Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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a relationship. By being involved with men who were already taken, Katie resolved her conflict and ensured that she did not become like her mother.
In addition to being personal, Katie’s splits also followed cultural and social norms. Women (and men) in contemporary U.S. society are generally offered two choices: be relational, dependent, passive, privately oriented, and feminine, or be autonomous, powerful, assertive, publicly focused, and masculine.11 To succeed at being a relationship- and career-oriented woman is quite an individual accomplishment, one for which society does not give women much help or guidance.
The split between career and relationships felt natural to Katie—it is difficult to be successful at both. In Katie’s chosen career, academia, women who achieve tenure are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be single twelve years after earning their PhDs. And women who are married when they begin their faculty careers are much more likely than men in the same position to divorce or separate from their spouses.12 Katie accepted that these social realities would naturally translate into deeply felt personal conflicts. But in fact these personal conflicts were not inevitable—many of the women I spoke with also felt conflicted about their commitments to relationships and career, but not all of them did.
As a feminist sociologist and a woman striving to develop both a career and a relationship myself, I understand the power of splitting at a cultural level. I have seen countless women deny the significance of their personal relationships in the workplace, not wanting to ruin their chances for career advancement—one colleague deliberately didn’t mention her daughter in a job interview out of fear that being a mother would make her seem less serious and committed.13 And we see women regularly downplay their professional and financial successes in order not to threaten potential male partners: the New York Times published a front-page article on successful young women in New York who date less successful young men. The women often deliberately obfuscate their financial and professional success in order not to scare men away.14 Katie was not alone in thinking that career success might come at the expense of a relationship, and vice versa. These cultural splits can powerfully affect a woman’s ability to even acknowledge, much less to feel, the full range of her desires.
So what would it mean for Katie to have identified the personal split between relationship and career as central to her dilemma? And why was it difficult for her to identify it? It challenged her identity as a strong and independent woman—one who locates these conflicts outside, in the culture, but who has trouble locating these conflicts within herself. If these splits were held in our personal selves, perhaps we would have complicated feelings about both relationships and careers. Perhaps part of us sometimes wants to run wild with our desire for a relationship, putting all of ourselves into it even while we fear such abandon. On other days, throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our careers, which may feel so much more within our control than messy relationships, can seem both appealing and scary. These may have been frightening desires for Katie to acknowledge—frightening because they threatened her identity as a modern woman.
CHAPTER THREE
The Bad Girl
Jayanthi
One of the apparent advantages of being a bad girl is that it’s supposed to be fun. Being a bad girl may be a bad deal in other respects—it gains a woman social condemnation and ostracism, and leads to others’ assumptions of limitless availability for sex; the list goes on. But at least it should be fun. There can be pleasure in defying others’ expectations, breaking the rules, and upsetting tradition. And there can be pleasure in having no messy emotional consequences, no attachments, no settling down, and no guilt about sex. There is also appeal in the drama and excitement of having crazy stories to tell and creating a history for oneself, especially if one’s history previously has been defined by others’ expectations of what a woman should be and do.
However, I found that the real-life experience of being the bad girl was often not so much fun. Instead, this approach sometimes left the women I studied feeling unhappy and numb. Particularly for women with fragile senses of self, the bad-girl strategy seemed to provide a strong identity. At the same time, it ostensibly protected women from losing track of their identities in a relationship by never investing in one emotionally. But rather than feeling strong and protected, some bad girls were left feeling alone and vulnerable.
Jayanthi, a twenty-nine-year-old second-generation Indian American woman born in 1974, spent her early twenties rebelling against her upper-middle-class, traditional but moderately religious Hindu family, doing everything she could to be “bad” in their eyes.1 Jayanthi spent years casually hooking up with men, and she enjoyed some of it, but often felt “played” and used by them. She would then retreat from men and sex and be a “goody-goody girl” who toyed with her parents’ offers of an arranged marriage. But eventually she’d swing back to being bad.
Having lots of sex felt like both a way to rebel against her parents and a way to assert her sense of herself as a strong woman. But while the sex helped Jayanthi to define herself in opposition to a stereotypical good girl, she didn’t get much pleasure or a solid sense of herself out of it. She felt more confused than ever about whether she was good or bad, Indian or American. And even as she eventually figured some things out about how to have an orgasm, Jayanthi confided anxiously that she worried about losing herself in relationships with men. She imagined that in a relationship, she’d get swept up into her partner’s world and lose track of her identity and things that mattered to her.
I heard this fear of losing track of their identities again and again from women in their twenties. Self-help books call out to them to “focus on yourself,” “make yourself happy,” and not to “lose yourself in a relationship.” But without a solid and reliable identity, these intonations rang hollow for women such as Jayanthi. This chapter explores why Jayanthi so feared that she would be subsumed in a relationship with a man. Why did a woman with such passionate interests of her own fear that she would lose track of herself and her desires in a relationship?
TENTATIVE IDENTITY
Jayanthi, a dancer and teacher who was tiny in stature, spoke very quickly and seemed to have boundless energy. Her enthusiasm for life, for dance, and for political causes was palpable, and she expressed strong opinions about the things in life that mattered to her. I was surprised, then, when Jayanthi confessed that she worried about being overwhelmed by a relationship, concerned that she’d quickly lose her own identity in the other person. It was difficult to square her fear of disappearing into someone else with the forceful personality before me. I came to learn that Jayanthi’s strength felt very tentative to her, and was not something that she could count on when faced with the prospect of close emotional and physical ties with a man.
Jayanthi’s early sexual experiences profoundly shaped her expectations of men and their trustworthiness. She had her first kiss and sexual experience in college at eighteen, and it was passionate and fun. They didn’t have intercourse, but experimented with almost everything else. It turned out, however, that Jayanthi had greater expectations of a relationship than the man did. She later felt the man had “played” her—he was dating other women, and she was disgusted and put off by that. In that first experience, she felt devastated and too emotionally involved. She vowed not to be played by a man again. So to avoid being either played or too involved, Jayanthi spent the next decade bouncing back and forth between being good and being bad. In both cases, she distanced herself from the men she was involved with, either physically or emotionally. While being a good girl, Jayanthi remained both physically and emotionally removed from men. And while being a bad girl, Jayanthi was physically close to but emotionally distant from men.
When employing the good-girl strategy, Jayanthi entertained her parents’ offers to find a suitable Indian partner for her. On a few occasions, she met men whose families her parents knew as a way to anchor herself amid the “craziness.” Or she would troll listings on Indian matchmaking websites, consoling herself that she might find some clarity and certainty about the entirety of her life if she had a secure partner who met her parents’ and community’s expectations of her. “When I got confused, I would freak out and feel, ‘I need to settle down. I need to find a partner, and I’m not seeing anybody now, so I better do it my parents’ way, through