I Would Rather Not Be a Good Woman

I’m writing this because every damn person around me is either getting married, already married, or planning to get married. And at some point, I probably will too. But watching all of this up close has been… something. There are patterns and conversations that are honestly cracking me up sometimes, making me scratch my head at other times, and occasionally making me want to pull my hair out in sheer frustration.

One thing that stands out immediately is how uncomfortable people get when women speak. The moment a woman expresses what she wants, what she expects, or what she is not okay with, the reaction is almost predictable. She is called too practical, too calculative, someone who is “turning marriage into a business.” As if wanting clarity and fairness somehow cancels out love.

This framing is not accidental. It actively delegitimises the idea of fairness by suggesting that love must be silent, selfless, and unquestioning. It assumes that one person’s sacrifice is natural, while the other’s comfort is simply how things are meant to be. For generations, domestic labour performed by women has been treated exactly like that. Cooking, cleaning, caregiving, all absorbed into the idea of duty rather than recognised as work. Because it is unpaid, it is also undervalued. And because it is undervalued, it creates a system where one person’s contribution is visible and acknowledged, while the other’s remains constant yet invisible.

This is also why the present moment feels like friction. Women are no longer willing to quietly carry both worlds. Many are working full-time jobs while also being expected to take complete responsibility for the household. This “double burden” is not new, it is just being questioned more openly now. And the response to that questioning is often not reflection, but moral policing. The idea of the “good woman,” endlessly adjusting and accommodating, still sits firmly in place.

A large part of the issue is that emotional and domestic labour continues to go unrecognised. Many men are simply not socialised to notice these forms of effort, which means they are also not conditioned to participate in them instinctively. So what should ideally be understood becomes something that has to be explained. And not just once. Women often find themselves repeating, rephrasing, and justifying the same needs in different ways, using different language, just to be taken seriously.

At the same time, there is a clear resistance to change. The system, as it exists, is comfortable for those who benefit from it. Many men have grown up in households where everything at home was taken care of for them. Replicating that structure allows them to continue receiving that care without actively contributing to it. Changing this would mean effort. It would mean participation. It would mean giving up a level of ease that has always been available to them. So the resistance is not always loud or explicit, but it is very much there.

This resistance is often justified by glorifying the past. The struggles of mothers and grandmothers are held up as ideals, as proof of strength, as benchmarks of what women should be. What gets conveniently ignored is that many of them did not have the same choices. Endurance is romanticised, while the lack of agency behind it is overlooked. At the same time, men who do try to change, who attempt to share responsibilities or understand their partners better, are often mocked or labelled as performative or weak. So not only is the old system protected, but any effort to move away from it is discouraged.

And then there is the way this imbalance is repackaged and sold back to women as empowerment. The idea of the “superwoman” who does it all, manages a career, runs a household, shows up for everyone, and never complains, is celebrated without questioning the cost. What looks like strength on the surface is often just exhaustion being normalised. Many women end up living in a loop, constantly working, constantly managing, with little rest, little recognition, and often no real sense of pause. Not even acknowledgment from the people who benefit the most from their effort.

What sustains this is not ignorance, but conditioning. From a very young age, many women are taught, directly or indirectly, that love is something to be earned. That care, service, and sacrifice are what make them worthy of it. That being accommodating, giving, and selfless is what secures affection and approval. So even when the system is unfair, stepping out of it feels uncomfortable. Because it is not just about changing behaviour, it is about unlearning the idea that you have to continuously prove your worth to deserve love.

What also sustains this imbalance is a quiet alignment of incentives. Those who benefit from the system often find ways to justify it, normalise it, or simply not question it deeply enough. At the same time, those who are disadvantaged by it are not always encouraged to recognise it early. Many women are conditioned to prioritise adjustment over assertion, to maintain harmony over questioning fairness. By the time the imbalance becomes visible, it is often already deeply embedded in everyday life. This is not about intelligence. It is about what people are taught to see, what they are rewarded for, and what they are discouraged from challenging.

This resistance is further reinforced by the tendency to validate past norms without interrogating their fairness. Many continue to defend the roles their mothers and fathers lived by, presenting them as cultural ideals rather than examining the inequalities embedded within them. There is comfort in familiarity, in believing that what one has grown up seeing must be right. But normalcy is not the same as equity. Respecting previous generations does not require replicating the limitations they lived within.

Then come the oversimplified explanations. I recently came across the idea that South Indian women are more open or liberal because rice is pre-cooked, allowing everyone to sit and eat together, while in North India, women remain in the kitchen making fresh chapatis, creating a power imbalance. It sounds interesting for a second, but it falls apart just as quickly. Food habits may influence small routines, but they do not define agency. Larger factors like education, economic independence, social reform, and family structures shape these dynamics far more deeply. Reducing inequality to what’s on the plate is not analysis, it is distraction.

Even education, which is often seen as the solution, does not fully solve this. You can be educated and still hold deeply regressive views. I was reminded of this recently while overhearing women casually judging and shaming another woman for what she was wearing. It was a stark reminder that internalised norms run deep. Education can inform, but it does not automatically transform.

The idea that women are inherently weaker has never really been about biology. It has been built over time through unequal access to resources, rigid roles, and social structures that limited women’s autonomy while presenting those limitations as natural. Over generations, these patterns settled in so deeply that they started to feel like the default.

What we are seeing now is not a breakdown of relationships or values. It is a renegotiation of them. Women asking for clarity, for fairness, for shared responsibility are not disrupting marriage. They are questioning why it was structured unequally to begin with.

And maybe that is where the real discomfort lies. Not in the fact that women are asking for too much, but in the realisation that they were always expected to give too much without ever calling it out.

© Kashish Saxena