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6th November 2025
10:45am GMT
Societal pressures follow women at nearly every stage of our lives. We manage to escape the immense pressure to be ‘perfect’ up until our teenage years, but once that expectation lands on our shoulders, it can be impossible to shake off. The expectation follows us throughout our 20s, 30s, and 40s and feels like something we can never let go of.
However, women like Elizabeth Day have helped many of us see that there is beauty in failure, and sometimes not following those expectations is the best thing you can do.
They expect us to get married, have a child, and buy a house as if it’s a seamless, easy thing, but sometimes that isn’t the only route for women.
In an exclusive interview with Her.ie, Elizabeth Day opened up about how much her life changed after her divorce, and why women shouldn’t let themselves buckle under the pressure society puts on them.
“I had this moment in my 30s where I got married. So I ticked off one of those three things, but because I thought that marriage was something that I should do, I ended up marrying the wrong person, and it was a dysfunctional relationship."
“Then I got divorced, which felt like a huge failure. And then I tried to do the second thing on that list, and I tried to have babies within that marriage, and afterwards, that didn't work for me either. I had unsuccessful fertility treatment.
"I had the first of three miscarriages, and I hadn't bought a house. So I was renting with my ex-husband, and when that marriage ended, and I moved out. I had a year of sort of living with my friends and on other people's couches, and then eventually getting enough money together to rent my own place.”
However, that uncertainty brought so much opportunity and growth for the journalist.
“I was confronted with the fact that those three things [marriage, babies, owning a house] on that list hadn't worked out for me. So what kind of life could I have lived if those things hadn't worked out? It was a blank canvas. And for the first time, I really drilled down into what I wanted rather than what I felt other people were telling me I wanted.”
For women who are struggling under those social pressures, Elizabeth Day told them to question how much of what they're being told is genuinely what they want as an individual.
“Take some time to get to know who you are because as women we are so often conditioned to place everyone else's needs and desires above our own. We people please often. We want to be kind and thoughtful. And we want to shape shift so that people never leave us.”
“We believe that that's the way to find love, but actually, all you are doing in every single one of those moments is you are sacrificing a piece of yourself. You're betraying who you really are and who you deserve to be. So, my advice would be to take some time to get to know yourself outside of the pressure.”
Day added that if you are going to live a life according to what you think other people's opinions will or won't be, you are never going to be fully happy.
“You're never going to be fulfilled because you're not living your own life. You're living another person's version of what your life should look like.”
Day has been an advocate for embracing our failures, and it’s something that has completely changed the way I look at life. I no longer beat myself up for failing to achieve these milestones because they don’t define who I am anymore.
Women are meant for so much more than marriage and motherhood, and there’s no shame in wanting a different life outside of the one society sets for you.
Day shared, “Sometimes the thing that you think is uniquely personal or uniquely shameful turns out to have far more universal resonance than you can ever imagine.”
Elizabeth Day’s new novel One Of Us is out now.
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One Of Us, which is one of our top picks for November. It’s a gripping, thought-provoking read that you will stay up all night reading.
Day has perfectly crafted a story about betrayal, old bonds, and buried scandals as one British establishment family comes face to face with the consequences of privilege.
Buy here.
