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CHAPTER TWO

The New Taboo

Katie

An increasing number of twenty-something women face a new taboo, and it’s not about sex or money or power. Instead, it’s a taboo about that traditional province of women: relationships.¹ No longer is a romantic relationship the holy grail for college-educated women. Their mothers may have concerned themselves with such old-fashioned matters, but times have changed. Instead, relationships are often perceived as threatening educational attainment, career development, and personal growth. These women feel comfortable having and expressing sexual desire—that’s not the problem. The problem is relationships that threaten to impinge upon personal and professional development.

Katie, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student born in 1978, with dark brown hair and bright green eyes, had a physical presence that made her seem taller than she was, and an intense gaze that she frequently turned on me when looking for help with her dilemmas.² She had known since high school that she wanted to be a chemist, but spent a few years after college working in labs and traveling, making sure she chose the right graduate school. Smart and accomplished, Katie landed a spot in a top graduate program. She seemed to have made all the right choices to position herself for a great career.

And the freedom that Katie felt and exhibited in her sexual development would appear to have set her up for a satisfying sex life. From a young age, Katie had felt free to explore her body—masturbating comfortably as a child and then letting her sexual curiosity and desires lead her to experimenting with various sexual practices and partners in her teens and college years. Old taboos and shame about female sexual desire seemed to have no place in Katie’s experience.

But shortly into our conversations, Katie confided that she worried that her single-minded pursuit of a PhD might limit her ability to meet a man with whom she could build a life. Being stuck in a small college town for five to six years while earning a degree felt severely restrictive to Katie. This realization—that she might want to prioritize a relationship over her career—felt shocking to Katie, and she did not admit to it easily. In fact, she felt deeply ashamed by such thoughts, worried that they signaled weakness and dependence, qualities she did not admire. To put such a high premium on relationships was frightening to Katie. She worried that it meant she wasn’t liberated and was still constrained by traditional expectations of women. Why should she, a young and highly educated woman in the twenty-first century, value relationships with men so highly?

I have heard Katie’s dilemma echoed by countless women in their twenties. They, like Katie, feel a taboo on being too relationship-oriented in their twenties. Parents warn, “Do you really want to settle down so early? We just don’t want to see you miss out on any opportunities.” Friends intone, “How will you know what you like and want if you don’t play the field? You’re only young once. Now’s the time to explore.”

This taboo is a new kind of cultural pressure, unfamiliar to women of earlier generations. Katie’s mother faced very different demands: to marry and have children early, to be sure to find a man who would support her financially. But Katie’s mom, like many women of her generation, lost out in the marriage bargain. She divorced Katie’s father soon after Katie was born because of his extramarital affairs, and thus she was cheated out of the assurances of protection that marriage had offered.

According to her mom, Katie had it made—she had a promising career ahead of her, she hadn’t abandoned her own ambitions for a partner or children, and a relationship would come easily once she was ready for it. But Katie lacked confidence about her own life decisions. She felt much more uncertain about both her career and relationships than she liked to admit. And, like other women of her generation, she deeply feared that she wouldn’t be able to have both a career and a relationship.

Katie, like many of the young women with whom I spoke, still struggled with having a relationship and a professional identity at the same time. Despite all the cultural advances we’ve made over the last century, it is still difficult to reconcile these two paths. In fact, the notion of “having it all” propagated by second-wave feminists seems like a pipe dream of yesteryear to young women such as Katie. This chapter explores why Katie feared that she couldn’t have both professional success and a relationship. Why would a professionally accomplished and ambitious woman feel so threatened by the idea of wanting a relationship?

FREEDOM AND NEW TABOOS

While Katie had unprecedented freedoms in her educational opportunities, career options, sexual experiences, and relationship patterns, she did not feel quite as free as we might imagine. Katie could, ostensibly, have had whatever kind of relationship she wanted, and whenever she wanted it. But as with many experiences of increased choices, new social and psychological constraints have arisen in response to them: don’t focus too much on relationships, don’t settle down too soon, put your energy into developing yourself, commitment comes at the expense of your own development, and so forth.³ These edicts didn’t feel like freedom to Katie once she became interested in pursuing a relationship.

