Sisters, are you free to choose?

“It's my choice,” I heard a young woman say recently and it made me wonder how much choice we really have in our lives as women and how much is socially dictated by gender roles. 

Often when  a woman falls in love she'll do anything for her man hence the song, Stand By Your Man. But dispite similar song lyrics for the men's perspective in, When a Man Loves a Woman, I have rarely seen men make the same degree of sacrifice that women seem to typically make in a relationship. 

As I sit here and think about past relationships, past sacrifices, I feel disheartened when I see, what I think is, someone making those same mistakes.  I want to take women shake them, yell and tell them to run towards their own dreams rather than sacrifice them for love. Often those sacrifices seem to be justified by monologues we run in our heads convincing ourselves that love is worth the sacrifice. We make the choice to make the sacrifice but often it seems to be the only choice that will allow us to maintain the relationship. 

But this is a mistake that we, as women, make all too frequently. We think we have a choice when really we know we don't. When there is a conflict between a couple as to where they should live due to employment availability- it always seems that the man wins the argument. Further down the road, when it comes to kids and whose career should take the hit that automatically comes with the pressures of child rearing, it is inevitably the women who CHOOSE to stay home with the children. It's their choice, but it is not a choice their husbands would have made, leaving women with no choice at all, just an illusion of choice that disappears like a dessert mirage the closer one approaches.

How far have we really come? There isn't equality in pay or expectations for women. Women still sacrifice their careers, dreams and the ability to make the best choices for themselves when they commit themselves to a man, to children. A wedding ring is still a slave collar hidden beneath the gold; only now it is wrapped in the false pretense of choice.