A woman’s goal for a happy family life might end up in smoke.

I’m a 33-year-old single woman and have had a boyfriend for a year. A year ago I “realized” that being successful in my career, meaning having money, did not make me happy. It felt like I had nothing. I wanted to get married and have a family. I met my boyfriend who is an MD and had just finished his residency.

I thought he was the ideal partner. Wrong! He turned out to be financially irresponsible—he still depends on his parents for money and likes to please his friends by spending more for them. He has no stable income and is too lazy to look for opportunities. This is not the man for me, but I am too weak to break up with him because that would be abandoning my dream of having a family.

I only have ordinary needs and I am just looking for a man who is “normal” and already financially stable. I feel desperate and lonely when I’m not in love. I don’t want to go on a downward spiral as I am weak when it comes to my personal life. If I stay with him—and I’m already thinking this way—I am sure I will just ruin our relationship going forward and lose the friend I have found in him.

WEAK

How do you define family? Father, mother, child? And is he the only man you will ever encounter?

If you have the money to be independent and adamantly focused on having a family, why not have a child without the horrors and pain of having a weak man around you. Don’t you already look at him with alarm, if not contempt, knowing in your heart that you’d have a ruined relationship if you go on with him? You can clearly see the writing on the wall and yet you’re blind to it! Enjoying your suffering?

You’re not going to lose a “friend” by not getting married to him! All you’ll lose is a pain the neck! Period!

The holier-than-thous will go up in arms for this kind of thinking but why not put your money to good use and have that family of two if you really feel desperate! Society forgets such aberrations—like when a single woman decides to have a child on her own alone—more so if she is strong and brave enough to do it. It is already an accepted way of life!

Why be hypocritical about what really goes on and force yourself to concur to that illusion of a “family?” Have you seen the absurd and laughable statistics on the separations and annulments of those who have tried marriage, just to conform to the dictates of a “normal” society? Why join that unhappy merry-go-round when you can start a no-strings, write-your-own-rules life yourself?

Unless you find that man you can respect who will stand as your equal in thought and word, then go for it! Otherwise, think geometry that teaches that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. How honest and straightforward do you want your life to be?

E-mail the author at [email protected] or [email protected]. Please visit my one-woman painting exhibit, “Landscapes in Oil,” at Chef Jessie’s Rockwell Club in Rockwell, Makati, until Feb. 7.