Earlier, when she had been focused on sexual and personal exploration during college and for a few years afterward, these injunctions did not feel so much like taboos, and in fact facilitated Katie’s pursuit of what she wanted. She could enjoy her sexual freedom and explore sexual experiences with men and women. And she could do this all without feeling as though she were compromising either her academic and professional development or her chances of developing a relationship in the future. She could pursue her academic ambitions unfettered by the emotional and time commitments of a relationship.⁴ And she didn’t fear any derogatory sexual labels that would mark her as “nonrelationship material” in the future.

But in her midtwenties, Katie found herself in a bind. She professed to want a relationship in which she could develop emotional intimacy and so explore herself and her sexuality more deeply. But she felt the influence of the social and psychological taboo of being relationship focused, and she worried about the potential loss of independence and her focus on her career. As she grew older and wanted more emotional contact with a sexual partner, but also wanted to advance her career, Katie was in a terrible dilemma.

We see this age-old conflict between relationships and careers played out on television shows such as Mad Men, in which one of the ambitious female characters, Midge Daniels, the bohemian art illustrator who had an affair with Don Draper in season 1, insists on having only affairs and not relationships so that she can stay free. For Midge, this seems the only solution open to her, given the restrictions of marriage in the 1960s. She’s reconciled herself to not having it all. It is striking, then, that in the new millennium Katie resolved the dilemma similarly: by having long-term affairs with men who already had girlfriends. This way, she enjoyed some emotional involvement in an ongoing sexual relationship, but there was no threat to her ambition and career because the relationship couldn’t go anywhere. At the time that I spoke with her, however, this did not feel like a solution to Katie, and instead was the problem she most desperately wanted to solve.

Katie’s solution to the dilemma of wanting an emotionally intimate sexual relationship at the same time that she wanted a career, although a particular manifestation of Katie’s individual psychology and history, also came precisely from the freedoms that Katie’s mother so envied.

SEXUAL FREEDOM

If having it all seemed elusive to Katie, then her sexual freedom would leave her feminist foremothers profoundly pleased. Rather than being consigned to “lie back and think of England,” Katie felt free to explore her body and its pleasures without shame and to be sexually experimental with men and women. And unlike the limited freedoms advocated by the sexual revolution, which often privileged men’s desires for unfettered access to women over women’s prerogative to follow their own desires, Katie felt free to let her own sexual desires be her guide.

Unlike many young girls, Katie seemed to feel that her body really belonged to her and to no one else. She began masturbating when she was eleven, and figured out how to climax from masturbation a few years later. An early vivid memory involved sitting on the floor of her bedroom, leaning against her bed with no clothes on and looking at her reflection in her pet snake’s aquarium. She felt curious about her body and sex and puzzled by how it all worked.

Although Katie felt her own desires strongly and clearly and was curious about sex, she felt generally unrecognized as a sexual being in high school. As an average-size white girl who judged herself to be “overweight and with small breasts,” she felt desexualized by most boys around her, not someone anyone would pay attention to or whose body would interest boys. These experiences and insecurities left Katie in the curious position of knowing her sexual desires but being unconvinced that her body could arouse the same level of desire in others.

