When Did Acts of Love Become a Threat to Feminism?

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Just a week into our marriage, my husband asked me to bring him a towel while he was in the shower. I remember making a face when he asked. It wasn’t like bringing him a towel was some huge inconvenience, but I was suddenly reminded of a social media reel I’d seen about how women end up running around the house with no time for themselves after marriage. Is this how it starts? Was I already slipping into that life?

It’s been three years since that day. He somehow never asked for that towel again.

Three years ago, that day, we were still surrounded by our luggage, and the towel was probably just an inconvenient thing to fetch in the middle of unpacking. That’s all it was.

But at that moment, I had started looking at an ordinary request through a completely different lens.

I had no preconceived notions about feminism or gender roles. But around the same time, my social media algorithm seemed to have decided that, now that I was married, I was its target audience for content about everything that could go wrong.