Wanting to be married

I was having imaginary dokusan with my teacher (in reality, I was in the shower). In it, we were talking about my fears around who I was, around wearing robes, around being someone at the zen center and he asked me, "What do you want to be?"
I didn't have an answer, and I was surprised by this. I thought I would have an answer that I didn't like or that I wanted to avoid but instead, in my head, it was totally blank. I kept searching for some answer when suddenly the word "married" came out of my mouth. It actually came out, like, I said it in the shower.
As soon as I said it, I was annoyed with myself.
"Great," I said to my teacher with a sarcastic tone. "I don't want to be a buddhist, I don't want to be a zen priest, (please see previous post) but I want to be married. Apparently, I want to be a house wife. I want to be someone's wife. Nice lofty goals for a woman in 2013!"
He just raised an eyebrow at me, but I felt like we both were noticing how down on this idea I was.
I don't remember if he asked me any questions after that but it didn't really matter- the point had been made: I wanted to be married and I felt like an idiot for wanting that.

I brought it up with my therapist the following week and we talked about my stories around marriage:
men don't actually want to be married, they're simply roped in to it by women who need to be married to feel good about themselves.
Women who marry do so to be taken care of, or to live out some childhood fantasy, or to fulfill some societal role.
Once men are married, they are trapped in to a role of going to work each day and coming home to a house full of kids and a wife who always wants more than he can possibly give her.
Women who are married are trapped in a house all day, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids.

My therapist started with the wanting-to-be-married part of things:
"So men don't want to be married?" she asked.
"No," I answered. "They'd much rather hang out with their guy friends and play games or watch sports or something."
"Wow," she said. "That sounds kind of lonely."
"Well no," I said. "They have their friends to hang out with."
"But no relationship, no real connection," she suggested.
I thought about this. I pictured a bunch of men, after the bar had closed, walking back to their cars in the parking lot, and driving home to an empty house.
My therapist spoke up again, "I think that most people would prefer to be in relationship than to be alone," she suggested.
And then I thought about the men at YUZ, and how many of them talk about wanting to meet someone, about finding a life partner.
My therapist continued, "I think that these stories that people make up- about men wanting freedom, about feeling trapped by marriage- are defenses against the fact that people actually want connection. It's human nature to want to be with others, it's in our biology. Nobody actually wants to be alone."

And I thought about this. I thought about my friends who actually are married, and none of them are trapped, none of them feel like they're stuck in a marriage. They have struggles and they have joy- they have relationships, and they are together, with another.
And then I started noticing the people around me, on the streets and in restaurants and it turns out that people seem to like to be with another person. They like to hold hands or lean their head on another- to take care of each other, to remind each other of things, to share life.

So my wanting to be married, isn't so much wanting to be a house wife, it isn't so much that I'm weak and needing a man to take care of me, it's wanting connection. It's wanting to be with another person, it's just something that I want because I'm human. It might even be something that I need. But the fact that I judge this need, that I deny myself its existence, keeps me from acknowledging it and giving myself the opportunity to actually fulfill it, to allow myself to feel connected to someone, someone special, intimately.