Submission Is Not the Word You Think It Is

You didn't like the title. I know.

Maybe you rolled your eyes at it in a bookstore. Maybe a friend sent it to you and you typed back 3 question marks. Maybe you bought it angry, the way you'd buy a ticket to an argument.

Good. Stay.

Because before we go anywhere together, there's something we have to fix, and it isn't your opinion. It's one word.

Submission.

You have a definition of it. I have a different one. We're about to spend a few hundred pages with that word sitting between us, and if I don't put mine on the table right now, you'll spend the whole book arguing with a woman who doesn't exist.

So let me tell you what you're picturing when you read it.

A woman apologizing when someone else steps on her foot. A girl going quiet at a dinner table while a man finishes her sentence for her. A bruise with an explanation attached. A kitchen in 1954. A pew. A contract in a bad novel, signed by a billionaire with a helicopter and unresolved issues.

I'm not going to tell you those women don't exist. They do. I've sat across from them, and I got closer to that life than you'd guess from a title like this one.

I'm just not writing about any of them.

* * *

Here's the part that will annoy you: you're not wrong about that picture. You've just got the wrong name on it.

The thing you're picturing has a name already, and the name is coercion. It happens to a woman. It arrives without her permission, usually early, usually from someone who had power over her before she had any of her own. It makes her smaller every year she stays inside it. I have no interest in defending it, and nobody who has lived next to it ever confuses it with a choice.

What this book is about is something a woman does. On purpose, with her eyes open, and it makes her bigger.

That distinction is the entire book. Everything else is just me, showing my work.

And it is a story, not a manifesto. I tried writing the argument first. It was unreadable, so I scrapped it and wrote the life instead. What follows is what happened to me, in the order it happened.

* * *

I'll give you the 3 conditions. If a dynamic is missing even one of them, we are no longer talking about what I mean by the word, and you should feel free to be as angry about it as you were on page 1.

1. It has to make her bigger. I was not free when I met him. I want to be exact about that, because it's the spot where careful readers get off this train, and they're right to be watching for it. I was looking for a way out of a life I couldn't fix alone, and a man with more money, more experience, and more certainty than me walked into that.

I know exactly what that looks like from the outside, because a reader already told me. She gave the first edition 1 star. She said the first 2 chapters were relatable, and that from the third one on, all she could see was an old man taking advantage of a young broke woman.

She wasn't being cruel, and I have never wanted to argue with her. Holding the definition she was holding, her reading is the correct one. That's the whole problem. She arrived at chapter 3 with the wrong word in her hand, and every page after it rearranged itself to fit.

She's the reason this page exists.

So don't test the starting point. Almost no woman starts free. Test the direction.

Coercion takes doors away. One a year, quietly, until leaving isn't thinkable anymore. That's not a moral judgment, it's the mechanism, and it's the same every time. What happened to me ran the other way. I have more money than I did, more skill, more work of my own, and a book with my name on the cover. He built most of that with me deliberately, because he believes a group is only as strong as its weakest member. Strengthen her and you strengthen everything she belongs to, including him. Everyone carries their own weight, for the good of the whole. That's his rule, not mine. I just benefited from it.

So count. Ask any woman how many doors were open to her the year she met him, and how many are open now. You don't need my definition. You just need to count.

2. It's given to a person, not inherited from a role. Not to men. Not to marriage, not to tradition, not to a god, not to a rule someone handed my mother and my mother handed me. To one specific person, chosen the way you'd choose a business partner or a surgeon, on evidence. I audited him for years, and he never once asked me to stop.

3. It can be withdrawn. This is the one everyone forgets, and it's the one that makes the other 2 true. I chose my cage. I hold the key. A door that only locks is a trap. A door I can open any morning and don't is a home.

* * *

Now the part you weren't expecting.

You already submit to something.

To a career that owns your evenings and calls it ambition. To an algorithm that decides what you find beautiful before you've had coffee. To a mortgage. To your anxiety, which is the most demanding master I've ever met, and the only one that never once told me it was proud of me. To your mother's voice, still running in your head at 30, still scoring you.

None of that is a criticism. It's arithmetic. Human beings are meaning-making animals, and we hand ourselves over to something. Money, a flag, a ring, a diagnosis, a follower count. The question was never whether you submit. It's whether you picked it, whether you can name it, and whether the thing you gave yourself to is worthy of what it's holding.

Most people are submitting to something they never chose, to something that can't love them back, and they call it independence because it doesn't have a face.

I did that for most of my life. It made me anxious, exhausted, and very good at pretending. I ground my teeth down in my sleep. What I have now, I picked deliberately, out loud, with my eyes open, and it has a face and a name, and it gives me an answer when I ask it a question.

That's the trade. That's the whole trade.

* * *

So yes. Submissive women are happier.

Not the ones who had no choice. Those women aren't happier and I would never insult them by saying so. The ones who went looking on purpose, chose with their eyes open, and came out the other side holding more than they walked in with.

That woman is happier. I've been both women, in one lifetime, and I'm telling you which one sleeps better.

You don't have to agree with me by the last page. Plenty of readers get to the end and decide this life is the last thing on earth they'd want, and that is a completely respectable place to land. It means you understood it and declined it, which is more than most people ever do with anything.

All I'm asking is that you argue with the right word.

This one is mine. Bring it with you.

This is how I'd open the book if I wrote it again.

Before you decide what you make of my word, it's worth knowing what you're already obeying. Careers, money, anxiety, what your family will say. Everybody answers to something and most of us never picked it. Ten questions, about two minutes, and nobody sees your result but you. Take the quiz.

And if you'd rather have the story than the questions, what comes after this is a memoir, not a manifesto. Chapter 3 is the one that 1 star reader stopped at, and it's the chapter I give away for free. Read it holding the definition above, and see whether you see what she saw. Read chapter 3.