I Can't Help But Feel We've Been Lied To

I've been sitting with this for a while, unsure whether to say it out loud.
Because it's complicated. And anything complicated about women, feminism, choice it gets flattened quickly into a take. And I don't have a take. I have a feeling I can't shake.

My generation was raised on the back of the sexual revolution. We were told we could have anything. That independence and family were both fully available to us, equally supported, equally valued. That we just had to want it badly enough and work hard enough and we could have the career and the children and the relationship and the identity and the body and the life.

I'm not sure that was true. And I think a lot of women my age feel that quietly, even if they don't say it.

We gained something real. I want to be clear about that. Economic independence. The right to a professional life. The ability to leave situations that previous generations of women were trapped in. These are not small things. I don't want to minimise them.

But something else happened at the same time, something that didn't get talked about as much.

The domestic became embarrassing. The desire to mother, to build something family-centred, to find meaning in that started to feel like something to apologise for. A woman without a career is still looked at with a particular kind of pity. Or suspicion. Like she's either failed or been manipulated into settling.

And yet no woman doesn't work. One works for her family. One employs other people to care for her family while she works somewhere else. The labour doesn't disappear. It just gets redistributed. And somewhere in that redistribution, something of its meaning gets lost too.

For the first time in history, more women over 30 in the developed world are single and childless than partnered with children.

I didn't make that up. That's where we are.

And the way this gets talked about mostly it's framed as progress. Women choosing freely. Unencumbered. Liberated from expectations.

I keep wondering if it's more complicated than that.

Because choice doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists inside the cost of housing. Inside the assumption that two incomes are now the baseline just to afford a basic life. Inside a culture that still expects women to carry most of the domestic and emotional labour even while working full time. Inside a healthcare system that has spent decades not taking women's hormonal and reproductive realities seriously.

When we strip all of that away and call the outcome freedom, I think we're skipping something important.

And then there's the tradwife thing.

I know. I know how it looks. I'm not endorsing it.
But I also don't think it means what most people say it means. I don't think the women drawn to it actually want 1950s submission. I think they're exhausted. I think they're reaching — and I mean reaching in a very biological, very physical, very hormonal sense — for something that feels like relief.

A simpler version of a life that has become almost impossible to navigate.

Our bodies haven't caught up with our cultural revolution. We still carry drives toward nurturance, toward cycles, toward the relational and the slow. When we spend decades suppressing or shaming those drives, they don't go away. They show up somewhere else. In burnout. In inflammation. In that low hum of something being profoundly off that a lot of women I know carry around and can't quite name.

This isn't a failure of feminism. I think it's a signal. And I think we're not listening to it very well.

Here's where this intersects with the work I do, because it does.

When I sit with women who are exhausted in ways they can't explain whose hormones are disrupted, whose nervous systems won't settle, whose bodies are inflamed, whose sleep is broken they almost never got there through bad luck or bad choices.

They got there through impossible demands, met faithfully, over a long time.

Chronic stress suppresses progesterone. Elevated cortisol drives inflammation. Emotional load that hasn't been processed lives in the body as physical symptom. This isn't abstract. This is physiology. The body doesn't lie, even when we do even when we tell ourselves we're fine, we can handle it, this is just what life is.

The body keeps score of what the culture refuses to acknowledge.

And I think part of what women are carrying right now is grief. Grief for the versions of their lives they set aside. Grief for the family-centred future they maybe wanted and felt they couldn't want, or couldn't ask for, or couldn't make work. Grief for a kind of slowness and rootedness that the modern world has made feel almost naive.

I don't have a neat conclusion here. I'm not arguing we go back to anything. I'm arguing we get honest.

Honest that what we're asking women to carry is extraordinary. Honest that the body will eventually respond to that load, and that the response looks like the very symptoms most women I work with walk in carrying. Honest that understanding why you're depleted not just logistically, but biologically and subconsciously is different from just pushing through or managing better or optimising harder.

Your body isn't broken. It's responding. Faithfully. Accurately.

The question is whether we're willing to listen to ourselves, and to what this cultural moment is trying to tell us.