Maybe you don’t want to have a partner or get married. I was also made to feel that I could not be an independent adult on my own as a single woman. I thought I was marrying the perfect choice of a person. Then he soon became a bad choice because I was miserable with him. But my mother still treated me like I was nothing without the husband, and kept telling me to stay in it. It made her feel good about herself because her daughter was married to this seemingly great man. I was groomed into doing what society and my mother wanted, pushed into it, kept in it once I was miserable. In my American society that way of thinking wasn’t even the way of all the people, not now, and not even then, decades ago. It was just my circle of influence and my controlling mother.

Now, I felt at the time that she was right, getting married was a good choice, and I happily did it. I was optimistic that I was going to be happy. It might have been great. But it wasn’t. It should have been alright to get divorced. But I got stuck in indecision because of all these mixed messages and influencers.

It comes down to, we need to figure out who we are, make our own choices listening to our hearts, and then be strong enough to advocate for ourselves to get out of bad situations and care for ourselves. No one else will really care for us sometimes, they have different agendas and we serve a purpose for them in that choice and our happiness is not necessarily important to them.