Ep #239: Who Told You Your Worth Depends on Being Chosen?

Sonia Wright (00:43)
You are listening to the Midlife Sex Coach for Women podcast, episode 239. Woo-hoo! Hello, hello, hello, Diamond. So good to be here.

and I’m coming to you from a somewhat unusual place in terms of I’m not in my studio like I normally am. I am actually in Ashland, Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

and absolutely loving it. And it has been fantastic and also fascinating. So over the last few days, I’ve watched two very different stories unfold.

Two very different plays. So one was The Taming of the Shrew, and that was written by William Shakespeare back in the late 1500s. So basically 400 to 500 years ago. And then the other play was Emma, written by Jane Austen. And that was written in the late 1800s. So that’s getting to like 100, 140, 50 years ago.

And they’re different authors in different centuries. And the topic, the protagonists, I guess you would call it, are different women, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the differences and the similarities. There’s one thing, and at almost the exact same time I was watching these plays unfold, I was also coaching a woman on one of my diamonds on my WhatsApp.

application community. So she wasn’t asking about Shakespeare and she wasn’t talking about Jane Austen, but she was touching on a topic that is so much deeper, but also connects to the topic of these plays as well. which her question is really essentially, what is my value if I’m not in a relationship?

And suddenly it hit me. 500 years later, we’re still asking different versions of the same question. Do I have a value as a woman if I’m not in a relationship? Like they have different words for it, old maid and spinster or whatever, but it all has a negative connotation. I have to say.

That I really admire this younger generation that’s coming along because they’re upending concepts of spinsterhood and do you need to be in a relationship or not? And they’re actively choosing not to be in relationships, a number of them. They’re choosing not necessarily to have children. That’s a an and sometimes the choice is being made for them because it’s so expensive out there. Like if you if it costs $3,000 for a one-bedroom apartment.

you don’t have the extra three thousand dollars available to pay for daycare. So a lot of younger women are choosing their breath of life. Some of them are choosing to get married, some of them are choosing to be in relationships, and some of them are choosing to be in solo relationships with themselves. But we tend to come from a generation where we are still actively questioning our value based on if we’re in a relationship or not. So when Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew.

Society looked completely different. Like women couldn’t vote, women didn’t have jobs outside of the quote unquote home. but now as we’re talking about this, we also need to take into consideration. We’re talking about different levels of socioeconomic levels, right? So the poorest women have always worked and will always work, right? but these stories, Emma

Taming the Shrew, they’re all looking at a certain level, socio and economic level. And at this level, women were not necessarily allowed to work. very often they weren’t allowed to really be educated in the same way their male counterparts would. And so for many women, and and let’s not forget that women could not own property. and so

Marriage wasn’t simply about romance and love and looking into each other’s eyes. For many women, it was about survival. Being chosen wasn’t just emotionally important, it was determining your economic future, your social standing, your security. And that was during you know the Shakespeare times. But if we move along to Jane Austen and the 1800s, then

The world has changed and yet it hasn’t. Marriage is still a center to a number of women’s future. As I said before, depending on your socioeconomic status. If you’re poor, marriage might be important, but survival and like getting a job and milking the cows and and doing all those things become very important to you too. But we’re talking at a soccer socioeconomic level where women were not allowed to quote unquote work outside the home.

Right. So even though Emma has far more agency than Catherine in the taming of the shrew or Katarina, the question remains the same.

Who will I marry?

Who is considered desirable? Who belongs? Who has value? And even though they’re centuries apart, there’s the same underlying story. And even I I say in our generation, you know, there still is this underlying belief that our value is associated with if we’re in a relationship or not. And like we get to get rid of this concept. So I go to this play, Taming of the Shrew.

And then I go and see Emma the next day. And then I open my phone. And one of the women in this WhatsApp community was struggling. Not because she didn’t know how intelligent she is. She’s amazing intelligent and beautiful and wonderful and all those different things. Not because she wasn’t successful, she’s amazingly successful.

And not because she isn’t kind. She simply wondered, Am I enough every not partnered?

And I really wanted to reach through that phone and tug her.

Because I know she’s not alone. She’s not the only one that’s thinking about this and wondering what her value is. Now I coach executives, I coach teachers, I coach entrepreneurs, I coach physicians, I coach retired women, I coach divorced winner women and widows and women that are happily married and women that are unhappily married, right? I coach women that are in situationships, like all different relationship status. And underneath so many stories is the same belief.

Maybe my worth depends on whether someone else chooses me. Imagine that. Like our worth is based on is somebody choosing us or not? And as I said, that this is changing, definitely for a lot of younger women, they’re choosing, you know, to just have their cat and have their best life.