These insecurities make it all the more remarkable that in high school, Katie developed an impressive capacity, rare in teenage girls—as documented in scholarly research such as Deborah Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire—to know what she did and didn’t want.⁵ Katie felt curious and interested and was happy to make out with the first two boys she kissed. But with the boy she took to her prom, she felt turned off because he was so forceful. She recalled: “He was just awful. He was pushing my head down into his lap in the back of his car on the way there, and on the way to afterprom. Wanting to make me give him head. . . . I was curious and wanted to do things, but was feeling bad about how it was happening.” She pushed him away and spent the rest of the night and weekend avoiding him. Rather than acceding to his demands, Katie pushed back. She wasn’t confused about whether she was entitled to say no, or whether her reaction was reasonable. It was clear to her that his behavior was unacceptable and unappealing, but she also remained aware of her own desires. She recalled: “I was attracted to him and had a crush on him, and had he not been so aggressive, I probably would have been more sexually open with him and had some more experiences with him. But as soon as he sort of was forceful and I felt like meat instead of like he was actually interested or thought I was attractive or anything, I was just turned off.” While Katie felt turned off by the boy’s behavior, she still acknowledged the presence of her own desire. She didn’t polarize sexual desire into something that only men possess, and that women must remain wary of.⁶

In college, Katie finally was able to do more sexual exploration with both men and women. She reveled in her ability to go to parties and, as she put it, “randomly make out” with people. Katie limited most of these encounters to sexual contact that didn’t include intercourse. Because Katie had such clear knowledge of what she did and didn’t want and was so comfortable expressing her desires, she never feared that things would go too far or get out of control, and they didn’t.

Katie applied the same qualities that made her a good scientist—curiosity, perseverance, and objectivity—to sex while she was in college. She actively tried to learn about both women’s and men’s bodies, seeking to figure them out. She wanted to understand the mechanics of men’s bodies, since she felt that she didn’t really have a handle on how they worked. As a junior, she and a guy and a girlfriend were “talking about sex down on the porch, and our confusion, our mutual confusion, about the opposite sex’s bodies.” They then

sat around in his apartment, naked, talking about our bodies and sexuality. And he was explaining to us, like, how a hand job is supposed to be done and how a good blowjob works. . . . We both wanted to know how to please. And so that was kind of a helpful lesson, but really asexual . . . it was very clinical . . . we were kind of showing him what feels good and, and it was very—it was not graphic. It was kind of like we were sitting there and pointing, kind of like, “This is the area that you should touch; this doesn’t matter.” And he was kind of like, he had his penis is his hands and was kind of lifting it up, and it was really, um, kind of the first time that I had been in daylight with a naked man and really gotten to see what it was all about. And I was, I remember being kind of struck by how testicles, how a scrotum, look like labia.

As Katie described this exchange, I pictured “circle time” in my mind—it sounded as straightforward as sharing in kindergarten. Only the content being shared was “This feels good when you stroke me here” and “This is what you touch and do to get me aroused” instead of stories of trips to the zoo. At this stage of her life, Katie was determined to gather sexual data as she would for an experiment run in the lab—methodically, purposefully, and without the intrusion of messy feelings.

Katie had sex for the first time with a good friend who lived in her dorm, but here things started to get complicated. She described her first time, as do many women, as somewhat underwhelming, more as something to be gotten out of the way than as something memorable. Katie was hoping they could work up to “good” sex. Before this time, she really had had no emotional expectations from sexual partners. But now she was interested in developing, maybe not a full-fledged relationship, but at least an ongoing sexual exploration in which she could learn how things worked with someone with whom she felt comfortable and close. The good friend, however, became awkward and distant after they’d had sex, and they didn’t have sex again until they’d both returned from stints abroad. In the aftermath, he seemed to want less to do with her than she did with him. This left Katie feeling confused and hurt, and unsure of what she could or should expect from a boy with whom she wasn’t in a relationship.

Unlike many other women, who say they felt pressured to have sex, Katie’s own desires dictated her first sexual experiences. In short, her sexual history in college would have done the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves proud.⁷ She felt no shame or even much inhibition about her early sexual experimentation. Instead, Katie felt her early sexual encounters to be straightforward, exploratory, and consensual.

Not so clear and straightforward was what Katie should do with the emotional desires that kept showing up once she had had sex. On the face of it, Katie was not yet really interested in relationships. She was focused on gaining sexual experience and succeeding academically. And she had the freedom (and sometimes pressure) to experiment sexually and remain rather uninterested in relationships in college and her early twenties. But the desire for something more than sex cropped up despite Katie’s best efforts to be scientific about it all.

