Just All Alone And Depressed

Hi Rose. Please don’t give up. It’s awful that you have to go through this at all and to go through it alone. Yesterday, I told my mother that in some places females are still forced to marry. I’m in the U.S.A. and while homosexuals don’t have many legal rights, it’s no longer a crime.

You are 30 years old and have a job so maybe you could spend less time or no time with your parents and refuse to see the men they try to set you up with. Maybe you could save enough money and leave there. Perhaps go online and see what jobs in your field to apply for in other places.

Here is a URL to a lesbian message board where you can post messages and talk to different women. I’m a member there and you can join and talk with us and maybe not feel so alone.

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messages&webtag=ab-lesbianlife

Please hold on.

–Salty

i live in the US now but i’m african, so i know all about living in a culture where you define yourself in relation to how others see you. But you’re 30 now and you have a job so you can take of yourself. It’s time to see yourself as the whole, independent, able being that you are. I’m not saying you should reject collectivism all together and become 100% individualistic, but i AM saying you have to love yourself and know that you deserve to be accepted as the person you are. You’re so concerned about your parents and they need to feel the same about you, they should be concerned with what makes you happy as opposed to what looked good to other people. Tell them you love them dearly and you want them to love you for who you are. Tell them you do not want to be married and that you hope they can live with it but it they don’t want to stick around you’ll understand. Believe me, they have to feel the tough love. They have to know that you can make decisions about your life and stick with those decisions. You can no longer act like a passive reaction to their decisions. It’s your life, you’re the one that’s going to have to live with that man and sleep in his bed every night, so you will make decisions about it. You can still speak up and keep them in your life, you just have to do it calmly and nicely so that they know it’s not an attack on them but a determination to redirect your life as an adult. Be mentally prepared to have a period of time when they may not want anything to do with you (hopefully you’ll find a good woman or reliable friends to help you get through it), but eventually, if they deserve to have such a brave daughter, they will come around. I’d also suggest looking for a job elsewhere, where you can be you and the world can discover the real you.
Good luck with everything honey.

I am so moved by your situation and just wanted to write. I am so glad you are looking for some help by posting and reading, to me that means that you care about yourself and are willing to protect yourself. Protecting yourself is going to have good long term consequences for your family and even the person you are engaged to. They might not see it now, because they may be a little (or a lot) confused. You can’t help that but you can refuse to walk into a situation that you know puts you all at risk for very devastating things. By protecting yourself, you are ultimately protecting your entire family system. You owe it to the strength and health of your family to be honest with yourself and others about what is being demanded, and to protect yourself. Integrity takes awhile to pay off sometimes, but in my experience it always does.

I don’t know if you yourself ever imagine having kids. If you imagine having a daughter of your own– you would never wish this on her. If you want to be a good mother someday you have to learn how to protect yourself, and by extension her, from these forces can that lead people to harm themselves and others.

Just a few of my thoughts– I am holding you and your family in my heart.

PS another thought– you don’t necessarily need to tell them about your sexual orientation in order to resist getting married. You can tell them you feel a strong call to be single. Are their female heroes in your country or culture who were unmarried– Joan of Arc figures or writers like the Brontë sisters or nuns like Mother Theresa, women who went their own way but who are thought of as heroes of some kind. If you can find a woman like that in your culture who you identify with in some way, then maybe you can use her as an example to your parents about how it is that you feel called to live. You can try to show that there is another future for you besides marriage.

Once you have fended off marriage then you can look at the question of possibly moving to another country or living out your true sexual identity, but you don’t need to do everything at once.

I only say this because you talked about homosexuality being criminal where you live. In addition to protecting yourself from a coerced marriage, you also have to protect yourself from any possible consequences that could come down on you from the state or from others outside your family. So please think very carefully about how you manage this. We all want you to keep yourself healthy and sometimes being smart about what you reveal, when you reveal it and so on is a very protective strategy.

Many blessings to you.