Hi Gems!
Liza here. Happy Thursday! How are you? I’m….medium, as usual. And in my perpetual state of slight grouchiness, I’m going to be writing about one of my biggest love and relationship related pet peeves: the pronoun “we.”
My hatred of we-ing yourself (hehe) the moment you get into a relationship dates back to middle school. It seemed that as soon as I hit sixth grade, most of the girls I was friends with had “boyfriends.” I use the quotation marks because boyfriends basically only consisted of people who you held hands with sometimes in the hallway, AIM’d at night (sorry Gen Z readers), and danced with extremely awkwardly to the slow jams of the year 1999. My friends didn’t even eat lunch with their boyfriends. Some of them would awkwardly dart over to the boys table during lunch, say a quick hi, and scurry back to the girls table, but that was it.
But regardless of these pretend baby idiot relationships, my friends dove head first into the pronoun “we.” “We loved that movie,” “we hate this teacher,” “we want to go to Sam Goody this weekend to pick up the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album.” It felt like using the pronoun “we” was a status symbol. It felt like a way to look down on the people who were not in “we”s.
And I always thought that my hatred of this pronoun was simply because I was never the girl using it. I was awkward, terrified of boys, pimply, and loud. I hated myself and my body and my weird pointy boobs (did anyone else’s boobs come in pointy?). It took me until I was about 22 to realize that everyone hates themself in sixth grade, regardless of whether or not they have a boyfriend, but at the time every girl seemed more confident than me. And I didn’t have one of those baby boyfriends to bolster my confidence. (Okay I did have ONE in seventh grade, but he asked me to be his girlfriend, we never talked except once or twice on AIM, and then I broke up with him in a handwritten note, delivered by my best friend two weeks later.)
Fast Forward: Sixth grade is now 21 years in the rearview mirror (yikes), and I still fucking hate the prounoun “we.” But I’m not 12, my boobs are no longer pointy, and I’ve been in a relationship for 7+ years. So if it’s not jealousy or my adolescent insecurity speaking, why do I cringe whenever someone we’s themselves (hehe again).
I think it’s because I still hear an urgency in my friend’s voices when they say things like “We loved that movie,” “we hate this restaurant,” “we want to go to the Catskills this weekend.” I still hear friends start referring to themselves and their partners ONLY by “we” the moment they declare themselves a couple. And It still seems to be something that people use to bolster themselves, to make themselves feel superior.
I know I sound like a bitter neurotic asshole here, but it’s a pet peeve, and that’s what pet peeves are, they are minor annoyances that bother you to an outsized degree.
There’s also a patriarchy component here (you knew it was coming). “We”-ing also seems to be a way that women lose a part of themselves in their relationships, in a way that I don’t see as much with my male friends. The sentence “we liked that movie” doesn’t feel good to me. You can both like a movie, but your opinions about it are different. You liked different things about it. “We want to go to the Catskills” doesn’t distinguish the nuances behind those wants. I’d much rather here “Brad and I want to go to the Catskills because he’s been feeling stressed at work, and I have been feeling disconnected from nature, and we both are feeling that our relationship hasn’t been given enough time and space because we’ve both been so busy.” And YES I know I used “we” twice in that sentence, but it distinguishes Brad and the female narrator (let’s call her Jen, lol) from each other.
And this is where that slightly sexist use of the overly attached girlfriend meme comes in. Girls are taught from a very young age (even younger than sixth grade) that being a “we” is better than being an “I.” And when you’re with a partner, you’re really both. But so many women forget the “I,” and so many men do not.
We (women) attach to men because we’re told it gives us self worth. Then we (women) over use the “we” pronoun to signal to others that we have achieved it. We (again, women) don’t do it consciously, but because we’ve been trained to think that it is an accomplishment to be displayed along with our degrees and accolades. I do not believe it is such an accomplishment.
I’m sorry if this is bitter. I’m sorry if I sound judgy. I’m sorry if you’re a “we” person, and you just do it for ease and convenience. Also, I totally “we” myself sometimes. Because like many of us, I’m a hypocritical product of the patriarchy. I’M SORRY I AM TRYING.
Does “we”-ing both you? You do you think I’m a bitter queen? Sound off in the comments, I really and truly want to know if I’m alone here!