Katie longed to be with someone she could get to know sexually, whom she could come to trust and feel comfortable with, and with whom she could be vulnerable enough to have an orgasm. These longings did not match up with her dismissal of relationships. As long as Katie didn’t pursue relationships involving emotional connection, she was unlikely to develop the trust and comfort that she craved. So Katie’s systematic acquisition of sexual knowledge, and her ability to orgasm while masturbating, did not guarantee orgasmic sex with casual partners.

This quandary left Katie with little practice at relationships. She had a decent number of one-time sexual encounters but not a lot of ongoing sexual experience; she feared depending upon a man; and she felt profound doubts about whether she could ever have both a successful career and a relationship—not a recipe for satisfaction from sex or relationships with men.

UNAVAILABLE MEN

The strategy of desire that Katie unconsciously developed as a solution, although it didn’t feel like much of a solution to her, was to pursue relationships with men who were already involved with other women. She got many of the perks of a relationship: closeness, passion, sex with someone she felt close to, and companionship. What she didn’t get were commitment, security, or any hope of a future. While disappointed by missing these emotional elements, Katie faced no risk that anything or anyone might compromise her ambition.

After disappointing sex in college, Katie continued to seek out ongoing sexual relationships that would help her to figure out “how sex worked.” She felt sexually inexperienced relative to her peers, and was eager to catch up to them in terms of number of partners and amount of sex. Katie was not, however, interested in developing committed relationships with men. She assumed those would come later, when she was ready.

In her first year after college, Katie traveled several hours away for “weekends of debauchery” with Mike. He and Katie had flirted endlessly in college, and they were both excited to finally sleep together. He had a long-distance girlfriend, and at first that was fine with Katie—she was after sexual exploration, not love. She described the appeal: “I wanted to know how it all worked, and how to make it feel good. And we were comfortable enough with each other to talk about that. So that was really the beginning of me starting to feel like, ‘Oh, my body is interesting to me. And even though I don’t necessarily perceive it as attractive, you know, he does. And he’s making that clear to me.’ ”

Despite the lack of a relationship or commitment, Katie felt comfortable with Mike and began to feel curious about her body when she was with a partner. Alone, she could explore her own body and knew what to do to reliably bring herself to climax. But Katie did not feel particularly at ease exposing her body and its pleasures to a partner. Mike and Katie’s time together was explicitly focused on sex, which early on felt like a welcome relief to both of them. Having no emotional complications appealed to both Katie and Mike. But as they continued to spend time together, she began to want a relationship with him, and was disappointed that one didn’t develop.

When she was twenty-three, Katie met Jim, and they fell hard for each other. He worked in the same lab that she did, and they spent the first several months they knew each other denying the sparks between them because Jim had a girlfriend. Katie was immediately drawn to Jim physically, and she loved his thoughtfulness and self-reflection. Jim’s relationship with his long-distance girlfriend was “very complicated.” He purportedly wanted to break up with her, but he didn’t want to interrupt her progress on her dissertation. Meanwhile, Katie waited in the wings. Yet Katie’s relationship with Jim was groundbreaking for her. It was the first time she had fallen in love, it was the longest relationship she’d had to date (four months), and it was the first time she felt really sexually intimate and could orgasm with a partner. Finally, Katie felt secure in a relationship, confident that Jim was interested in her and cared about her. This security allowed her to let go of insecurities about her body and her worries about whether Jim was enjoying himself in sex. She described sex with him as fun and exploratory: “And we would just say, you know, ‘Let’s go.’ And I think if I wanted to switch positions or whatever, it was all kind of just very happy, playfully, ‘Let’s do this.’ And it felt very comfortable to just express what I wanted, and when. And I think he definitely felt comfortable, too, doing the same thing . . . moving each other, just physically placing each other’s hands in different places, whatever. So, just communicating through words and through movement.” Because of the security and comfort she had with him, Katie felt confident that Jim would break up with his girlfriend and that they could build a committed relationship together.

