“Why should I take dating advice from you? You’re single.”

This is a comeback I’ve heard many times for the six years I’ve been writing my advice column, And That’s Why You’re Single.  Apparently, in order for a woman who writes about dating to be taken seriously, she needs to have a man to trot out or cite as evidence that she knows of what she speaks.

My answer to this pointed question is quite succinct. I don’t need a man in my life in order to practice common sense and critical thinking. People throw the fact that I’m single (as far as they know) in my face to try and discredit me.  This one query reveals quite a bit about the person posing it. Namely, that they consider a woman’s ideas and opinions invalid unless she has a man by her side to validate them.

This question isn’t really a question. It’s an attempt to minimize my thoughts. The point of the inquiry is to shame me. Apparently, a woman who isn’t constantly looking for excuses to talk about her relationship is considered suspect. 

What’s funny is that I never hear the same types of criticisms directed at single men who write about dating and sex. In fact, I think single, male relationship writers like Dave Zincenko and Michael Thomsen tend to get more of a pass from their audience. Men aren’t viewed with the same critical eye for being a certain age and still single. They’re supposed to be playing the field and exercising their options, especially if they write about sex. In a case like that, the more experiences the male author deconstructs, the better he is perceived. And not just by his male readership.

I’m not sure whether many women will agree with this, but I tend to believe that a man with an impressive roster of sexual experiences is considered more desirable. His female readers may outwardly act outraged at his admissions, but I think internally they find him more attractive than a man who admits to dating one or two women before marrying his high school sweetheart. What I really think makes the man more sought after is that, because of his “vast” list of lovers, he is seen as a challenge. Men don’t bother to slut shame him. They’re too busy trying to replicate whatever tactics this guy employs to score so easily and often. The women that these writers date don’t see him as a liability. They consider him a catch, if only because of the potential bragging rights that come with “taming” him.

Now imagine a woman using her own Black Book as a source for her writing. If she’s liberal with her sexual admissions and beliefs, many folks see her as a threat. A big portion of her female readership will see her as a traitor because they’re being encouraged to examine their own insecurities that revolve around men and sex.  If she can’t manage to find anybody to settle down, she’s too picky or damaged. The insults and accusations consistently revolve around three things: her looks, her age and her relationship status. Those are considered a woman’s Achilles Heel, and men and women will do whatever they can to sever it. When Candace Bushnell’s marriage dissolved, you could almost hear people running to the Internet to mock her. “Fifty Shades of Grey” author E. L. James repeatedly had to endure comments about her weight and looks, as if she didn’t deserve to be so successful because she wasn’t a size two.

The reason for that, of course, is because most women are expected to wear the fact that they have a boyfriend as though it’s a badge of honor. The act of doing so was ingrained in us as young as our early teens. Being able to say that you had a boyfriend was considered the end all be all. We’d find ways to shoehorn mentions of him into conversations about biology lab or what we ate for dinner. Sharing that you had a boyfriend somehow elevated you over the heads of your peers. It meant that you found a boy that found you attractive.

You’d think that this sort of intra-gender competition would cease after high school. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Read the comments of any article that revolves around dating – specifically the author’s dating woes – and you’ll be treated with numerous stories that start off with, “Well, when I met my boyfriend…” A quick tour of these threads will make you feel like you’ve been transported back to your high school lunchroom. I recently got into it with a commenter over at XOJane. Rather than actually argue the valid points I raised, my opponent snarked back, “You can disagree without being mean. Just sayin’ (oh, and btw, and that’s why I’m NOT SINGLE). hugs.”

In these situations, a woman will trot out her relationship (no matter how new it is) to bolster the validity of her insight. That is what truly makes behavior like this so unfortunate. For years women have struggled to be independent from men. Yet there appears to still be some underlying need to prove to other women that we have male approval. It’s as if some women believe that the ability to utter the words “my boyfriend” grants them access to some kind of higher ground.

