Reading BIMBO by Ashley James got me thinking about this question recently and not just for healthy relationships but for any relationship.
At what point did we start teaching women that having someone was automatically better than having themselves?
Years ago, perhaps that made sense. Women often needed a husband to survive financially, buy a house or even open a bank account. Today millions don’t and that changes everything because the moment a woman no longer needs a man, every relationship becomes a choice that she gets to make.
That’s the bit many men are struggling with, not because women hate men but because they finally have a choice.
Reading BIMBO brought that into sharp focus for me. Ashley describes being told there are plenty more fish in the sea before replying, “I can tell you for sure that the sea has been chronically overfished, polluted and was full of commitment-phobes.” It made me laugh because, although it’s funny, it also contains an uncomfortable truth.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised I don’t actually think this is a conversation about dating. I think it’s a conversation about one of the biggest cultural shifts any of us will ever live through. Women becoming financially independent isn’t just an economic shift, it’s a cultural earthquake because for the first time in modern history millions of women can ask a question their grandmothers often couldn’t.
Does this relationship actually improve my life?
Once that question can genuinely be asked, everything changes.
After more than thirty years coaching men and women around the world, I reached an uncomfortable conclusion: most men believe they make a woman’s life better, yet very few actually do and even fewer are willing to ask the woman whether they have.
That isn’t because most men are bad men. It’s because most of us were never taught to ask the question because the patriarchy raised us to believe that we were the answer. This belief sits at the heart of everything we must work towards to undo as it is one of the cornerstones of the patriarchy.
I know that now because I was one of them.
I loved my partner, I worked hard and I genuinely believed I was making her life easier. Looking back, I was making it smaller and I had absolutely no idea I was doing it. The reason I couldn’t see it was because of my insecurity.
The difficulty with insecurity and the behaviours it drives is that insecure behaviour almost never introduces itself as insecurity.
It introduces itself as love, protection, leadership, caring and wanting the best for someone. It certainly did in my case.
That is one of the cruellest things about insecurity. It doesn’t just fool the people around you, it fools you too.
Meanwhile, the woman quietly adapts.
Not because she lacks confidence but because adaptation is often the easiest route through another difficult conversation.
She starts choosing her words more carefully, she decides some things simply aren’t worth raising and she explains herself a little more than she used to. She apologises for things she didn’t need to apologise for and she begins managing someone else’s emotional world without even noticing she’s doing it.
None of these decisions feel significant on their own but over months and years they quietly accumulate until one day she finds herself living a life that has been edited around somebody else’s insecurity rather than built around her own values, personality and choices.
Then people tell her she has a confidence problem.
Rarely, in my experience, is confidence the real issue. More often than not it’s adaptation. She’s spent so long becoming who she needed to become in order to keep the relationship working that she’s begun to believe that’s simply who she is.
If your partner makes your life heavier instead of lighter, what exactly are they bringing?
I appreciate that’s an uncomfortable question but I think it’s one we should all be asking, regardless of gender. A relationship should bring more laughter, more peace, more support, more friendship and more possibility into your life.
A relationship should leave you feeling more yourself, not less. If it doesn’t, why are you in it?
For centuries many women didn’t really have the luxury of asking that question because leaving often came at an enormous financial or social cost, if they could leave at all that is. Millions of women around the world still don’t have that freedom today and we shouldn’t forget that. Increasingly though, many do.
That’s why I think women becoming financially independent is one of the most significant cultural shifts of our lifetime.
It isn’t simply changing who pays the mortgage, it’s changing the entire basis upon which relationships are built because:
…women becoming financially independent is forcing men to compete on the quality of their character instead of the necessity of their existence.
Personally, I think that’s one of the healthiest shifts we’ve ever seen.
It isn’t asking men to become perfect, it isn’t asking women to hate men and it isn’t an attack on masculinity. It’s simply removing the historical advantage that meant many women needed a relationship whether it enriched their life or not.
Now they can choose.
That’s where much of the anger we see today from men really comes from. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it to be worth paying attention to.
As a man, if your sense of worth depends upon someone needing you, what happens when they don’t? If your value has quietly become wrapped up in being indispensable rather than being enjoyable to build a life with, independence can feel like rejection rather than liberation.
I understand that because I had to confront exactly that in myself.
The question many of us men need to ask ourselves isn’t whether women have changed. They have.
The better question is whether we as men have changed enough to deserve a place in the lives they’re now free to build.
If a woman no longer needs us, what do we actually believe we’re bringing into her life?
That’s not a question to answer defensively. It’s a question to sit with because somewhere in our answer will probably be the work we’re here to do.
To the women reading this, I’d offer a different question.
If your life feels lighter, calmer and more like yourself when you’re single than when you’re in a relationship, why would you believe being in a relationship is the prize?
Perhaps the prize was never finding someone else first. Perhaps it was finding yourself. The version of you who no longer mistakes sacrifice for love or adaptation for kindness and who realises that the right relationship doesn’t require you to become less of yourself in order to keep it.
The right person should help you to become you more yourself than you were before they arrived.
If they can’t do that, leave that seat empty until someone can.
In the meantime, build a life that delights you.