The Myth of Marriage As Purpose: A Patriarchal Seduction
Patriarchal relationship ideals are predicated on roles of conditioned codependence as purpose and enabling narcissistic abuse cycles
Patriarchy employs seductive narratives and archetypes of romance to indoctrinate young girls from birth into a myth that purpose is found through marriage and partnership with men.
This seduction - stories of fairy tale romances with handsome, rugged men who secretly harbor a chivalrous heart of gold (if you dig deep enough) - are designed to entice women into willingly entering patriarchal marriage contracts. There is a reason why the story always ends with marriage and the mythical conclusion of they lived happily ever after.
The purpose of inundating girls and women with media and archetypes promoting marriage as their end goal, life purpose, and happily ever after is to seduce women into willingly sacrificing self to serve men’s needs and desires.
It is critical that women wake up to unlearn these myths now. The impending Trump Administration promises to enact Project 2025 policies to ban abortion nationally, reduce/eliminate access to hormonal birth control, and rescind No Fault divorce laws that enable women to leave abusive and unfulfilling marriages with dignity and privacy.
Our best response to the impending horrors of unrestrained patriarchal retribution and domination is for women to refuse to participate in marriage and union with men. Seriously - the best response and protection a woman can offer herself is investing in sovereignty, female friendships, and economic independence. And ignoring men across the board - 4B all the way.
The YT chat above discusses many of the points here in greater detail, and also some other ideas not specified in this article - check it out if you’d like!
The Codependent Myth of Hetero Romantic Standards
First, let’s recognize the most fundamental and problematic promise of the marriage myth. Partnership cannot provide individual purpose. That’s not what true love and partnership are capable of or designed to provide.
Healthy romantic love and partnership exists exclusively between two whole individuals who each possess an independent sense of passion, purpose, and direction that exists outside of the confines of the relationship. Passion, purpose, and direction are created through many means - careers, hobbies, communities, creative expressions, or athletic pursuits, etc.
It is the product and cultivation of a healthy relationship with self first where you choose to create and nourish activities, connections, and talents that spark joy and the fiery satisfaction of intentionally concentrating one’s efforts for the sake of experiencing that journey.
Friends, rivals, mentors, and lovers may join you on this journey, but ultimately the journey is about individual experience of choosing to invest in it. The joy of dedicating self to cultivating the process because it yields self satisfaction and accomplishment.
A healthy partnership supports, celebrates, and encourages this individuality of life outside of the relationship. Because true love and partnership never diminishes the wholeness and integrity of either person.
Within relationships, compromises are needed to benefit mutual goals and managing the allotment of time/material resources - but these are give and take understandings and commitments. Compromises should never function to snuff out the individuality and opportunity of one partner in favor of the other exclusively.
Patriarchal romantic standards function oppositely. These marriage dynamics and gendered social role expectations essentially promote conditioned codependency amongst women that enables narcissistic abuse amongst men.
Narcissism is the opposite of love - and men have no interest in understanding or caring for women, let alone developing the capacity to love as a practice.
Inundating women with messaging that she is not enough without a man, that she is going to be lonely and unhappy if she does not commit to marriage, and that her worth is judged on her ability to attract a man is all about conditioning women into insecure and codependent mindsets. This teaches women that living with a man who only narcissistically consumes from her is better than living independently.
That is a lie designed to enable patriarchal narcissistic abuse at scale.
Standards of patriarchal marriage are structurally designed to extract love, care, and the manufacturing of basic needs and life from women to benefit men. This alleviates men from the burden of knowledge and labor to meet basic needs and enables them to focus near exclusively on their individual purpose and prosperity.
Men are never expected to sacrifice golf time, let alone passion or career pursuits to contribute to the wellbeing and functioning of his household and marriage.
The reality is, most men only seek the material benefits of marriage to a woman - they are not seeking out real connection or love or partnership.
The male loneliness epidemic is largely driven by men who refuse the work of real connections that aren’t narcissistically manipulative and exploitative towards women.
They want to own and use women for their own benefit without meeting standards of contribution, care, emotional maturity, or non-transactional investment to benefit and support her existence as an individual with unique needs and desires.
This is why women’s rights and bodily autonomy are being legally stripped - to force women to comply with standards of narcissistic abuse under the pretense of love and union.
Narcissism is the opposite of love - and men have no interest in understanding or caring for women, let alone developing the capacity to love as a practice.
Marriage is the Contract of Women Becoming Male Owned Machines
As I always say, patriarchy is the system of male private for profit ownership of women as their means of production. Literally through creating life via pregnancy and childrearing, but also as the sole infrastructure for producing basic needs for men to consume without participation, compensation, or reciprocity.
