Ayesha Curry is the latest celebrity to be intentionally misunderstood and crucified for sharing unconventional thoughts. She’s getting a tsunami of backlash for shaking up the patriarchy by admitting that a big wedding and kids were never her idea of nirvana.
The interview that sparked this recent wave of backlash is a resurfaced conversation that happened in August when the author made a guest appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. The mom and businesswoman admitted that she never wanted a traditional life, touching on the initial vision she had for herself.
“So I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want to get married,” she said at the time. “I thought I was going to be a ‘career girl’ and that’s it. And I had my eyes set on my goals. I was never the little girl that dreamt about the wedding dress and all of that. And then, it happened so early in my life. It’s one of those things, like, you actually don’t know what you want.”
The 36-year-old married Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry at the age of 22 and was pregnant with her first child, daughter Riley, one month later. They currently have four kids together. She admitted that she often felt like she had to choose between her calling professionally and her family.
“That was never presented in front of me that way. It kind of just had to be that way, and because … After we got married, we found out we were pregnant with our daughter so quickly, I didn’t even have time to think about what I wanted anymore,” she said. “It’s so interesting. I spent my entire life trying to work toward something, and then it kind of just disappeared, and I didn’t think twice about it.”
Ayesha also touched on not expecting Steph’s career to take off in the way it did, noting that he didn’t understand what she was going through. She remembered having goals for herself and spoke to the need to figure out her identity outside of motherhood. Instead of this interview opening up the door for a fruitful and nuanced conversation about the different ways women can exist in marriage without losing their identities, we’re having a rigid (and repetitive) conversation about how much Ayesha hates being married because she doesn’t idolize marriage. Not only is this conversation tiring, but it’s also worrisome because are our critical thinking skills in the room with us?
I’m not surprised that Ayesha triggers patriarchal men. They benefit most from women worshiping marriage, so their vitriol is needed to maintain the patriarchy. It’s more interesting to watch women’s reactions. Both the ones projecting, because they’d give anything to be a rich man’s wife, and the ones with the same grievances as Ayesha, who are mad that she had the courage to say them out loud.
It is possible to miss who you were before marriage, grieve what you hoped you’d have, and still be thankful for the unexpected life you have now. Unfortunately, not enough people have done the self-work necessary to understand that we can hold multiple truths at once. And when I say self-work, I’m referring to shadow work, which entails giving audience to the suppressed parts of yourself. It requires unearthing stories you tell yourself about how your life should be, how you should show up in the world, and how others do so. And then holding space for all of those sometimes conflicting truths without judgment. If we did more of this in our personal lives, we wouldn’t be kicking and screaming in comment sections about when Ayesha does it.
I was once married and remember how difficult it was to adjust to being a wife and a mom because I felt a grief nobody talked about enough. Similar to Ayesha, I was grieving the loss of an identity that shifts once you take up the long-term commitments of having a spouse and children as a woman. The sadness that comes when you find your needs become background noise because you’re constantly trying to meet everyone else’s can be suffocating. It also takes time and honesty to recreate an identity that incorporates your new reality.
People call Ayesha ungrateful because she’s doing this self-work in real time. What the critics are really saying is that having a good man should be enough for women to feel fulfilled in life. In other words, “How dare you think you’re bigger than the patriarchal program?” It reinforces this false idea that the greatest thing a woman can achieve is starting a family. Unless we are being willfully ignorant, we should know that this isn’t true, especially in 2025. The most extraordinary things a woman can achieve are self-fulfilment and a strong sense of self-identity. Those things aren’t automatically given with marriage and kids; it’s something you can only find within. It’s also something many women are searching for in a world that tells them their value doesn’t exceed their marital status and uterus.
Shout out to Ayesha for giving voice to other married women who are grieving old identities and seeking the courage to craft new ones. And good luck to our sis on her journey.