As Katie’s departure for graduate school in California drew near, things began to fall apart with Jim. While Jim said he wanted to choose Katie, he worried that his girlfriend would be lost without him. Katie and his girlfriend eventually learned that he was lying to them, and he lost both of them. Katie felt deeply distressed that she had trusted him so much, and that she had believed that he would leave his girlfriend for her.

Having had a relatively serious relationship helped Katie to feel secure, but also showed her some of what she missed when single. She begrudgingly came to see that she actually wanted a man in her life, and that having a relationship could have a generally stabilizing influence on her. Katie expressed the sense, or perhaps the hope, that she’d feel better and more secure about her career and academic choices if she had a relationship as an anchor in her life.

Despite this realization, once in California Katie found herself having conflicted sexual contact with Dave, who, like Jim, had a long-distance girlfriend. This time, although it felt difficult to control, Katie tried to extricate herself from the situation. Dave was smart and attractive, and Katie felt an instant rapport with him. They talked well together and clicked physically—it was difficult to deny the attraction and the potential for a relationship. But he had a girlfriend on the East Coast, and Katie already had a string of relationships behind her in which she’d been the other woman. Dave seemed to need Katie, which made it hard for her to end it. He made half-hearted statements about their relationship being wrong, but somehow they’d end up in bed together. Katie would then stop in the midst of having sex and say, “What are we doing? This can’t happen.” If things were to end for good, someone needed to be firm, and it wasn’t going to be Dave. Finally, Katie put a stop to their relationship. She felt sad to lose Dave and disappointed in herself for getting involved with him in the first place.

Katie repeatedly chose to form relationships with men who already had girlfriends. But what had started as a strategy for gaining sexual experience—being a Sexual Woman who avoids relationships—became increasingly frustrating and unsatisfying. By being with unavailable men, Katie ensured that she didn’t develop an ongoing connection with someone with whom she could feel secure. She was struggling to transition from keeping relationships at bay to prioritizing relationships, and she felt herself to be woefully unprepared to do so.

WHY UNAVAILABLE MEN?

One might conclude that Katie chose unavailable men because of her father, who cheated on her mother, and her stepfather, who was emotionally unavailable and had limited involvement with his wife or stepchildren. And that may be the case—it may be that Katie merely followed the models available to her. Or it would seem that Katie found only men who acted in ways that confirmed her mother’s fears about men. While her mother did remarry, Katie grew up regularly hearing her mother’s warnings about men’s fundamental unreliability and sexually aggressive nature. In cheating with her, Katie’s partners proved themselves to be worthy of wariness. In effect, they showed her that her mom was right. Or Katie may have been unconsciously acting like the men her mother had warned her about by doing her own cheating, thus seizing some power in a situation in which she felt powerless. But I had the sense that there was more to Katie’s choice.

It seemed to me that Katie not only didn’t want the closeness and interdependence that accompany a serious relationship, but actually feared them. She admitted that early in her relationship history, “I didn’t really want to be in a relationship, and so it was kind of just like, ‘Well, we have this play relationship, and it’s never gonna go anywhere, it’s not that serious, and it’s kind of like having my independence but [also] having someone to kiss.’ ” She came to recognize that she got something out of not being someone’s girlfriend—she kept her independence. And she deeply feared that this independence would be compromised by a relationship. She desperately feared becoming a Relational Woman, lacking sexual desire and, more important in her eyes, independence.

We can understand some of Katie’s determination to maintain her independence when we look at her mother. Katie was so resolute in her efforts not to be like her mother that perhaps she avoided committed relationships with men altogether. Although Katie felt close to her mom, she wanted a life very different from hers.