I don’t think it’s a conscious action. I think it has been burned into our brains to think that, without a partner, we don’t deserve to have an opinion on certain matters.  Mainstream media, TV and movies don’t help us break out of this thinking, either. I recently bemoaned the cancellation of my guilty pleasure TV show, “Smash,” complaining that all the lead female characters had to be attached to a man, a couple even fighting over one. Olivia Pope from ABC’s “Scandal” has to be tied to the simpering, brooding Fitz in order to make her more interesting. We’ve been conditioned to try and one-up our peers where men are concerned. There’s this subversive need to prove to other people that we are desirable. And the way many of us prove that is by trotting out our partners. Social media feeds are clogged with references to boyfriends and dates. While some of these mentions are expressions of genuine happiness, I think many others are revealed strictly for the benefit of the reading audience. “Look at meeee! Somebody thinks I’m pretty!”

Originally, my decision to keep the details of my love life out of my writing was one of self-preservation. The personal memoir writing format has birthed a popular subsection that I affectionately refer to as the Oversharing Trainwreck. There’s this misguided belief out there that a woman who writes about sex and dating has to exploit her own experiences in order to be considered “brave” or “real.”  The core of any good relationship is intimacy. Taking to the web to spill my guts made it difficult for any man to trust or feel safe with me. Now I choose to keep my love life status to myself to avoid being defined by my ability to get a man.

No woman should be made to feel as though she needs to prove value or intelligence in this manner. Her work–and her life–should stand on its own, regardless of whether or not she has a man by her side. — Christan Marashio

Christan is an NYC-based writer and columnist.

Last July, my boyfriend Jesse and I moved in together. The next day, we went to New York City Hall and got “gay married” — that is, we became (heterosexual) domestic partners. We’re among the many straight couples who have become legally linked, mostly for health insurance and other practical reasons, since domestic partnership became an option in several states as the closest alternative to marriage for gay couples. Now that the Supreme Court is debating the legalities of full-fledged gay marriage, we’re also pondering whether we’ll “have to” get hitched to maintain our benefits, should national marriage equality become a reality. In fact, we know one couple who already got married after losing their health insurance coverage once New York legalized same-sex marriage.

Of course, we’re unequivocally in favor of marriage equality. But this lower “level” of commitment has been worth something in its own right to us — not just for the health benefits, but for the ways it helped us see exactly what we wanted from our relationship.

As wary 30-something New Yorkers, Jesse and I built our couplehood in careful, meticulously plotted, much-debated steps. Even the regular practice of spending the night at each other’s places was up for debate. (We’re really into having our own space and alone time.) We waited ten months before exchanging “I love you”s. We declared our reticence about marriage early and often. Eventually, sleepovers became a practical necessity as well as a key bonding experience. That “I love you” felt real and earned. We became domestic partners when we realized that said status would allow me to be on his health insurance and give us at least a chance of proving our standing with each other in the event of, say, a hospitalization or death. (Also: We can rent cars together without an extra fee!) Of course we wouldn’t have done it if the commitment level weren’t there, but we also wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t have reason to.

And marriage? We’re still saying only if we have to, though that seems like it’s possibly in our future.

That “only if we have to” attitude about each stage of our relationship has lent it a deliberate quality we both take comfort in. We’re analytical people. Call us cold commitmentphobes if you like, but investigating domestic partnership has given me a better understanding of marriage — and even, in a way, made it more romantic to me. What can I say? Having almost gotten married once before, having a say over each other’s do-not-resuscitate orders and sharing our assets without tax penalties sound far more romantic than picking out bridal bouquets and paying too much for cake. Here, a few things I’ve learned about marriage from being domestic partnered:

Domestic partnership is not marriage. We chose it as the simplest, quickest alternative so we could stop paying more than $600 per month for my COBRA health coverage. But no institutions arerequired to recognize domestic partners’ legal status; many companies simply choose to. Hospitals don’t have to give you a say in your partner’s care and the status doesn’t hold up in court for much. Marriage, in fact, instantly confers more than a thousand benefits and advantages to those who undertake it. Speaking of which …

People get married for good reason! I scoff at the gauzy, taffeta, compulsory nature of heterosexual life commitment. I resist its patriarchal underpinnings. But damn if married people don’t get a lot of great stuff! There are those thousand-plus rights, possible tax advantages (though you don’t always win by filing jointly, I’ve learned), massive legal simplifications if things go badly, and gifts! We have a decent income as successful professionals, but we’d get our new apartment in order faster if we could register.

