This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz

Author:Lyz Lenz [Lenz, Lyz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

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The choice I did have was a choice of what I could wear. A couple of weeks before the wedding, I rented a dress from Rent the Runway. It was a flowing purple dress, with a plunging neckline and side cutouts. It looked good on my misery-toned body.

I’d never worn anything that sexy before. Honestly, I’d never even really tried to be sexy before. Of course, there were the Halloween parties in college where I dressed up in my friend’s pleather pants with a cropped Hard Rock of London T-shirt and went as a sexy rock star. (I know, but it was college.)

But I had not ever truly embodied my sexuality. I’d been raised to simultaneously believe both that I was not the pretty one, I was the smart one; and that if I had been pretty, it was a curse. And I got married right out of college.

In the last years of our marriage, I subscribed to a lingerie-of-the-month club, hoping to inspire some creativity in our love life. But the lingerie was cheap and itchy, and I felt uncomfortable performing for someone else’s fantasies that always seemed half formed. What about you but in a necklace and underwear vacuuming? Okay, I would do that. But what about my own fantasies? But even if he’d asked that question, I had no idea how to answer it.

The last time we had sex was his birthday. We spent the night fighting. And when we finally had sex, I felt empty and shelled out. I was just a body. A flesh bag used for another person’s pleasure. After he was done, I sat on the couch and cried. I wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t separate myself from my body just for the enjoyment of someone else.

The purple dress was for me a way of saying that I wanted to be a body. That I wanted pleasure. I wanted to be happy. There had been no affair. No sort of awakening. It just wasn’t working. I couldn’t hold it all together. So, I put on a sexy purple dress and went to my brother’s wedding.

A woman’s life can be defined by the clothes she wears. What remains of history’s great women, from Hatshepsut to Jackie Kennedy? Clothes and jewelry in museums. Clothes aren’t just how we find our place in our lives; they’re often all we’re remembered for after we die.

Even so, Western culture hates a woman who spends money and time on her clothes and appearance. They mock her for being frivolous. They scold her for narcissism and/or hypocrisy. (Remember Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits? The time several national media outlets wrote think pieces on Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s hair after it was revealed she got a $300 haircut and lowlights at a midrange salon in D.C.?)

But clothes are more than just frivolous accoutrements to the more serious work of living. In a world where women seldom have the freedom to say what we need to say in the exact right way

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