But still others have been told that their value is tied up in if they’re able to be in a relationship or sustain a relationship. Or some people are choosing to stay in the relationship for economic advantages. There’s a lot of different ways, but there is also an underlying concept of what is my value if I’m not chosen, if I’m not in a relationship.

And here’s the thing, nobody has to sit down and teach us this directly. It’s like everywhere. It’s in movies, it’s in fairy tales, it’s in television, it’s in books, it’s in advertising, like it’s everywhere that we look. And we just cannot necessarily get away from this idea. And so it’s something that we need to talk about. What is our value? Where does our value come from? Right.

Even well-meaning family members will say things like, when you find the right person, when you get married, when you’re dating, when you’re in a relationship, when somebody wants you. it’s interesting. As soon as if you’re going through a divorce, the question is, when are you going to date again? Or when are you going to find your next person? Like you can’t be whole all by yourself. But we need to understand that this is an invisible curriculum that we don’t have to adhere to.

Anymore. We get to give this up and definitely in midlife we get to choose what we want. And this is one of the gifts of midlife. Is that we finally get to ask ourselves, is this actually true? Is this story one that I want to continue to adhere to? Or is this simply a story that was told to me that I didn’t question previously?

Cause here’s what I know. Your value doesn’t increase because someone puts a ring on your finger. my goodness. No. And it doesn’t decrease because somebody takes a ring off your finger. Now I might say this.

It’s shown that if we’re talking about heteronormative relationships and things like that, men live an average of seven to nine years longer if they’re married. And that’s not necessarily true of women. And a lot of if they do a survey in terms of like happiness in women, a lot of single women are very happy, you know, because they’re not taking care of everybody else. They’re actually

Prioritizing themselves. Now, I’m not saying to give up your relationship in order to be happy, but I am saying don’t tie your value and your happiness to whether or not you’re in a relationship. You choose to be in that relationship and you can choose to stay in that relationship. You can choose to nurture that relationship, but still nurture yourself. Recognize that no matter what happens, your life is important and you get to choose it.

right now and you don’t have to listen to old outdated stories. Your worth existed before anyone ever fell in love with you. Your worth existed long before anyone ever chose you.

Your worth, your value is there. It’s just innate. And it exists to this day. And it will exist tomorrow, whether you’re dating or single or married or widowed or divorced or partnered or joyfully choosing yourself in solo partnership, I call it. So really your relationship status does not determine your value in this world. If you’re breathing, you are valuable.

And you also get to choose to be in a relationship. I’m not saying don’t be in a relationship. I am saying don’t tie your value to whether or not you’re in a relationship and choose to stay in a relationship that’s not working for you because you’re concerned that your value will decrease. Right?

And you may be wondering why the midlife sex coach is talking so much about this. But you need to understand that value and intimacy begin long before being in the bedroom.

If you don’t value yourself, if you don’t think you have worth, how you show up in the bedroom really reflects your self-worth and your value and how you think of yourself. So if you secretly believe your worth depends on being chosen, then you’ll often tolerate relationships that don’t honor you at all. You may ignore your own desires.

You may stay quiet instead of speaking up honestly about what you want and what’s happening in this relationship. You may confuse being wanted with being valued. Those are not the same thing. Being desired is wonderful. Being loved is beautiful, but neither creates your worth. They simply reflect it.

They simply reflect it. And if I’m saying like being loved and desired like by yourself is the most important gift that you can give yourself. So what if we stopped asking who will choose me? And what if instead we asked, How do I choose myself? How do I become someone I genuinely enjoy spending time with? How do I honor my body? How do I create pleasure? How do I cultivate friendships?

How do cultivate purpose? How can I look at joy? How can I focus on adventure? Because here’s something that’s really fascinating. The healthiest relationships are usually built upon two or more people who already know their value. So imagine two choices, right? Two people coming into a relationship where one or both people do not value themselves. They’re going to

agree to things that they don’t necessarily want they may end up feeling resentment and anger but not really voicing it they may be acquiescing quite a bit they may be focused on other person’s needs and not their own that is not the basis for a good relationship but then imagine two or more people coming together in a relationship who value themselves if you have respect for yourself you generally have respect for other people

And so now you’re both showing up as your best self, and you’re also showing up with respect and honor for the other individual. And that is a completely different relationship. And it’s one that’s built on a solid foundation, not on people pleasing because you want, you desperately need something from the relationship. You two are choosing to enter the relationship just because, just so you can have that experience.

Just so you can experience love and connection and joy and pleasure and all those things. But not coming from a place where you need something from the other person. And if you don’t get it from the other person and it reflects badly on you, like there’s something wrong with you. That’s not necessarily what a relationship is all about. So

As I sit here in Ashton, Oregon, and it’s such a beautiful place. And as I enjoy the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and you all definitely need to check it out, I’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m realizing something. These plays may be hundreds of years old.

