Equal Relationships
What Makes For an Equal Relationship?
An equal relationship can mean several things. Maybe you switch off nights on who pays the dinner bill, maybe you split your bills in half between the both of you. But is that what it means to be in an equal relationship?
My boyfriend, Drew and I recently moved in together, before I met him it was one failed relationship after another. Why? Because I wasn’t treated as an equal to my partners. Before Drew, I had never really known what an equal relationship had felt like. I had a guy tell me once that if he were to ever get married, his wife would quit her job and start having children while he provided for everything. ON THE SECOND DATE. The audacity. Now my current relationship isn’t perfect, however, we both bring each other up as best as we can. We both work to hold each other accountable because we both want to succeed and see each other succeed. Sometimes we’re in our little worlds, him his real estate and rentals, me my writing, but it never interferes. We like seeing each other work. When we go on dates we try our hardest to switch off who pays for it, if he can’t get it I will, if I can’t get it he does.
Being in an equal relationship means, not only that you split dates, but you feed the other person’s successes, maybe you have to pull a little extra weight sometimes. The keyword sometimes, you should never pull all of the weight of a relationship all the time. Sometimes it could mean you had a bad day so your partner cooks dinner and does the dishes after. They submitted 70% while you were only capable of putting in 30% for the night. Maybe you and your partner go on a date and they realize that with the bills that just came out of their pocket, the date was a little steep to pay for. You pick up the check this time, which left you giving 90% while the other gave 10% for the day. This doesn’t mean your relationship isn’t equal, it means quite the opposite. Your partner made up for what you couldn’t for a night, and vice versa when they couldn’t.
A healthy and equal relationship, doesn’t look like never arguing or the man always catches the check, the man pays the bills, etc. It’s telling each other when something is wrong, maybe it’s an argument over someone not picking their dirty socks up off the bedroom floor or an argument on whose turn it is to do the dishes. Whatever it is, it’s never just keeping your mouth shut to keep the other person happy. YES, even if that means it starts an argument.
Why do We Want Equal Relationships as Women?
No woman wants to feel like they’re less than their significant other, so why should we?
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I asked a few people this question, over and over again. My favorite answer came from my mom. She states “When you both put work into a relationship to make it work you’d like to see equal ‘payback’, or ‘credit’ given.” This is understandable, you don’t constantly want to hear someone talk about how good your husband is to you and never hear about how good you are back. She also said something that stuck with me, “ I’m all for him getting credit for a job well done if he’d done it all on his own. Just as I’d like for myself, but if you work together it’s a joint effort and one’s value isn’t worth more than the other, but an equal relationship also shouldn’t be about keeping score.”
We all tend to brag about our significant others, and we are always hearing replies like “oh my god he’s so good to you”, and “I wish I had a guy like that”. But what happens when you aren’t around your partner? Do men talk about what we do for them? Are his friends in the background hyping up their partner, or that they found the perfect person for them when we do something for them? No, unfortunately not, as women we get comments about how cooking dinner and cleaning the house is “absolute wifey material”. We don’t want to be wifey material for living in the ’60s. We want to be wifey material because we have jobs and we work hard for our goals.
To be equal in a relationship means your partner looks at you like a teammate, as a key to your own success. We don’t want relationships where we have to sit back and listen to how great our partners are, we don’t want to have to keep our mouths shut during the hard times. In relationships especially, we should be able to call out our partners for doing or saying something that upsets us. We shouldn’t have to sit back and just take it. We also don’t want to be labeled as crazy or told “your acting like a woman” when we do speak our minds or have something that’s upsetting to us. As women, we shouldn’t have to sit back and take it, especially in relationships.
How Can We Make Our Voices Heard and Have Successful Equality in Our Relationships?
Improving and creating equal and healthy relationships for both parties isn’t always easy. Again a relationship can’t always be 50/50 for both people, but it shouldn’t always be the same person giving the majority of the effort. So how exactly do we voice what we want out of our relationships?
Start by setting the standards right away, although, it shouldn’t be our job, to state that we want to have an equal relationship, where we lift each other, we have to. Never sit back and let your partner tell you what you can or cannot do. Stand up for yourself and stand up for what you believe in.
It never really came up in my relationship, where we stood on equality, it kind of just came to be that way. Right off the bat in our relationship, I pulled a huge feminism card. Drew immediately backed off. We had later on discussed that even though we are in a relationship, we both want to succeed and it’s important that we do. We also had talked about how we need to lift each other up, and not to put a strain on the other person’s goals.
Without, pulling the I’m a feminist card and this relationship needs to be us both working equally as hard to keep it together card. I full-heartedly believe we would still be where we are today, because for him, being raised by a single mom, he sees a lot of strength in women. For others, it’s not as easy.
Sometimes, to establish boundaries on being equal in your relationship, you simply need to just do you. Be your independent self, stay on your grind, and honey, if he isn’t respecting that just leave. Don’t subject yourself to a relationship where you are being held back from accomplishing your dreams. The sky is the limit and as everybody in the universe puts it, there is plenty of fish in the sea.
