Ayesha Curry is getting dragged for doing something that should be completely normal: being honest about her life. In a resurfaced interview from her August appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, she opened up about marrying young, getting pregnant quickly, and feeling like parts of her identity disappeared in the process. And the internet, predictably, lost its mind.
The backlash has been swift and harsh. She’s being called ungrateful, out of touch, and disrespectful to her marriage. People are acting like she committed some unforgivable sin by admitting that becoming a wife and mother at 22 meant putting her own dreams on hold. But here’s the thing: Ayesha didn’t say anything wrong. She said something real. And that’s exactly why people are upset.
What She Actually Said
In the interview, Ayesha talked about not wanting the traditional path initially. She had career goals and a vision for herself that didn’t center marriage and motherhood. But life happened fast. She married Steph Curry at 22, got pregnant with their daughter Riley a month later, and suddenly found herself navigating a reality she hadn’t planned for.
She spoke about feeling like her identity got swallowed up, that she didn’t have time to figure out what she wanted because everything moved so quickly. None of this means she regrets her marriage or her children. It means she’s being honest about what it’s like to lose yourself in roles you didn’t fully prepare for, even when those roles come with love and privilege.
Why the Backlash Is Telling
The reaction to Ayesha’s honesty reveals a lot about what we expect from women, especially married women, especially Black women married to successful men. We expect gratitude. We expect silence about anything that doesn’t fit the fairytale narrative. We expect them to perform happiness at all times because admitting complexity feels like betrayal.
Patriarchal men are predictably mad because Ayesha’s words threaten the fantasy they’ve built around marriage. If women start admitting that being married to a good, successful man doesn’t automatically equal fulfillment, the entire system starts to crack.
But the women dragging her? That’s more complicated. Some are projecting their own desires onto her situation, upset that someone living what they consider the ideal life would dare express anything other than constant gratitude. Others share Ayesha’s grievances but are uncomfortable seeing them said out loud because it forces them to confront truths they’ve been avoiding in their own lives.
Holding Multiple Truths at Once
Here’s what people seem unable to grasp: you can love your spouse and miss who you were before marriage. You can be grateful for your children and grieve the identity you lost. You can have a good life and still feel like something is missing.
Ayesha isn’t saying she hates her life. She’s saying she got married and had kids before she fully knew who she was, and that’s required constant adjustment and renegotiation of her identity. That’s not ungrateful. That’s honest.
We haven’t normalized this kind of honesty, especially from women who seem to “have it all.” When someone achieves marriage and motherhood and admits they’re still figuring themselves out, it feels threatening to the narrative we’ve been sold about what should make women happy.
The Grief Nobody Talks About
There is a specific grief that comes with being a young wife and mother. It’s the grief of losing the version of yourself you were becoming. It’s watching your needs become secondary because everyone else’s needs are louder. It’s realizing that the person you thought you’d be doesn’t get to exist in the way you imagined.
This grief doesn’t negate love or gratitude. It just exists alongside it. When women, especially Black women, try to name this grief, they’re told they’re being ungrateful or selfish. But suppressing it doesn’t make it go away. It just makes women feel isolated.
Ayesha giving voice to this creates space for other women to acknowledge the parts of their lives that don’t fit the fairytale script.
The Double Bind of Black Women
Black women face particular scrutiny when we talk about marriage and motherhood. We’re supposed to be strong, self-sacrificing, and endlessly grateful for any partnership that doesn’t actively harm us. Admitting ambivalence or complexity gets read as ingratitude.
Ayesha is navigating this as a Black woman married to a public figure, which means her life is constantly analyzed and held up as either an example or a cautionary tale. The pressure to perform perfect contentment is immense. But perfection isn’t real, and pretending it is doesn’t serve the women watching who are struggling with the same feelings.
She’s Not the First, and She Won’t Be the Last
Ayesha isn’t the first high-profile woman to face backlash for being honest about marriage. Michelle Obama was criticized when she opened up about the difficulties in her marriage to Barack, admitting in her memoir and interviews that there were times she wanted to “push him out the window” while raising their daughters. She spoke candidly about the resentment that built when Barack’s political career took priority, about feeling like a single parent at times, about marriage counseling. The response? People called her ungrateful, questioned how she could complain about being First Lady, and accused her of damaging Barack’s legacy.
Jada Pinkett Smith has faced relentless scrutiny for revealing the realities of her marriage to Will Smith, including their years-long separation and the non-traditional structure of their relationship. Every time she speaks openly about what their marriage actually looks like versus what people assume it should be, she’s dragged, mocked, and told she’s oversharing or embarrassing her husband. The discomfort isn’t about what she’s revealing. It’s about the fact that she’s revealing anything at all.
And then there’s Beyoncé. When Lemonade dropped and she opened up about infidelity in her marriage to Jay-Z, the world didn’t know what to do. How could Queen Bey, the woman who seemed to have it all, admit to such pain and betrayal? The album was brilliant, raw, and necessary, but it also shattered the illusion people had built around her marriage. Some fans supported her. Others were angry that she stayed. Many just couldn’t reconcile the perfection they projected onto her with the messy reality she was sharing.
We Can’t Handle the Nuance
The pattern is clear: when successful, high-profile women admit their marriages aren’t fairytales, we lose it. We don’t want to hear that Michelle Obama struggled. We don’t want to accept that Jada and Will’s relationship doesn’t look like ours. We don’t want Beyoncé to be anything less than untouchable. And we definitely don’t want Ayesha Curry to admit that marrying young came with costs.
Because if these women, with their resources, their support systems, their “ideal” partners, can’t figure out marriage without struggle, what does that say about the rest of us? If their marriages require work, compromise, grief, and constant renegotiation, then the fantasy we’ve been sold about marriage being the answer to everything falls apart.
That’s the real reason for the backlash. It’s not about what these women are saying. It’s about what their honesty forces us to confront: that marriage, even good marriage, is complicated. That even with love, stability, and success, women still lose parts of themselves. That the institution itself requires sacrifice that often falls disproportionately on women, and that’s true whether you’re married to a president, an NBA star, or to someone working a normal, middle-class job.
We aren’t comfortable with that truth. We want marriage to be the solution, the goal, the thing that makes everything else make sense. We want to believe that if you just find the right person and do it the right way, it’ll be easy. These women are saying it’s not. And we can’t handle it.
She Deserves Support, Not Judgment
Ayesha is doing something brave by being honest, and she’s joining a legacy of Black women who’ve refused to perform perfection at the expense of their truth. She’s not trashing her marriage. She’s not saying she regrets her life. She’s saying that marrying young and having kids immediately meant she didn’t get the chance to fully discover herself first, and navigating that has been hard.
That deserves support, not backlash. Because somewhere, another woman is watching and realizing she’s not alone in her grief. And that matters more than protecting a fairytale that was never real to begin with.
