Straight culture’s orientation toward heteroromantic sacrifice is also influenced by socioeconomic class. Respect for sacrifice—or sucking it up and surviving life’s miseries—is one of the hallmarks of white working-class culture, for instance, wherein striving for personal happiness carries less value than does adherence to familial norms and traditions. Maturity and respectability are measured by what one has given up in order to keep the family system going, an ethos that is challenged by the presence of a queer child, for instance, who insists on “being who they are.” Queerness—to the extent that it emphasizes authenticity in one’s sexual relationships and fulfillment of personal desires—is an affront to the celebration of heteroromantic hardship. As Robin Podolsky has noted, “What links homophobia and heterosexism to the reification of sacrifice . . . is the specter of regret. Queers are hated and envied because we are suspected of having gotten away with something, of not anteing up to our share of the misery that every other decent adult has surrendered to.”
For many lesbian daughters of working-class straight women, opting out of heterosexuality exposes the possibility of another life path, begging the question for mothers, “If my daughter didn’t have to do this, did I?” Heterosexuality is compulsory for middle-class women, too, but more likely to be represented as a gift, a promise of happiness, to be contrasted with the ostensibly “miserable” life of the lesbian. The lesbian feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has offered a sustained critique of the role of queer abjection in the production of heteroromantic fantasies. In Living a Feminist Life, she notes that “it is as if queers, by doing what they want, expose the unhappiness of having to sacrifice personal desires . . . for the happiness of others.” In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed argues, “Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction or purpose, or as what drives a story.” Marked by sacrifice, misery, and failure along the way, the journey toward heterosexual happiness (to be found with the elusive “good man”) remains the journey.
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality