I learned a new term that has been bandied about on social media these days: Married Single Moms.

No, it doesn’t pertain to my current situation right now, which is being a single mom who is still legally married but is already separated; divorce is still being debated in Congress so she is still stuck. (Annulments are hardly granted here unless you can bribe your family court judge, which many people had already done. How do you think politicians and celebrities here can have speedy annulments?).

So what are MSMs? They are women who had been like me prior to the separation—they have husbands who do not contribute to anything in the marriage and family life.

It’s only now that I realized that I had been an MSM all along…I was a solo parent ever since the girls were born. Given that I was the only one doing all the lifting, it was easy for me to leave because I was the breadwinner and I already knew how to run my household and raise my children single-handedly. The only difference between married and separated was that I had one less source of headache after I uprooted ourselves.

I remember the time when my girls’ preschool class visited our house (since ours was the second nearest one) as an illustration of how a typical family looks like. The teacher asked her class, in the family what does the father do? My girls, who were three or four years old at that time, cheerfully said, “he lies on the couch and watches TV!”

I wasn’t there when that happened; it was just reported to me by my nannies. That must have made the teacher realllly uncomfortable.

Then she asked again, what does the mother do? “She goes out to work. She takes care of us!”

That sums up my marriage—or sham of a marriage.

Then there’s another term that I have learned from social media again: trad wives.

This has been popularized on Tiktok (based on what I read so far) by mom influencers who cosplay as the perfect 1950s-type of traditional housewife, who go through the motions of keeping house in perfectly turned up dresses. They play into the Stepford Wives fantasies of (usually) alt-right men/conservatives.

So what is the connection now between MSMs and trad wives? The real “trad wife” are the real stay-at-home moms who are not perfect as what these mom-fluencers portray. Fine, if this makes you happy, then go for it. But those who are sold this fantasy should always remember that they are just one accident/death or affair away from being destitute. Once the man has an affair/divorces you or he gets sick or worse, dies, then you are left with no income, no skills, no bright prospect for employment outside the home.

MSMs, on the other hand, have survived and can survive when shit hits the fan. It’s really difficult and exhausting to be an MSM but then they are equipped to go solo. It’s just a matter of recognizing they needed to walk away from that toxic situation to improve their lot.

Some of the best pieces of advice on marriage were given to me by newspaper women. One was a friend 10 years my senior. We were both covering the central bank at that time and before I went on leave for my wedding, she told me to save up—just as I have saved up for my wedding—for shit-hits-the-fan situations like annulment. She said it gives you some kind of security that you will have money for emergency or for filing for annulment if things go south.

I did listen to her. She was so right.

The second advice was given to me by a lawyer-columnist who I used to follow. We were in a junket trip abroad and one time at breakfast I talked to the author (JD) of the book about mistresses and told her my sister loved her book. JD said, tell your sister thank you and you should let other women read that as a warning—the signs that husbands are straying and all their shennanigans. JD should know—because…

Anyway, this lawyer-columnist chimed in and told me that the “best protection you can have is to have your own money and the means to earn to your own money.” Share expenses in the house and have a joint account for that, pay for the things that you are willing to pay for, but always have your own bank account. 

Those two things have always been in my head. These two things pushed me to finish my master’s degree and made me chase career advancement. I’ll never know if and when the time will come I would have to cleave, journo friend told me.

She was right. They were right all along.