CHAPTER 1

Something Old, Something New:Refashioning the Wedding Vow and Ceremony

Caught in the swirling actions, thoughts, and journeys of others, we lose touchwith our breath, our bodies, and the grounding center within us. All who havelost their way, come. Serenity awaits you here. Rediscover the way home.

Several high school and college-aged young women told their stories on Oprah!the other day. Caught in the life-threatening swirls of possessive, jealous, andcontrolling boyfriends, these women represent, according to statistics, one outof every four young American women. Whirling in a chaos not their own, unable toget their bearings, some had lost years of their lives—important, irreplaceableyears. While their classmates were testing the limits of their intellectualcapacities and exploring their interests and curiosities in order to discern adirection, a calling, a career, a focus for their astounding life energy andpotential, these young women lost all interest in themselves, their friends,their studies, and their futures. They told us about the contraction of theirlives to meet the demands, fulfill the expectations, and obey the dictates oftheir jealous lovers:

"He tells me whom I can see and whom I can't see."

By the time they are seventeen many young women have surrendered their ambitionsto a growing need for affection and their autonomy to an emotional dependence onthe approval and good will of others. At seventeen the young woman is well onher way to being a formula female.

—Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye

"I have to check in with him on the hour or he gets angry."

"He broke my pager so no one else can contact me."

"He wants me to dress a certain way based on his preferences. I have no choicein the matter."

"If another boy talks to me, he holds me responsible. He is very jealous. Ican't have male friends."

I was horrified as they told their stories. How can this happen in 1999, whenMadeleine Albright is negotiating humanitarian interventions and peaceagreements around the world, when the players of the Women's National BasketballAssociation are inspiring a generation of Title IX young women, and when Oprahherself is offering women and girls transformational resources daily on nationalTV? How can this be in so-called postfeminist America, where we're told all thebattles have been won and true gender equality is at hand? Oprah asked theresident "expert" my question. The expert reminded the audience that one out offour adult women is in an abusive relationship—like mother, like daughter. Moreprofoundly, young women in our culture are convinced by the age of twelve thatthe pursuit and maintenance of a relationship with a man should be their numberone life priority, a priority that can easily turn into an obsession with life-threateningconsequences. How can this be? And yet there it was, poignantlyportrayed on national TV—out of four young women were facing the same oldchallenges in 1999 as there counterparts had in 1969, 1959, 1949.

I posed my question to three young women in high school: "Hasn't anything reallychanged for you? Were all our efforts to make your way less turbulent, moreself-respecting, in vain?" They reminded me of the magazines they read, the adsthey see, and the music they hear daily—words and images proclaiming withgreater tenacity and effectiveness than the images of women in the StateDepartment, on basketball courts, and yes, more loudly even than the woman-affirmingprogramming of Harpo Productions, that girls need to be saved and thatboys are the saviors. Hannah spoke for all of them: "If we became as powerful asMadeleine Albright or as smart as Oprah Winfrey, what man would ever want us?Boys like girls who don't have it all together, girls who know they need to besaved."

It's important for girls to explore the impact the culture has on their growthand development. They all benefit from, to use an old-fashioned term,consciousness raising. Once girls understand the effects of the culture on theirlives, they can fight back. They learn that they have conscious choices to makeand ultimate responsibility for those choices. Intelligent resistance keeps thetrue self alive.

—Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

I asked Hannah, Juliet, and Jennifer if the words of a woman who attended highschool forty years ago in 1959 described their experience today: "I expected mento save me from loneliness, social disapproval, boredom, failure, and mechanicalbreakdowns. I have treated men as godlike. This never seemed wrong to me sinceI've been surrounded by women who go to extremes to please their men at allstages of life." Yes, they told me, young women today expect their boyfriends tosave them from the same things. They added "being homeless" and "harassment fromother boys" to the list and then laughed nervously. Jennifer explained,"Sometimes the savior becomes the harasser. All of us have friends whose liveshave been threatened by their boyfriends." I asked why girls don't leave whenthe relationship becomes abusive. Juliet answered, "Respectability comes fromhaving a boyfriend whether he's nice or mean. To leave is shameful and sometimesdangerous. And it's not all that different for our moms. I asked my mom to leaveher second husband over and over again. It's obvious he's using her and I don'tfeel comfortable around him. She really doesn't believe she can survive withouta man. I've stopped asking."

Any transitional time in a girl's life is a delicate opportunity for growth, atime of heightened vulnerability which signals the emergence of a potentialstrength. Ritual affirmation at these critical junctures helps her cross thenext developmental threshold.

—Virginia Beane Rutter,Celebrating Girls

One young women didn't make it to Oprah! that day to tell her story. Instead herfather told viewers about the night she was picked up by her boyfriend. Theydrove to his apartment for a "breaking up" ritual, returning each other's CDsand other valuable items exchanged during their relationship. This sweet youngwoman believed they could remain friends, right up until her final breath. With"If I can't have you, no one else will," her life was taken by a possessivelover. Her precious spirit lives on in her father's ministry among young womenand...