In creating who I am, I definitely try to avoid the things that I feel like [might predispose me] to be who my [mom is] . . . losing sight of your own goals in life, and just things that you find interesting, when you have children. And if I have children, I’ll definitely . . . make [an] extra effort to keep my own personal life going on as well, with hobbies or career or whatever. Which my mom didn’t do at all, and now she’s kind of, her career was us. And now we’re gone, basically, and she’s left with “What do I do now?” And she can’t think of anything.

Katie’s mother had not maintained a career or even independent interests while raising her children, and for Katie this served as an object lesson about how to live, or not to live, her own life.

Katie’s fierce attachment to her independence gave me some important insight into her struggles. Half of the women I spoke with shared her strong concerns about compromising their independence when they were in a relationship. Of course, independence and autonomy matter to all of us—we need to be able to think for ourselves, make decisions for ourselves, and take care of ourselves. But many of the women I spoke with were subject to an ideal of radical independence that holds that invulnerability, safety, and control are important to maintain at all times. This ideal, however, is based upon a fear of closeness, vulnerability, and interdependence.⁸ So it is not surprising that Katie didn’t like to admit her desire for a relationship, feeling that such a desire made her weak and dependent. This seemed to be one key to her being with unavailable men: as long as she was never someone’s girlfriend, she could continue to be radically independent.

Katie felt ashamed of her desire for a man in her life on whom she could rely: “Women feel like they want to reach for their goals, and yet they can’t admit that they want to be in a relationship. And women who want to be in a relationship more than reach for their goals are seen as weak and spineless. . . . I think for years I’ve never wanted to admit that I wanted a relationship.” In Katie’s social context of young and aspiring women and men, she felt as though it were disappointing to prioritize a relationship with a man. This is a new cultural message that goes against the grain of centuries of female socialization. Historically, women have been encouraged to value relationships, often at the expense of their own aspirations. Much of feminist scholarship has focused on understanding and sometimes trying to change this apparently distinctive aspect of female psychology.⁹ Katie is part of a new generation of highly educated women who are, of course, still socialized differently than are men, but who feel they ought to focus on their career goals, potentially at the expense of developing a relationship, at least in their twenties. All the women I interviewed felt this encouragement, and many, like Katie, expressed shame at their desire to prioritize a relationship.

This shame seemed to be at the core of Katie’s continued involvement with unavailable men. Her choice allowed her to have emotional and sexual relationships with men but keep them at a distance. She did not, and in fact could not, put them at the center of her life—they remained at the periphery. This ideal of radical independence was so powerful because it matched up with Katie’s fears: men leave and men are unreliable, so she’d best avoid closeness, vulnerability, and interdependence with them.

INTERNAL CONFLICT AND SPLITTING

Katie’s dilemma—being with men who were taken yet desiring relationships—signaled her internal conflict about being in a relationship at all. Her desire was tempered by her fears of losing her focus on career and herself.

But instead of just being conflicted and acknowledging her mixed feelings about both relationship and career, Katie split the two desires. She set them up as mutually exclusive in her mind, and therefore made their coexistence seem impossible. This kind of splitting is the basis of much helpful categorization of the world—past and present, you and I, here and there. These are the building blocks of the mind’s organization and distinguish people with a healthy orientation to reality from those with a disturbed orientation to reality. But many otherwise healthy people also use splitting as a defense against complexity and uncertainty. When someone such as Katie splits rather than acknowledges her internal conflict, she neither recognizes her complex desires nor opens herself to the uncertainty and vulnerability inherent in desiring seemingly paradoxical things. By splitting, Katie solved the problem of uncertainty and vulnerability, but she also didn’t get the relationship or sex that she tentatively wanted.

Katie followed a path trod by many women in her generation—she doggedly pursued her career goals and achieved success by being aggressive and competitive. She was smart and accomplished in her work but had trouble finding as much success in her love life. She approached the latter mainly by keeping it at bay. To prioritize relationships felt embarrassing and slightly humiliating, and could also have threatened her identity. But the identity that Katie was so fiercely defending was based in part on splitting.

