot actually choose someone until you know which one it is. and you cannot unlearn what you were taught about love without first admitting that you were taught it at all.
if the answer unsettles you, i promise it’s not selfish or evil to be desired, but it’s not true to yourself either. it’s not shameful to want somebody on your own, it’s not embarrassing to have romantic or sexual desires from your end first. that is the conditioning you’re supposed to have. the part of you that wants to look away from that question is usually the part that was trained the hardest.
you meet someone, something clicks, and from there it is just feeling your way through it, guided by instinct, guided by your heart. that’s love. right?
right????
that is the story i was handed, and for a long time i never once thought to ask who wrote it or why. because it was so natural right? it was just an automatic process that just happened to you. ‘smitten’ we call it.
surprise surprise, turns out love is a structure. it has an architecture, built long before any of us were born, and we have been living inside it our whole lives.
i want to walk you through what i mean, slowly, because it took me a while to sit with it myself, and some of it made me genuinely angry once i understood it.
there is a whole body of feminist thought, going back decades, that argues romantic love is not some pure, transcendent thing floating above society. it is a tool. a very effective one, built to keep a certain arrangement in place. they argue romance is a social institution.
shulamith firestone called romantic love the pivot of women’s oppression. her argument, stripped down, is this. love convinces women to enter relationships and arrangements that mostly benefit the other person, and it does this so effectively that women experience the arrangement as their own deepest desire rather than something they were steered into. all the caregiving, the domestic work, the emotional labor of holding a household and a family together, gets quietly folded into “that’s just what love looks like,” instead of being named for what it actually is, which is unpaid, uncounted work.
none of this works without stories. myths, specifically, about what love is supposed to look like, fed to us from childhood through fairytales, films, books, and eventually every reel and show we consumed as teenagers. here are some of the biggest ones, the ones researchers have actually studied and named.
look closely, girls taught to endure, boys taught that controlling is caring. it is not a coincidence that this exact combination shows up as a major factor in teenage and adult relationship violence.
unlearning does not mean giving up on love
none of this is me telling you love is fake or that you should distrust every person who has ever cared about you. that is not the point, and it was never the point.
the point is unlearning the specific, narrow, often damaging version of love we were handed, and replacing it with something more honest. some researchers who study people unlearning traditional relationship scripts, including people exploring non monogamy, found a useful pattern in how that unlearning actually happens. you do not need to adopt any of these structures yourself for the underlying shifts to be worth thinking about.
there is research on women who have consciously pushed back against all of this, not in some dramatic, burn it all down way, but in quieter, more deliberate everyday choices. a few of them stuck with me.
choosing to be single on purpose, not as a waiting room before the “real” relationship starts, but as a full, complete way to live.
building a wider circle of people you are close to, instead of funneling all your emotional needs into one romantic partner and calling that intimacy.
putting real energy into friendships, community, and things bigger than yourself, instead of treating a partner as the only acceptable container for love.
still wanting romance, still wanting the butterflies and the softness of it, but being honest and clear about what you will and will not accept inside it.
and maybe the most human one of all. accepting that you can know all of this, understand it fully, and still feel the old pull sometimes. still want to be chosen. still crave being picked. unlearning a lifetime of conditioning is not a clean, straight line. it is messy, it doubles back on itself, and giving yourself grace for that is part of the process too, not a failure of it.
again, this isn’t an argument against men, marriage or love. it’s an argument against never questioning what was fed to you as obvious. love is not measured by the feeling of being chosen. the spark is probably just dopamine hits from validation, uncertainty, and finally being worth through someone else’s eyes. specially in indian families where you’re taught from a young age that certain characteristics will make you more desirable for ‘the one’ you marry.
with acceptance & evolution,
Nush <3
thinking about all the mistakes i might not have made if i’d read this a decade ago. could’ve learned through you instead of the hard way.
Finally, someone actually wrote about this 😭