Like Someone in Love: Marriage, Motherhood, and What It Means When You Don’t Follow the Script
“She used to imagine her wedding day almost like everyone else: white dress, beaming bride, the look in his eyes, the promise of “us forever”. Somewhere deep in that fantasy was the assumption: marriage, children: that’s what makes a life complete.
But as she stood before the mirror, she found herself wondering: is this what I want, or what I’ve been told I want? Am I embracing love, or am I stepping into a role carefully constructed by others?”
In my series Like Someone in Love, I explored that tension: the romantic expectations women carry, the questions that sometimes go unsaid, the judgements that linger when one deviates from “the script”. The series unfolds as a young woman prepares for her wedding, embodying the role of a bride deeply in love. Yet, amidst the anticipation, she finds herself questioning whether this path is truly her own desire or a construct imposed by society.
And reading Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington recently helped me see how broad this struggle is: how the pressure to be married, to become a mother is tangled in culture, in gender, in identity. What if freedom lay not just in following love, but in defining on your own terms what love, marriage, motherhood even mean?
Even in an age of independence and choice, a silent judgment lingers: if a woman is not married, not planning children, is something missing?
Is she incomplete, selfish, or simply unloved?
Women Without Kids: Naming the Silence
Ruby Warrington speaks of the “unsung sisterhood” of women who live outside the motherhood narrative.
She writes of the guilt and judgement that arise when women step away from the expected path, revealing how deeply pro-natalist ideals shape our lives.
Her book does not frame non-motherhood as lack, but as a life complete on its own terms. She shows how women who live child-free (and not child-less), by chance, by choice, by circumstance, are judged for not performing the expected femininity. It invites a radical thought: that fulfilment is not measured by marriage certificates or birth announcements, but by the freedom to define one’s own meaning.
Marriage, Love, Autonomy
To question marriage or motherhood is not to reject love. It is to ask whether love must always be bound by a contract or expressed through parenting.
When women choose partnership, or choose children, or choose neither, each decision is an act of authorship in a story too often written by others.
Imagining Different Futures
The quiet revolution lies in recognising that a woman’s value is not conditional.
Fulfilment can mean a wedding and a nursery; or a studio, a passport, a book-filled flat, a life textured by friendships and projects and desires entirely her own.
The question is not whether she will be loved, but whether she will be free.
The bride in Like Someone in Love remains poised, her decision unseen. Whether she walks down the aisle or steps away is less important than the fact that the choice belongs to her.
In that quiet assertion lies a different kind of romance: the love of a life authored by the woman who lives it.
Reading List & References
For those who wish to explore these themes more deeply, these books expand the conversation:
- Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood🔗– Ruby Warrington
A thoughtful exploration of non-motherhood and the social pressures around reproduction. - All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation 🔗– Rebecca Traister
A historical and cultural look at how unmarried women have shaped modern society. - No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood🔗– Edited by Henriette Mantel
Personal essays from writers who chose to remain child-free. - Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life Without Children 🔗– Jeanne Safer
An early but still resonant work on living fully without motherhood. - Women Don’t Owe You Pretty 🔗– Florence Given
A bold manifesto against the expectations (beauty, relationships, validation) that trap women in predefined roles. - How to Be a Woman 🔗– Caitlin Moran
Memoir and feminist essay exploring the messy, funny, liberating reality of defining womanhood for oneself.