Marriage is integral to enforcing and perpetuating this system where men depend on women as the machinery of their lives - performing all knowledge and labor related to meeting basic needs.
Basic Responsibilities of Wife Machines:
Pregnancy and childbirth while being denied access to abortion healthcare and facing criminal liability for miscarriages
Create and maintain a safe, aesthetically pleasing, well organized, clean home
Plan healthy meals, acquire groceries, cook, clean up from meals every day
Laundry for all household members
Clothes for family members - proactively manage who needs what clothes and ensure always clean, ready, and prepared ahead of time
All knowledge and labor related to children’s development - medical needs, educational needs and support, extra curricular, emotional support, social development, and all research, scheduling, and accommodations required for execution
All preparation and execution related to cultural observances and social/family gatherings - ex. all planning, coordination, decoration, food prep, shopping, and wrapping related to Christmas
Managing all household organizational needs - finances, efforts to save money through couponing, researching more economic options, DIY efforts to reduce purchasing, ensuring paperwork related to needs (like car insurance or registration) is proactively cared for and accessible when needed
Managing husband’s relationships - ensuring he calls his mother on her birthday, performing the effort to maintain and nourish the family’s social ties to communities
Being the emotional support and strategist in assisting husband navigate his life and career
Satisfying physical expectations of husband
That is the basic overview of what men expect to consume from their wives - day in and day out. This offsetting of mental, emotional, physical and material labor is what enables men to receive and consume a life worth living from women.
This is the foundation of the culture of male narcissism - the entitlement and expectation to consume all of this effort, expertise, and care without meeting any standards of care, contribution or knowledge themselves.
Protection is Independence
Women cannot inspire, cajole, reason with, or convince men to want to evolve past their own encultured narcissism. The only answer is to reject men until they experience enough sustained, direct consequences to want to evolve themselves.
I don’t have a lot of hope for that - their culture of narcissism encourages men to scapegoat women as the source of their misery 11 out of 10 times. Regardless, I advocate every women to remain single and deny men access to their energy, care, and investments.
Center self. Get that money. Hang out with girlfriends. Learn new skills or hobbies. Do not marry men.
Project 2025 is going to ensure it is impossible for women to leave marriages to ensure men materially benefit from women without needing to uphold any standards of integrity, contribution, care, or participation.
Men are incentivized to perform partnership and lie about their true political expectations for a wife until after he’s convinced a woman to legally bind herself. At that point, the mask will fall and it will be too late for a woman to escape.
Men are just too dangerous. 54% of men voted for Trump and many understand that they cannot acknowledge that when seeking to date women - and they have no problem lying to manipulate access to you and your body.
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Yes, there are good men - but they are so rare. The culture of male narcissism is powerful and few men are willingly to do the work to decenter their immediate fears and desires to develop the basic life and social skills necessary to be an adequate partner.
I know the violence they’ve been threatening already is insane. Your body, my choice disgusts me. But we do not negotiate with terrorists. And it’s not women’s responsibility to engage with these violent, narcissistic men so society doesn’t have to.
Now is not the time to trust men - it’s too expensive to make the wrong bet and learn once his mask falls. It’s not too harsh to reject men across the board - it’s in your own best interest of self preservation as a woman.
We do not negotiate with terrorists
I’ve been on the 4B lifestyle for over 2 years now - I didn’t begin with 4B intentions, but I’m maintaining it. I needed to decenter men to heal wounded parts of myself that I was seeking to avoid and escape through codependent centering of men. I tell you - I am so grateful to myself for walking that path, however challenging it was at the start.
I felt a lot of grief and isolation initially. It was all worth it - now, my life is more peaceful, exciting, creative, and fulfilling than I ever thought possible. And I made by myself for myself. I could never settle for narcissistic man now - but before, I thought that was the prize.
Now, I know building a life that I am genuinely excited to live and feel fulfilled by is the prize. It’s not always a picnic, but it is always more satisfying and peaceful than my old life - no doubt about that.
Personally, I’m signing up for self defense classes and embarking on a training journey. I’m doing so to develop the confidence that I can fight to overcome potential freeze or fawn responses if a man ever seeks to make good of his online threats.
I hear them when they threaten violence and I believe them. So I’m starting my preparation to fight back because my life is more valuable than being some man’s machine. And I’ll fight for it.
If they’re setting up a system where SA is likely to lead to forced pregnancy and jailtime for abortions, I’m know which jail sentence I’d prefer to incur. At least then I’d be preventing that man from the ability to harm another woman on this Earth.
Thanks for reading! New long chats up today on YouTube Coco_Has_Ideas
I’m on TikTok at CocoHasIdeas
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