A feminist fairy tale

Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Jane. Jane was a college student and she was dating a young man who lived on the other side of town, where he went to the other college in town. Jane didn’t like to drive and had a horrible sense of direction, so she let her boyfriend drive whenever they went out. She also shared her apartment with roommates, while her boyfriend had an apartment to himself, so usually when they stayed together, she stayed at his place. It was easier for her to park at his place than vice versa, and he had to leave for school earlier than she did, so it made sense. It all made sense. But it still bothered her, every once in a while, that she had to split her belongings across the two apartments. She never seemed to have the right clothes with her. She had spent so much time stocking her kitchen with all the right things, only to end up making do with what her boyfriend had while her tools gathered dust and her milk spoiled. But she adjusted. It was too much fun spending time with her boyfriend for her to change the situation.

Then one night, Jane’s boyfriend picked her up to go to the movies. Jane wouldn’t have known how to get there anyway, since she hardly ever drove anywhere besides the grocery store and her boyfriend’s apartment anymore. Sure, she could have mapquested it, but it was easier to have her boyfriend pick her up, and that’s the normal thing to do anyway, right?

After the movie they spent the night at her boyfriend’s apartment. They snuggled together happily as they fell asleep. The next morning, her boyfriend went off to school early while she stayed in bed, having finished her classes for the semester. Finally she got up and got ready and gathered her things to go back to her apartment. She went to the parking lot and looked around, but her car wasn’t there. She remembered that her boyfriend had driven the night before. Normally when that happened he would drop her off at school in the morning, but she didn’t have school that day, so they hadn’t planned for that. Her boyfriend was now in the middle of a lot of work, and too busy to leave before evening.

“Shit,” she thought. She knew it was too much to ask of her boyfriend for him to take her home then, but she had planned to work on things in her apartment and spend time with her roommates. She didn’t get to see her roommates much since she had been spending so much time at her boyfriend’s apartment. Suddenly, she remembered that there was a bus from one college to the other. She quickly looked up the information and planned to make the next bus. She learned the names of streets that she had walked with her boyfriend, but not known herself, since she had never had to navigate them on her own. She was determined to start taking back responsibility for her own transportation, and this was the first step.

She got to the bus stop ten minutes early and waited twenty minutes past the time the bus was supposed to come. It never came. She spent the rest of the day in her boyfriend’s apartment, waiting for him to get home.

The moral of the story is: keep control over your own life, even when that means doing more work (like figuring out directions, or driving your boyfriend to school sometimes). And don’t trust buses to be on time.