Entry for the „The Single Life Challenge"
I am very interested in your opinion about this one, so don't hesitate to leave a few words behind! :)
Phoebe Black.
One of many daughters of the noble House of Black.
But still, someone who was more than unique in her family.
It seemed like a main goal of the Black family to get their sons and daughters married as soon as they graduated from Hogwarts, always sticking to their motto „Toujours Pour". Always determined to continue the pure bloodline of their family.
And here was what made Phoebe different from all her siblings and cousins. While they had been married for years by now, she was still unmarried at the age of 34.
No matter how much her parents had tried to persuade her, had threatened her, she had never given in to their demand for her to find an appropriate man and marry.
She preferred to stay single and she was determined to stick to this, because she was absolutely happy with it and she felt free, no matter how much her family criticised her for it.
At nearly every family meeting, birthday, party, ball or wedding, somebody would come up with the subject by asking her when she would finally present a fiancée to them.
But every time this happened, she would just ignore these comments.
Phoebe could simply not imagine herself in an arranged marriage with some pureblood wizard choosen by her parents or by her out of the simple need to find somebody.
No, that was nothing for her.
She had seen how unhappy her siblings were behind their facades that were supposed to show off a perfect functioning connection. None of them were admitting it, but it was clear to Phoebe that they regretted to have married people they barely knew, who sometimes were complete strangers to them. It seemed impossible to her that they could be happy to be forced to have a intimate relationship with somebody forced to them.
Of course there were exceptions, only a few, but these few had had the luck of falling in love with someone who was acceptable to marry into the Black family or they had started to love their partner after the wedding.
But most of the time, the marriages that were formed were secretly a catastrophe. The heirs resulting of these connections were not children of love and even though their parents loved their children, the cold dealings between the parents were surely affecting the children.
At least Phoebe found that seeing how her mother and father acted towards each other had given her a negative image of marriage from an early age on.
And so, when the time had come for her, she had asked her mother to give her some time and allow her to deepen her studies about Herbology after graduation. That was something that was normally not to be granted to female members of the Black family, because education was not important to give birth to heirs. But after long hours of pleading, her parents had given in. She had been allowed a year for her studies if she promised to still have a look at the potential partners her parents suggested and eventually marry one of them. She had agreed, even though she had already been sure that she would not stick to her word.
One year turned into a second and even more time passed and her parents had been becoming more and more impatient with every applicant that had been sent away by Phoebe, no matter how much they had praised her beauty and also her intelligence or how good looking they had been.
Regardless who was sitting in front of her, sipping at the tea she had offered reluctantly, regardless how nice the man seemed... she could not get rid of the thought that she would feel imprisoned, even when she was well treated by her husband.
So Phoebe had kept thinking of polite words to compliment them out of the house and with every year passing, her parents seemed to give up more and more.
Maybe they had come to the conclusion that yelling at her was not helping much, and therefore they had resigned to the hope that Phoebe would find a man if they only stopped nagging about her inappropriate lifestyle.
Phoebe was rather happy with these circumstances, but only sometimes, she actually felt a bit of loneliness. But not about spending her days in a empty and silent house... but about seeing how much distance her behaviour had brought between her and her family.
They had all started to drift away from her, just because she lived her life in the way she wanted and dared to stick to her own ideals.
But still, she did not regret her choice to be a single Black.