Our first lessons in love often come in the form of examples, passed down by those who raised us. We asked three writers to explore this concept for the essay series, The Love Lessons I Inherited (That I’m Still Unlearning). Here, writer Chanté Joseph looks back the women who raised her.
Most of the women in my family were single when I was growing up. Aunts, godmothers, cousins – even my grandmother. These were women who made it work; shipped their children off to their respective fathers’ homes on their weekends and had full lives. They were part of their local churches; they had niche interests. My own mother, a fashion addict and expert gamer, could clock levels on Super Mario in minutes that I’d spend hours battling.
The women in my family made sure we never lacked anything; we’d spend Christmas at my aunt’s house with her children. No boys allowed! We took family holidays together and, on Fridays after work and school, my cousins and I made music videos on the iMac while our mothers gossiped, smoked cigarettes and drank wine by the kitchen window. My aunt’s deep, boisterous laugh and my mother’s high-pitched cackle, followed by her exasperated “Oh my God” as she caught her breath between laughing, imbued the house with joy.
Beyond racing to say “That’s my husband!” first when Morris Chestnut came onscreen during The Best Man, the women in my family barely spoke about their romantic desires. This complicated my own relationship with romance a lot. Men were faraway things to be desired in jest and any sort of earnest yearning felt shameful. I was never explicitly told this was a bad thing, but the absence of real conversation around them made it difficult to explore my own wanting. I had convinced myself I was defective, and it would be a cold day in hell before I described myself as a “lover girl”. Looking back, I’m surprised my therapist didn’t laugh me out of the room when I asked her what therapeutic tools would rid me of my desire for romantic relationships.
I felt exhausted at the performance of romance because I did not know how to carry the weight of my own longing. Any time a romantic situation went awry, I blamed myself for giving in to my childish desires and questioned why the love I already had – one that had been proven to me by the women in my life, time and again – wasn’t enough. The excuse that I could not and should not want a relationship skewed how I viewed connection entirely.
I am still learning how to manage these conflicting desires – ones that come partly from my upbringing and are also a repercussion of our social conditioning. In this modern world, women no longer require a male partner to get by in this world. It’s a world that was presented to me as a given growing up.
I’m also learning that the desires of my mothers and aunts are not as flat as I assumed. I had kept them boxed in my memory as the epitome of ‘independent women’, stripping them of their humanity to punish myself for being human. Now, I realise, we’re all working things out. I just have to discover what works for me.
This article is part of On Connection, Service95’s special issue in partnership with Bumble. Discover all the stories here.
