I call myself a feminist. Some call me a "Femi-Nazi" - as if caring about equality automatically makes me someone's enemy. I don't bother explaining myself to those people.
Have, more or less, fended for myself my whole adult life. From the day I left for the US, through every relationship since [and there were quite a few] - some good, some painful, all of them teaching me something I didn't ask to learn - have stood on my own financially.
The one person I've ever genuinely leaned on that way is my Dad. Not partners nor friends. When I say "dependency," I mean it in that narrow, specific sense: Money.
Emotionally, in friendship, in who I trust, have never sorted people by gender. I don't think love or loyalty comes with a gender attached.
So I've always been comfortable calling myself independent. Financially, at least, the label has held up. By all modern metrics, I have lived my life on my own terms and by my own standards. Have never relied on anyone else for financial security - a boundary inadvertently established in boarding school and maintained rigorously ever since.
And yet, I still find myself holding men to a traditional standard of financial provider-ship. If they lack that capability, I find them lacking. There is a quiet friction in being a fiercely independent woman who still carries the recessive, stubborn strand of desiring a bit of male dependency.
Lately have hit a strange crossroad - one of those moments where you think you know exactly who you are, and then life quietly asks you to prove it again. And what's come up isn't about money at all. It's smaller than that, and somehow harder to sit with. Who fixes the car when it breaks down? Who calls the plumber? Who's the person you ring at 11pm when something in the house just... stops working?
For someone who likes order, who wants to be the one in control of her own life — not having an easy answer to that question is unsettling in a way I didn't expect. And when I sit with that discomfort honestly, I think it's bigger than plumbing.
Was raised in an Indian patriarchal society, and however loudly I call myself a feminist, I think there's a recessive gene in me - planted there long before I had a vocabulary for feminism at all - that still wants a male anchor. Not a dominant one, necessarily. Just... someone to lean the weight on.
Not asking whether that's right or wrong - don't think it's useful to judge it that way. Am asking myself something quieter: why is it still there? Why, after everything I've built on my own, can't I fully shake it off and simply tell myself - out loud, and mean it - that I am enough for myself? That I have always shown up for myself, and always will.
This is the feminist’s paradox: If I am truly liberated, why do I refuse to don the cape of the sole provider? Why do I still gender the concept of security?
I don't have a neat answer yet. Maybe unlearning a gene planted by generations doesn't happen just because you're a feminist. Perhaps it’s because we equate financial capability in a partner not just with money, but with safety, competence, and a primal desire to be cherished and protected.
For an independent woman who spends every waking hour being strong, the desire for a partner who can provide isn't a betrayal of feminism - it is a subconscious longing to finally lay down the shield, even if just for a moment, and trust that someone else has the strength to carry the weight.
I don't know if I'll ever fully uproot that gene. But I'd rather keep questioning it than pretend it isn't there.
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