Buckle up lovers, for I have been sitting on this one for a bit. A few years actually.
And it has been in the past few months that my unease and confusion has finally made sense.
We have heard it all…ever since the coaching industry discovered the words Queen & King, it has been running with it ever since…and why not. The ideology of it on the surface… is beautiful.
I mean I know. I have even written a few articles with these words leading you down the yellow brick road.
You know the script.”Become a queen”. “Know your worth”. “Embody your feminine”. “Raise your standards”. “Do the work”. And then….. if you have done it correctly, if you have healed enough and glowed enough and stopped texting him back, your king will arrive.
There he is baby, Crown and all.
And together you will….. live in a very beautiful cottage for two, getting all your needs met by each other, until the end of time.
Gorgeous one.
That is not a Queendom.
That is more like a very expensive studio apartment.
In the past few years I have fallen in love with etymology… so let’s talk about what a Queen actually was. Because the women who held and to this day hold that title are not sitting in a tower waiting for a man to complete them. They are running courts. They were commanding armies. They were signing trade agreements, holding spiritual counsel, patronizing artists and poets, managing diplomatic relationships with other kingdoms, and yes, taking diofferent lovers.
Eleanor of Aquitaine held her own court at Poitiers. Her own. Separate from her king. She patronized troubadours, presided over courts of love, held political power in her own name, and when her king displeased her she raised her sons against him and survived it.
Cleopatra did not wait for Caesar. She rolled herself up in a rug and had herself delivered to him. That is not queen energy as the coaching industry defines it. That is a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and went and got it on her own terms.
Catherine the Great ran an empire, took lovers of her choosing, and built one of the greatest art collections in human history. She was not manifesting anyone.
These women had courts.
Not just a king. An entire court. Ladies in waiting who knew their secrets. Political advisors who sharpened their thinking. Spiritual counsel for what the politics couldn’t touch. Knights to make love to. Artists who reflected their world back to them in beauty. People who made them laugh. People who told them the truth when everyone else was performing agreement.
Different people for different needs.
A Queendom or a Kingdom, is the village for high society.
And here is a paragraph of my book…
“Historical Celtic societies, before Roman and Christian colonization, recognized various forms of polyandry where women could marry multiple husbands simultaneously. These arrangements were not aberrations but recognized social institutions that often corresponded with women’s roles as political leaders, landowners, and spiritual authorities. The Irish legal tradition of Brehon Law recognized nine different types of marriage, including arrangements where women maintained multiple simultaneous partnerships. Women in these societies could divorce freely, retain their property after marriage dissolution, and choose new partners without social stigma. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Celtic queens and female leaders maintained multiple consorts, with their sexual freedom serving as both personal autonomy and political strategy”
So this is my constant internal inquiry….as in, what is for sale underneath the crowns and the feminine codes and the standards, is still the same monopoly structure we have always been handed.
One person. For everything.
Your king as your best friend, your lover, your business advisor, your emotional support, your spiritual mirror, your financial partner, your social life, your family. The whole thing. All needs. One human.
You cannot build a Queendom on that.
Not because he is not enough but because no single human being is designed to be everything to another. That is not some kind of failing not a long winded wound to be healed through years of constant therapy. It is actually just the architecture of being human. We were built for community the way birds were built for flight. Trying to get everything from one person is like trying to breathe through a straw and calling it air. ( i am having fun with my analogies atm )
A queen knows who to go to for what.
She goes to her king for the things that are his, the particular quality of his presence, the specific way he holds her, the partnership they have built. And she goes to her court for everything else. Her women for the conversations that only women can hold, her advisors for the thinking she cannot no should not do alone, a certain person for her spiritual practice, for what neither he nor they can touch, and her different kind of lovers and partners for the seasons she is in. Her own solitude for what belongs only to her.
This is not polyamory as some. kind of a prescription.
This is a full, full life. A full queendom.
The loneliness inside modern relationships is not a mystery at all.
We took a structure that was never designed to contain an entire human life and told two people to climb inside it and be grateful. And when they feel suffocated, isolated, overwhelmed, depleted, when she feels unseen and he feels like a failure and both of them wonder if they chose wrong, they leave one another.
The relationship is not the problem.
The isolation is.
A queen is not isolated. A queen has a kingdom…..people, purpose, community, a web of belonging that does not begin and end with one man.
Build the court, my love.
The king is one part of it.
A significant, beautiful, irreplaceable part.
But only one part.
💋
M