Ex-Good Wife Adventures by Laura Montoya

I had a severe mental breakdown last Tuesday after learning that my romantic interest—the most fictional, imagined, and fleeting of them all—had started a relationship with a fantastic woman. I found out he had a girlfriend in the middle of a brownie party, dressed in leather and holding a helium balloon. So, I approached him and asked him why the hell he’d ghosted me. He’d started a relationship with the Italian diva after categorically rejecting the idea of us ever having a serious relationship. “I’m not ready for a serious relationship at this point in my life,” he’d repeatedly told me during our dates-not-dates, only to find him again two months later in a seemingly very committed romantic venture with the curly-haired European beauty. I don’t blame him; she’s wonderful, and I wish them the best, sincerely, bitterly, but sincerely.

But beyond the characters in this temporary teenage story in my 35s, I remember realizing that day that I wasn’t going to blame anyone but myself. It was my fault again, for being naive, for being infatuated so fast, for waiting for a man to see me and appreciate me. So, I sank into the depths of guilt and the “why me, God?” Why me? (Insert here tears, mucus, babas, and a scream, with your imagination) The male God looked at me, smirking, and asked, “Do I know you?” But seriously, why can’t any man take me seriously? I asked God why I wasn’t attractive enough for someone to risk everything for me.

Then I jumped to Instagram looking for affirmation. I needed responses from coaches all over the continent to reassure me in Spanish and English that it wasn’t my fault; it was his loss for not choosing my spectacular beauty and charisma, and that ghosting me was an immature response from a 40-year-old hot man. No Instagram coach said that, but I ended up finding several videos about decentering men and romantic relationships in women’s lives. You are free to laugh at me, but that idea had never occurred to me. I had never posed the question: what could happen to my tropical sexy self if I stopped pouring all my energy into finding a life male partner? Why was I so obsessed with marriage, or at least having a man next to me in the morning who could say, “You look so beautiful,” despite having a bird’s nest for hair and dragon breath?

Then, I remembered that my colonized Colombian society and my very Christian Pentecostal family had trained me for years to become a wife. Not to mention the influence of Disney, Mexican telenovelas, U.S. romcoms, and passionate Britney Spears songs that still spin in my head during random meetings at work: “My loneliness is killing me, aaand I, I must confess, I still believe, when I am not with you I lose my mind, give me a sign, hit me, baby one more time.” And that “baby” could be anybody as long as I could become a wife.

All my efforts during my childhood and teenage years were aimed at becoming some man’s best friend, girlfriend, or eternal love. I wanted to be the chosen one. And I was chosen. I was married for almost nine years to a good Pentecostal man, and despite years of embodied experience learning that marriage might not produce happiness in the same way buying a lottery ticket does not immediately make you rich, I was still committed to the active hunting of a man and the dilapidation of my PhD stipend by buying lottery tickets.

So, it was time for me to listen carefully to the empowered women of Instagram that asserted that maybe marriage is not such a beneficial institution for heterosexual women after all.

I also had to start believing the wise work of Latin American feminist and queer theologians I had read for years. Yes, I am like a preacher who preaches and never practices. Mexican feminist liberation theologian Maria Pilar Aquino, points to the Latin American misguided conceptions of women’s roles as being “naturally” mothers and wives, therefore the primary caregivers of the household. Aquino states that since the industrialization period in Latin America by the beginning of the 20th century, there was a clear division between the private and public spheres of society.  Women gained access to paid jobs in the public sphere but remained in charge of the domestic private realm, still confined to the wife and mother roles while trying to contribute to the household finances. Aquino defines this situation as women’s “double workload” which only expanded unequal distribution of power between men and women.

Feminist liberation theologies see in the double workload a clear source of oppression for women in Latin America, but that oppression has been historically ignored and theologically normalized by traditional Christian patriarchal systems. Civil achievements like women’s right to vote or access to education did not change the structural oppression that remains to this day in Latin America. In fact, it increased the number of situations of exploitation. 

In a similar vein, Florence Thomas, a French-Colombian feminist, journalist, and writer, has followed the stories of Colombian women for the last four decades. Thomas asserts that women’s daily caring of their households, what she calls “the economy of caring,” should be acknowledged as a primary economic activity in Colombia.  Thomas argues that all the activities that patriarchy expects women to do daily and considers trivial and minor are, in fact, activities that sustain life. Those activities include caring about food and flavors, warm/cold and clean places, clothing, children’s education, and dealing with health/illness in the family. Thomas states:

“It (the economy of caring) is the daily care of bodies and objects. It centers its attention on wellbeing, not from a trade-marketing perspective but from the affection, solidarity, and concern to sustain life (…) issues ignored and undervalued by many economists.”

Florence Thomas, Nosotras, las mujeres (Bogotá: Editorial Desde Abajo, 2020), 45.

Thomas insists that the Colombian economy of caring sustains the country’s market since “labor” in a country must be represented by the sum of paid work and unpaid work. Women’s unpaid work represents 29% of the national gross domestic product.  According to Thomas, Colombian women’s domestic unpaid work, their role as wives and mothers, is taken for granted. At the same time, their participation in the job market is expected to increase amid Latin America’s capitalist dynamics.

Finally, I cannot ignore the decades of Pentecostal preaching that used the image of “a virtuous woman” in Proverbs 31:10 to train us in the “privilege” of being well-behaved and submissive; “fragile,” they would say; “teachable,” they would claim. I was taught all my life that I had to cultivate the values of a noble wife so a man could “find me.” Laugh at me again, or hug me, because that’s the story of my women ancestors, my mom, aunts, and myself. We committed our lives to our husbands while watching most of our personal dreams and ambitions go down the drain. Since being a wife was so important and basically the only option for them, solitude, and independence looked impossible and emotionally unbearable. Somehow, we internalized the economy of caring as our duty, and we attached our financial and emotional well-being to a man’s presence. Being a wife, a “chosen one,” was inherited: my family and social honor.

So, I tried to be the “good wife,” but I burned out and got a divorce. I am the first divorced woman in my family. I was tired of managing the household after 12-hour shifts at work. I wanted to become a PhD student, so I pursued that dream while the “dream” of being a wife became more and more confusing. However, as my post-divorce fictional affair with this guy in Atlanta ended, I noticed that the task of becoming a chosen-one virtuous woman is one that is hard to exorcise. It is an embodied impulse, an unconscious running program in the back of my head to prove my value as a person in this world. Now that the “decenter men and romantic relationships” is a recent discovery for me and that heterosexual marriage looks like a very inconvenient location for my personal dreams, I wonder what other futures await me if I invest all my energy in dreams that do not have to go down the drain because I have to hold the title of wife. Can this FAR post have a second part that answers that question? Is that something you, dear reader, would like to find out with me?