In 2009, I was in an LGBTQ studies class in college learning about intersectional identities, and the instructor asked us each to write down three identities we held.
Nearly every woman in the class named their gender identity first; followed for many by their sexual identity; then something related to their major, extracurriculars or future career plans.
Nearing five years of marriage, the first identity I wrote down was wife.
At 23 years old, when asked to define myself, the first thing that came to mind was who I was to someone else. This moment wasn’t insignificant in my decision to get a divorce a year later.
I did a similar exercise when I started the Hi, I’m 40 series; I brainstormed essays by first jotting down parts of my identity I might want to write about. My autism, bisexuality, education, Wisconsin roots, body image, gender, writing work, relationship to television, dalliances in vegetarianism… What didn’t make the list this time was my relationship status.
I’ve been with my partner for 15 years — three times the length of my marriage — but in this relationship, I am not a wife.
By most measures, my current relationship is no different from a marriage; we just don’t have the blessing of god or Social Security benefits that come with that title. Official marriage has never been on the table for us, because I told my partner immediately that I’d never marry again. Being a wife, to me, represented everything that had gone wrong in my first marriage and the ways I’d given up on myself in service of someone else. I never wanted to let that happen again.
I was embarrassed to name my identity as wife in that college class. It was weird to be married as a college student — not just because we were young, but because that time in our lives was supposed to be about self-discovery and becoming. Marriage felt like a final thing, an end to discovery, the destination, compared with the journeys and identities they still had the freedom to explore. Plus, naming my marriage as my identity ahead of anything else revealed in a really uncomfortable way how much my place in that couple superseded everything else about me.
Now 40 years old and a decade and a half into a committed and road-tested relationship, marriage wouldn’t be out of place like it was when I was 23. Most people already assume I’m married, because that’s what’s normal for a woman my age. I used to take pride in pointedly correcting them, but now I generally note this data point as a reason to avoid them in the future. If you’re coming in hot with patriarchal assumptions in 2026, I don’t have the time.
This relationship hasn’t changed my mind about being a wife. As much as I love this man and want to care for him and be cared for by him and grow and change and explore as we build this life together and all the things people say in wedding vows, I do not want to be his wife.
I think it comes down to this: I cannot simply be “a wife.” I have to be “his wife.” A wife belongs to someone, and I don’t ever again want to feel like I belong to someone.
That “belonging” has changed quite a bit since the advent of marriage in our culture, rapidly in just the last 50 years or so, evolving even in the past 10 or 20 years. Of course a wife is no longer legally property of her husband, as she once was. She’s no longer financially bound to him, no longer restricted from leaving him, no longer obligated to suffer his abuse, no longer at such a risk of losing her children to him. Our culture largely accepts wives who work outside of the home, wives who keep their own names, spouses who keep separate finances. Marriage to a man doesn’t legally strip a woman of her identity and her personhood the way it once did.
But those vestiges of marriage are barely behind us, and many still linger in our culture today.
Within my mother’s lifetime, married women didn’t have access to a credit card in their own name. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which outlaws discrimination in lending decisions based on gender and marital status, among other things, didn’t come along until 1974.
No-fault divorce was unavailable in some states as recently as 2010.
Wives were exempt from U.S. rape laws until the mid-1970s, so-called marital rape was treated differently in many states well into this century and South Carolina still makes it officially harder to define an assault by a spouse as rape.
Culturally, it’s still much more common in single-earner marriages for the wife to forgo a job than the husband, and she still takes on the majority of domestic labor even when she works outside the home.
About 80% of women married to men still take their husband’s surname — including 73% of women under age 50 and 70% of liberal-leaning women.
The majority of grooms still ask for their future father-in-law’s blessing before proposing, and fathers still “give away” their daughters at wedding ceremonies, both traditions stemming from an understanding of women as objects passed from one man to the next.
If my partner asked for my father’s permission to do anything with me, I’d leave him immediately.
If you want any or all of this in your life, that’s fine; this isn’t about telling you to change. I want you to have whatever traditions and rituals in your life make you happy, and there’s nothing wrong with you if it makes you happy to change your name and have your father walk you down the aisle; you can make those rituals mean whatever you want them to mean to you. But this is about how marriage feels to me, and why I am choosing not to be a wife again.
Identifying as a wife saddles me with all this baggage. Stepping inside the institution of marriage to a man feels like willingly stepping into a mousetrap (the nice kind, where you get cheese and you get to live, but you’re stuck in a cage and no one ever releases you).
I’m grateful it’s legally easier than ever to divorce, but it’s still harder and more expensive to end a marriage than to start one. While we love to tell a cultural story about divorce running rampant in the U.S., the divorce rate actually peaked nearly half a century ago during the first wave of no-fault divorce, and it’s been declining since. This cultural myth feels like a way to reinforce the stigma of ending a marriage. Even if we’re moving past that stigma, it’s still common for women to stay in untenable marriages because of money or children.
It’s not like I could disentangle myself from my partner at the drop of a hat. We share a whole life and intermingle finances and own a house together (and, of course, love and other feelings). But remaining unmarried eliminates the implicit obligation to make it work that kept me in my first marriage long past its expiration date. I’ve never promised — to my partner, my family, his family, the universe, whatever — to stay in this mousetrap forever. I get to choose it every day. The door is always open.
The crack in that door is what keeps me, in this probably-forever relationship, from feeling like my identity has been absorbed into the blob of my partner. From seeing myself first and foremost as his.
That open door is what lets me nurture those other parts of my identity, to take selfish moments, to take care of myself when I need it, to return to myself when I melt too far into his world. There’s no institution to uphold, no promise to keep, no image to protect that gets in the way of what I want in our life together.
There’s just me, each day, in partnership with him.
Your turn
How does your relationship status fit into your identity? What’s been your experience with marriage? How does that color your relationship to this cultural institution?
Such an interesting conversation. I did change my name when I got married but a big part of that was that I didn’t particularly like my last name. Now we’re divorced but my kids have his name and I still don’t like my old one, so I’ve kept it for now. I’m thinking about changing it completely to my mother’s maiden name, but the admin around that is off putting so have said I’ll do that when they’re 18. I also would never remarry and never take someone’s name again! Hindsight!