contraband 🔺 (BearIsDead arc)

WOMEN WERE NEVER DESIGNED FOR MARRIAGE They were designed for community. For roughly 95% of human history, a woman’s primary environment was female. Not her husband. Women. When a woman gave birth, she wasn’t alone with a husband. She was surrounded by women who had done it before. There was always someone holding the baby. Someone cooking the food. Someone gathering the herbs. Someone carrying the water. A child did not belong to two people. A child belonged to the village. Girls learned womanhood by living beside women. Watching them bleed. Give birth. Breastfeed. Grieve. Love. Age. Before books, women were the books. Before universities, women were the education. Before experts, women were the wise ones. The female body evolved inside a living web of grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties, midwives, and friends, not inside a detached nuclear family. A man contributes one cell. A woman contributes her entire body. Life asks something very different of women. Her physiology is literally organized around giving life away. This is why women gathered. Not because they were social, but because creating life was too great a burden to carry alone. And for 95% of human history, a woman rarely carried life alone. When she bled, women understood. When she gave birth, women arrived. When she grieved, women sat beside her. Modern romance sold women a beautiful lie: That one man could replace a village. Women were taught to compete with the very people they once depended on for survival. And something ancient was lost. Most women think they’re grieving a relationship. I think they’re grieving a civilization. And the body never stopped looking for its way home. ✨🙌🏾💫