Divorce is a bitch. Obviously it would be emotionally draining to split up from the person you thought was the love of your life — I truly have a hard time entertaining the idea of someday living without Jesse. But I also know how life goes, and I’m a staunch realist. Having watched others go through New York’s divorce process, complete with a year-long cooling-off period before making it official, I am not eager to participate. So far, this difficulty has served as the main impediment to any marriage plans for us. That’s why I love the ideas that have been floated, at least in theoretical circles, for more sweeping marriage reform than just allowing for gay couples. “Temporary marriage,” “group marriage,” and easier divorces are among them, as this New York Times piece points out. I particularly like the idea of making civil unions the nationally recognized form, and letting people figure out privately what “marriage” is to them.

Weddings are at least part of the problem with marriage. A Marie Claire piece even showed thatmore couples are simply getting “permanently engaged” as a way to show their commitment without dealing with all the tulle. I understand the allure of that arrangement, though it strikes me as self-defeating. You’re doing this to demonstrate your commitment to the world, to ask society to recognize your status as a couple, but it seems all a permanent engagement would invite is people constantly haranguing you about when the big day is. I dragged my own ill-fated engagement out, so I know. I personally prefer either going through with marriage or taking a stand against it. For Jesse and me, just figuring out that we don’t need a big white ceremony made us consider marriage more seriously. When he came up with the idea that we could have a small ceremony at our Zen Buddhist temple, wearing our black robes, with vows given by our teacher, that had me pondering a wedding seriously for the first time since I swore off marriage. And who knows? Maybe someday it will happen — if we have to, and we want to.

To continue with our “Loving While Feminist” series of posts — we’ve already talked dating,boyfriends, and girlfriends — we’re tackling feminist relationship dilemmas today.

Dilemma #1: It turns out it’s time to get married after all. You’ve spent a ton of time dissecting and critiquing the institution of marriage. You know it has historically treated women as chattel. You know almost every part of a traditional wedding ceremony is deeply sexist, hopelessly materialistic, or both. Then, as time goes by, you fall in love with a wonderful man. You move in together. You are a freelance writer, so you really wish you could share his corporate insurance. You would like to be able to visit him in the hospital if he gets sick or have an automatic say in his health decisions if the worst should happen. Maybe you even daydream about a nice, small wedding — what’s wrong with declaring your couplehood to the world? We say, go for it! You don’t have to do your wedding or marriage the way others do. Have a small or totally private ceremony. Become domestic partners instead of spouses. Hammer out your own custom relationship contract. There are plenty of ways to customize committed relationships these days.

Dilemma #2: You’re sure you don’t want kids, but you don’t want to be on the pill forever.Consider an IUD, which is all the rage now that better options are available. Or discuss a vasectomy with him — ladies don’t have to carry the entire contraception burden.

Dilemma #3: Money — ugh. We wish we had a cure-all for the ills that can be caused by sharing finances. (If you have one, please let us know.) Mostly, what has worked for us is: staying calm; voicing all of your fears, financial secrets, and concerns as soon as they come up; and checking in with each other frequently to make sure everyone is feeling that things are as equitable as possible. Not equal, but equitable — one partner’s bound to make more than the other, but as long as the contributions to the household feel balanced, that’s all that matters.

Dilemma #4: Chores — also ugh. This is loaded with particularly feminist implications, what with the whole history of women doing all the housework. We’d never advocate dropping your feminism, but just beware that your feminism can push you into irrational territory here. We can sometimes tend to load doing the dishes or cooking dinner with the resentment of our female ancestors when, well, someone has to do dishes and cook dinner, and sometimes it might have to be you. Again, as long as things feel balanced between the two of you, that’s what’s important.

Dilemma # 5: Putting motherhood before your career. Let’s be clear once and for all: “having it all” is a nonsense term that exists solely to guilt women into feeling like failures if they don’t master the impossible task of a soaring career, a hot-and-steamy romantic life and supermomdom. If you decide to have children, you get to decide what balance is best for your family. And if that means taking a break from your hard-earned career, yes, you’ll miss it (and you should), but it doesn’t have to be forever. And the job of taking care of a child and raising him or her to be a conscious, valuable member of the world population is the hardest and most important job in the world. It’s something to be proud of.

