Psychology Today | 15.07.2026 22:06
Linda was getting married for the second time at age 52. She was remarrying because her to-be-husband’s tax situation was better than her own. This sounded like she should not want to. I asked if she was also excited about marrying Jon; her answer was “not really.” Marriage, as a concept, was something she rejected; she wasn’t one of those trad-wives who drank the Kool-Aid and fell for the cultural narrative. Marriage, she explained, had been created not for love but as an economic arrangement when women were dependent on men and couldn’t work or get an education. The church had romanticized marriage as something sentimental, which the patriarchy was now deliberately using as a form of power and control—to hold women hostage.
