Hello, ladies. Long time lurker, first time poster (but I’ve commented on other people’s posts on here before). Anyway, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always been the kind of woman who’s been pro-childfree, anti-heterosexual marriage (specifically for myself), anti-nuclear family white picket fence fantasy. Even as a young girl, I knew that stuff was BS. My mindset wasn’t always a feminist one, though. It was more so along the lines of “I don’t want anyone else living in my house”, which is still true to this day. I grew up in a small two-story home with many family members, and I longed for the day when I could finally move out and have a space all to myself. I absolutely did NOT want to ruin that peace and tranquility with a husband and kids taking up my precious space.

But as I got older and started having more sexual experiences with men, and started watching my friends date men and seeing what other women went through with men, it hit me that young!me was onto something early on even if I didn’t really understand why I felt that way. Now that I’m older, it’s become so much easier for me to detach myself from men who aren’t worth my time. I don’t try to maintain failing relationships with guys. I just let them run their course and end things, never speaking to the guy again. I don’t even argue with men when they don’t act right. I just block their number/block them on social media and move on with my life. And I definitely feel like growing up knowing that I never wanted kids or a husband made those steps easier for me. Because, for me personally, I’m not talking to men with the intention of finding a long-term partner. I talk to men whenever I want sex and/or companionship, and if a dude is failing in either areas I kick him to the curb and don’t think twice about it because I never plan on having any guy stay in my life permanently.

From what I watched growing up, and the stories I’ve heard from the women I know, not wanting to be a mother or a wife has definitely saved me from a lot of men’s nonsense. Watching women in my family endure men’s BS because they have the fantasy of a life-long marriage with a man, complete with kids and a home, really bothered me when I was younger because these women were so capable, and yet they were wasting so much of their time, energy, and youth on a man who still treated them like crap. Stuff that I watched my own mother go through with men made me promise myself to NEVER be so desperate to be a wife that I lose all sense of self-respect.

Now that I’ve found FDS and have better techniques for throwing away trash men and only giving men who benefit me my time, I definitely feel like I’m in a better place as a woman in my early 20s than my mother was when she was my age. I try to impart some words of wisdom to her every now and again, but my mom is one of those women who do not think her life is important enough unless she’s some man’s wife. No matter what I say about how she keeps giving too much of herself to men, she won’t listen. She wants to be a wife, first and foremost, and she will continue doing anything men want as long as she thinks they’ll put a ring on her finger. I hate watching it happen, but she’s a grown woman and I have done the best that I can to get her to understand that she goes way too above and beyond for men who don’t even treat her with respect. So I’m just hoping I don’t repeat her mistakes. I feel like I’m on the right track.