Two years ago, I convinced my girlfriend at the time to read Dan Savage’s The Commitment.

I figured what was basically a treatise about passionately fighting for one’s right to wed, by a guy who was so formerly blasé about the idea of marrying his boyfriend of a decade, could convince her that gay marriage was the way of the future. A choice many queers were making, in just about every conceivable fashion (much like our straight counterparts). Besides, we lived in the most exciting city in the world, New York. We shared a love of all things artistic and we knew how to entertain ourselves (and each other) on a shoestring budget. How could our marriage be boring? It would be an adventure, just by the very nature of who we were and where we lived.

Or so I thought.

After she read the book, a switch was flipped. I don’t know if it was the book itself, per se, or if it was our relationship changing to the point where she could envision us sharing a life together. We were already sharing the same apartment, families, vacations, and money.

A short time later, on my birthday, she proposed. And in true egalitarian fashion, I returned the proposal on our anniversary a month later. We exchanged rings. We playfully called each other “wife” and told my family that our rings were not so much “engagement rings” as they were “rings of intention.” (To wit, my cousin’s husband affectionately declared that that is what “straight men should get from their fiancés.”)

But as our euphemisms vaguely suggested, we had no concrete plans, only “intentions.” We had made a deal: We decided we wouldn’t get married until I was finished with my master’s degree or New York state legalized same-sex marriage. Three months after we broke up, our beloved state did in fact do just that. For obvious reasons, it was a bittersweet victory.

On the one hand, I was thrilled for couples who could take that next step—or rather, leap—not only for themselves but for queer people everywhere. I knew this wasn’t the end of the battle, but clearly we had made some kind of progress. And then came the resentment. And the anger. And the pain. And the shock of having my life turned upside down, ushering in a new—and what I perceived as cold—world order.

Suddenly, 28 felt old. It felt left behind. I found myself keeping score, comparing the accomplishments of my 20-something counterparts to my own like never before. Suddenly, nothing I was doing or had done was good enough. With gay marriage, it seems, comes the immediate pressure every straight woman feels: Get married, or die alone.

The hilarious irony in all this is that when I was a teenager, I assumed I would settle down later in life (even before I realized I was gay), in my early to mid-30s perhaps. When I was 15 I guess I thought this sounded like the trajectory of a worldly person, someone who goes on crazy adventures before meeting the love of her life and buying that house in the country, maybe even contacting a sperm bank and preparing second-parent adoption papers. But in the reality of my situation, that trajectory no longer felt like something to desire.

I had had my adventures, I thought. And dammit, I was still having them—I took the plunge (finally!) to get my MFA, I changed jobs after several years’ worth of misery, I traveled, I had a lease on my own apartment in Manhattan. I had made amazing stuff happen—and the bulk of it with a loving, supportive partner by my side.

See, the problem was that I thought I had found someone who would be there through all the new and exciting pursuits as well as the day-in, day-out sometimes-drudgery of routine. I didn’t feel tied down, I felt wide open and released. I believed it was to the credit of our rock solid relationship—meanwhile, giving myself no credit whatsoever.

When our relationship ended, I even found myself using the term “divorce.” I mean, after all, that’s kind of what it was. There was the dividing of possessions and money owed and repaid. And of course, there was the emotional dividing as well.

It was the closest thing to marriage I have ever experienced. And with gay marriage, alas, comes gay divorce.

Even after all the heartache and struggle and therapy sessions, I would still do it all again. I still want to take that leap of faith. Keeping two people together, whether it’s two women or a man and woman or two men, is a monumental feat not to be taken lightly. And what I gained in those three years is invaluable, but I also gained something from our ending.

I realized I do take care of myself—and not just in typical adult manner (bill paying, food buying, appointment scheduling , etc.). I’m learning about my limits; when to reach out for help and when to take my own advice; how to bestow generosity but not to a fault; how to assuage my fears and doubts without any added reassurance. I may have even figured out how to forgive myself.

Because I’m a poet myself and because I think poetry can represent the truest form of expression, I’d like to share this excerpt from “This Deepening Takes Place Again” by Emily Kendal Frey. She writes: “If losing me / is the worst thing to happen, / your life is still a good life.”

Yes, it is.