But we don’t have to keep living their script. You don’t have to do this. History explains where our beliefs came from, but we get to choose what our beliefs are now. And these belief systems from the past don’t have to determine where we’re going in the future. So maybe this is the generation of women that finally write a new story. The story we’re

Our value isn’t based on being chosen. Or if it is being based on being chosen, it is because we have chosen ourselves. And no matter what happens in our lives, when we have our own back and we choose ourselves, there’s nothing that we can’t accomplish. And that value is there. And you get to go out into this world and choose your best life. You’re not trying to play small in order to get somebody else’s approval.

Such that they choose you.

You don’t have to worry about that.

You get to choose

A place and a relationship where intimacy begins with the relationship that we have with ourselves. And I think that’s so amazing. And we get to offer that to ourselves. All righty. I think that’s a story that’s worth telling. Maybe the women in the past didn’t necessarily have all the choices, but we do have the choices today. And thank God for all that’s happened in our lives and over the hundreds of years. So we can

make choices. But now that we have the ability to choose, choose ourselves. Choose ourselves and do not put our value based on who chooses us. Unless we do put the value on the person that chose me was myself. So this week I want you to notice something. Whenever you hear this little voice saying, Am I enough? Pause and ask yourself another question. Who taught me that I wasn’t enough?

Yeah. And it’s not about blame. You know, I don’t want you to sit there lingering like, Yeah, who taught me I wasn’t enough? But you get to get to that place where you’re like, I actually am enough and I always have been.

And also recognize the chances are that story wasn’t written by you, it was planted in your mind by somebody else. And you get to erase that and write your own story. You don’t have to keep living somebody else’s story. All right, Diamonds. Thank you so much for spending time with me. And until next time, remember you deserve intimacy, connection, pleasure, and joy. Not because somebody else says that you are worthy and valuable, but because

Because you already are. Okay, Diamonds. So good.

Alrighty. So if this episode resonated with you, this is exactly the kind of work that we’re doing inside the Diamond Intimacy Collective. Together, we’re questioning the stories that we inherited about value, about desire, about relationships, about aging, and what it means to be a woman in midlife. We’re replacing the old scripts.

with ones that are rooted in self-worth, pleasure, connection, and choice. So if you’re thinking about joining the collective, now is the time. The founding membership price is just $355 and it ends on August 1st. So on August 1st, I have been offering so much value within the Diamond Intimacy Collective and that has not been reflected in the price. And the price is going to be going up to $997 for the year.

Or $97 a month. But as a bonus for the founding members, you get to be part of my inaugural live reignite intimacy program. That is a 12-week program where we are going to touch on all these different concepts and we’re going to get you to that place where you are valuing yourself, where you are educated around your body, around pen perimenopause, upon menopause, around sex, around all of these different issues.

And

Reignite program. It starts September 20th. This is the first time in two years that I have offered, two years or longer, that I have offered a 12-week online group coaching program. Myself and Coach Dono will be leading this program. And this is the only time it’s going to be offered this year. And I honestly don’t know when I’m going to offer it again next year because it is a commitment.

Like showing up every single week for 12 weeks, at a time in my life where I have a lot going on, but you matter to me. And doing this work matters because I’m recognizing I can tell you everything about sex, I can tell you all those things. But if you’re not comfortable releasing the shame, educating yourself, prioritizing yourself, figuring out what pleasure looks like for you, figuring out what midlife in this body.

That you have that’s going through all the hormone changes. If you’re not able to focus on those type of things, I can show you as many sex toys or I can show you as many positions or whatever. But this is about you and how you become the woman that creates the amazing sexual intimacy over the next 30 years and how you get flexible. So the link is in the show notes.

August 1st is the cutoff date to be a founding member at the 355 price. After that, it’s gonna go up. And the Rig Night program is an amazing bonus that’s in the Diamond Intimacy Collective. That is gonna be separated out and it’s gonna be not offered as part of the Diamond Intimacy Collective after that date. So already. I love my founding members. I love my diamonds. And for me, this is something that is personal.

I want to be there for you and I want to offer you like a no brainer offer if that makes sense. Like my diamonds have always been there and you are fabulous and amazing. And I want to be there for you too. So click on the link, put the code in founder 355 F O U N D E R 355 355. Put it in the checkout. There’s a place for the coupon. and instead of the 997 price for a year, the Diamond Intimacy Collective.

you will get the year the Diamond Intimacy Collective for $355. And that also you will be helping to create the Reignite program. I’m going to be asking you questions. I’m going to be checking in with you to make sure that you’re getting your needs met and we can create the best 12-week program to help you to create that intimacy that you deserve. Okay. Until next time, Diamonds,