Imaginal Acts

Sometimes it comes from old patterns where love to you meant earning, proving, or holding everything together. So you start adjusting yourself your standards, your needs, your routines,trying to make the relationship work. But you don’t change someone into alignment, you choose someone who already is because that “ecosystem” isn’t a small detail. It’s your everyday life. It’s what you wake up to, how you feel in your own body around them

Centuries of documented, systematic, institutional abuse (emotional, physical, sexual, financial, legal) and we are supposed to feel guilty about a woman who figured out how to make the dynamic work in her favor for once. Absolutely not. The same systems that denied women the right to own property, to have bank accounts in their own names, to leave marriages without losing their children, to work without their husband’s permission, to press charges against the men who hurt them, to be believed when they spoke. These systems were built by men and maintained by men and benefited men for so long that the current generation of women is still navigating the residue of them in their daily lives. So when a woman uses what she has to extract resources, security, opportunity, or simply a more comfortable life, I genuinely cannot locate the moral problem. I have looked. It is not there.

I have very limited moral outrage left for women who manipulate, leverage relationships, marry strategically or otherwise use the systems available to them to secure wealth, status, comfort, or protection. Men built entire legal, financial and social systems around benefiting themselves and locking women out of stability, wealth, autonomy, credibility and safety and somehow I’m supposed to collapse in moral horror because a woman decided to secure the lifestyle she wanted through marriage, charm, strategy, proximity, whatever?

The Ocean by Seye Isikalu (2016)