Pick Me, Pick Me, Please Pick Me

I want to start with this. If you have ever chosen the unhurried version of your life, the one with a home you actually enjoy keeping, and a man you actually enjoy choosing, and a flicker of shame still showed up anyway, sit with me for a minute.

Somewhere along the way, wanting an ordinary, tender life became something a woman has to defend.
A woman can love cooking for the person she is building something with. She can keep a beautiful home and put on the dress she knows he likes because she likes who she is when she does, with or without a man ever having suggested it first.

None of that makes her anyone’s project.
There is no prize waiting for the woman who pretends to hate romance, or domesticity, or men, to prove she is woke enough or modern enough to be taken seriously, and there is no committee that gets to decide her choice was made under duress just because it happens to look old-fashioned from the outside.

A label is only truly meaningful in a limited context: when a woman makes her personal taste a judgment on all women; when saying “this is what I like” becomes a call to choose her because she is superior to women with different preferences. This is a performance aimed at impressing others, disguised as a personal preference.

I have a friend named Renee who has a successful corporate career and openly shares her opinions about men. Online, her presence is unmistakable; she believes men don’t deserve her and finds them exhausting.

She expresses these thoughts as casually as others say good morning. In person, during lunch, she communicates the same views confidently, challenging anyone to disagree.

Then her boss calls, and something in her posture changes before she even answers the phone.
Lol, she straightens in her chair. Her voice climbs half an octave into something warm and eager to please. She says yes to a Sunday deadline she had complained about all week to anyone who would listen.

I have watched her do this enough times that I finally asked her, gently, why a woman who will not soften her voice for a man who actually wants her and provides for her softens it instantly for a man who signs off on her bonus and can get rid of her in seconds.

She didn’t really have an answer. That’s the part to reflect on. If the idea of not needing a man was ever the main principle, it shouldn’t disappear just because the man influencing her promotion now holds power. She was still in the audition process, but she had just picked a judge she found easier to admit she wanted to impress.

Both Renee and the woman on the other side of this, the one whose calling is a spotless kitchen and a well-timed dinner, deserve better than mockery.
Both of them get accused of the same thing by different crowds. One gets called desperate for wanting a career badly enough to please a boss.

The other gets called desperate for wanting a marriage badly enough to please a man. Neither accusation is really about what she wants. It is about who is doing the judging that day.

Renee is not unusual, either. Scroll through enough profiles, and you will find the same split running underneath a lot of them, a woman who is fluent and fearless online, fully certain of every position she takes, and then noticeably smaller in the rooms where an actual decision gets made about her career or her rent or her future.

The version of her who argues with strangers all afternoon is not exactly lying. She has just learned that one version of herself gets applause and the other one gets promoted, and she has decided, without ever saying so out loud, which reward she is willing to give up.

That division forms early and isn’t usually deceptive at first. It often begins as a form of protection. Somewhere along the line, you adopt an opinion that isn’t truly yours, whether feminist, feminine, ambitious, or easygoing, because the environment around you rewards it.

The alternative is facing ridicule from those whose approval you seek. After years of this, it ceases to seem like a costume and starts to feel like part of your personality. However, when you’re challenged and asked to prove it, you realize how much of it was merely supporting structure and not authentic.

Because none of this is really about one boss or one husband or boyfriend. We audition for our jobs, performing whichever version of competent gets rewarded that quarter, agreeable in the meeting where agreeable gets you noticed, sharp in the one where sharp does.

We audition for our families, playing whatever role got assigned to us before we were old enough to choose it, the responsible one, the easy one, the one who never causes trouble at dinner and pays for it later in ways nobody at that table ever has to see.

We audition for our own parents and siblings, competing for a kind of approval that was supposed to be unconditional in the first place, comparing report cards and job titles and whose life looks more finished from the outside. Somewhere in the middle of all that performing, it gets hard to remember which opinions were ever actually yours to begin with.

None of this needs to result in a conflict between two types of women. The traditionalist and the feminist are not natural foes, despite what the algorithm repeatedly claims.

Both have grown tired of being told what a woman should desire, and they responded to this fatigue in their own ways: one by creating a home on her own terms, the other by pursuing a career on her own terms.

They could easily recognize each other in the same room within thirty seconds if they weren’t first convinced that only one could be the winner.

Here is the test I would actually trust, and it has nothing to do with which label you claim, traditional or modern, feminist or feminine, ambitious or content.

1. Would you make the exact same choice if no one was ever going to find out?

2. Would you still keep the dress on with the lights off and no one watching?

3. Would you still take the promotion if it never appeared inanyone’s feed?

If the answer changes depending on who is looking, you already know whose approval you were actually chasing.

I stopped auditioning for the version of myself that photographs well from either camp, the effortlessly chill woman, the fiercely independent one, the endlessly accommodating one.

I make the decision that matches what I actually believe, based on what I have watched play out, again and again, in my own life and in the lives of women I love, not on which version of me a given room seems to prefer that day.

Some days that decision looks traditional. Some days it looks nothing like it. It is mine either way, and I am the one who lives with whatever comes of it, which strikes me as the only honest arrangement there is.

That last part is the whole point, and it is the part most auditions never mention. Nobody in the crowd carries the outcome of your choice home with you. The people who mocked Renee’s boardroom voice will not be there when she decides whether the promotion was worth the cost in weekends.

The people who mocked the traditional woman for choosing a small, tender life will not be there on the ordinary Tuesday when that life is exactly what gets her through it. You are the only one who has to live inside whatever you pick, which means you are also the only one whose vote on it should have ever counted.

A feminine woman does not need a side to belong to. She needs a reason for her own choices that would still hold up even if nobody clapped for it.
You don’t need a panel’s approval to be genuine.

The traditional woman and the boss babe aren’t rivals; they are simply women who grew tired of seeking permission, wherever it led.

Stop auditioning for the role that was never worth the price of constantly trying to fit into it.

Be the calm one this week, because you have actually earned it.

With love,

Elma.