Stop the Wedding and the Weight of Being a Good Girl

I have been listening to this song on repeat, it has become unhealthy. When I hear a song I really like, it's like falling in love. I'm obsessed and infatuated in the beginning. Never wanting to be far from it, talking to everyone I know about how amazing it is. I worry about listening to it so much that it becomes annoying, but I can never quite stop myself from repeating it just one more time. 

The lyrics in this song are what make me keep coming back. They tell us to not become the quiet good girl who is so afraid of disappointing others, she in turn disappoints herself. Choose yourself in spite of everything. The table is set and the guests are waiting, but you can still choose yourself. 

Ashe wrote this for her younger self, the one who didn’t stop the wedding, because she didn’t realise she could. All our lives girls have been taught to be good, to be kind, to be selfless and caring. Whilst those are all important qualities we are rarely told we can be selfish, we can make mistakes, we can put ourselves first. 

Movies, and books, and sometimes, even adults we love and that love us can project this idea. We are taught from a young age that happy endings for girls often involve marriage and babies, and whilst this is what some girls want and desire, others crave something different. We all want the ability to choose a life without judgement. The ability to run towards ourselves and away from expectations and pressures of being perfect. Ashe reminds us that we don’t have to tear our hearts out to fit into this perfect mold, if the love doesn’t fit with us we don’t have to change ourselves to make it work. We can, simply, stop the wedding. 

It feels like she wrote the song for the good girls who were always well-behaved in class, who selflessly put everyone else’s needs before their own, humbled themselves to the point of disappearing. When you are labelled as the ‘good girl’ the weight of responsibility that comes with this is not always visible but it sits there hovering above you, reminding you that you need to work twice as hard to be seen as anything else. You are told that you need to moralise the boys and teach them how to behave, it's no wonder we mature quicker. When a teacher moves a misbehaving boy next to the ‘good girl’ the box is sealed around her, she has to continue being good for the sake of the boy now her expectations have been doubled. It's no wonder we think we have to sacrifice our identities to help them grow, but what about us? What about when you stop moralising, what is left of your own identity that you haven’t poured into them?

I’m not saying that this song tells us never to get married, but it tells us not to get married because that is what we feel we ought to do. To make everyone happy, to fit into what we were told our future should look like. What I am saying is, let's take the responsibility off those young girls and let them be good and bad, teach them they can make mistakes and still be a decent person. Teach boys some responsibility, don’t do them the disservice of shrugging off their behaviour with ‘boys are so immature at that age.’ Teach them better. But for god's sake don’t let slap some little girl who is trying to figure herself out with a label like ‘good' that she will feel forced to live up to and carry around with her for the rest of her life. 

As Mary Oliver says ‘you do not have to be good, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’ So, stop the goddamn wedding if it's not what you want. 

Written by, Macayla Riney-Lucas