We all have internal conflicts—over whether we want to be in a relationship, over whether we want a career. It’s when we turn these conflicts into splits that we run into trouble. When we make our conflicts categorically true, we’re likely to have difficulty achieving our desires. For example, we might assert: “I can’t have a relationship and a career at the same time.” Splitting deprives us of the opportunity to know our complicated feelings about our desires.¹⁰

Katie was able to talk about and identify these conflicts, which was hopeful, as she tried to sort out how to fulfill her desires. But the conflicts were more solid than fluid, more external realities in Katie’s mind than complex internal experiences. Katie imagined commitment to career and commitment to relationship to be mutually exclusive and felt guilty for wanting a relationship. This split goes a long way toward explaining why Katie tended to be with unavailable men.

Katie split for a variety of reasons, both personal and social. For Katie, and for many women, the vulnerability that characterizes relationships was difficult to tolerate. Katie’s solution to managing her vulnerability and internal conflict was to split and to develop a version of radical independence. At the same time that she wouldn’t depend upon a man financially, she wouldn’t need a man emotionally, either. In this way, she maintained her invulnerability.

Personally, Katie worried that wanting a relationship made her too much like her mother, a woman who gave all her energy to her family and children. Katie worried that desire for a relationship made her “weak and spineless,” unintelligent, and dependent. She was concerned that if she prioritized her career, she would be unable to have a relationship with a man because that is not something that intelligent and strong career women do. She was left feeling shame over wanting and valuing a relationship. By being involved with men who were already taken, Katie resolved her conflict and ensured that she did not become like her mother.

In addition to being personal, Katie’s splits also followed cultural and social norms. Women (and men) in contemporary U.S. society are generally offered two choices: be relational, dependent, passive, privately oriented, and feminine, or be autonomous, powerful, assertive, publicly focused, and masculine.¹¹ To succeed at being a relationship- and career-oriented woman is quite an individual accomplishment, one for which society does not give women much help or guidance.

The split between career and relationships felt natural to Katie—it is difficult to be successful at both. In Katie’s chosen career, academia, women who achieve tenure are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be single twelve years after earning their PhDs. And women who are married when they begin their faculty careers are much more likely than men in the same position to divorce or separate from their spouses.¹² Katie accepted that these social realities would naturally translate into deeply felt personal conflicts. But in fact these personal conflicts were not inevitable—many of the women I spoke with also felt conflicted about their commitments to relationships and career, but not all of them did.

As a feminist sociologist and a woman striving to develop both a career and a relationship myself, I understand the power of splitting at a cultural level. I have seen countless women deny the significance of their personal relationships in the workplace, not wanting to ruin their chances for career advancement—one colleague deliberately didn’t mention her daughter in a job interview out of fear that being a mother would make her seem less serious and committed.¹³ And we see women regularly downplay their professional and financial successes in order not to threaten potential male partners: the New York Times published a front-page article on successful young women in New York who date less successful young men. The women often deliberately obfuscate their financial and professional success in order not to scare men away.¹⁴ Katie was not alone in thinking that career success might come at the expense of a relationship, and vice versa. These cultural splits can powerfully affect a woman’s ability to even acknowledge, much less to feel, the full range of her desires.

So what would it mean for Katie to have identified the personal split between relationship and career as central to her dilemma? And why was it difficult for her to identify it? It challenged her identity as a strong and independent woman—one who locates these conflicts outside, in the culture, but who has trouble locating these conflicts within herself. If these splits were held in our personal selves, perhaps we would have complicated feelings about both relationships and careers. Perhaps part of us sometimes wants to run wild with our desire for a relationship, putting all of ourselves into it even while we fear such abandon. On other days, throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our careers, which may feel so much more within our control than messy relationships, can seem both appealing and scary. These may have been frightening desires for Katie to acknowledge—frightening because they threatened her identity as a modern woman.