almost certainly a culprit. Class hang-ups, too, and not as much mutual compatibility as there had once seemed. Moreover, wrote Sugar, she left because she had to.
‘Certainly, an ethical and evolved life entails a whole lot of doing things one doesn’t particularly want to do and not doing things one very much does, regardless of gender,’ she wrote. ‘But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.’ She shared her suspicion that doing what one wants to do seems a particularly difficult prospect for women. As I read, I imagined an alternate plane of existence, where some version of me slammed shut my laptop and flung it at the wall.
This column from the then-anonymous Sugar had been written by Cheryl Strayed, about a year before she’d unmasked herself and released the bestselling 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Wild is a chronicle of dissolution: the death of a parent, the destruction of a marriage, a stint at addiction, and the author’s self-redemption by way of a gruelling physical quest. Throughout, Strayed offers a narrative trajectory that might sound familiar to the unhappy women plaintively seeking answers to counterintuitive romantic predicaments from advice columns, Reddit boards, and the stereotypically pinker quadrants of the internet.
In Wild, Strayed encounters marital demise as the consequence of crisis, the final punctuating snap after a tailspin in the years immediately after her mother’s death. The trauma of her grief, of her life, renders her crazy; it is crazy to push away a Good Man. The advice column offers a condensed version of this narrative, with the crazy turned down and centred, instead, on an empathic urgency. ‘There was nothing wrong with my ex-husband. He wasn’t perfect, but he was pretty close,’ Strayed’s Sugar writes. From the very beginning of their whirlwind courtship and marriage, Strayed recalls something nagging inside of her: ‘a tiny clear voice that would not, no matter what I did, stop saying go.’
Sugar offers permission, and in it, validation that listening to one’s instinct is the exact opposite of insane. There is nothing pretty or interesting, after all, in coming spectacularly undone – nor in internalizing that as your fate. It is not crazy to leave even a good man, and it will not ruin you.
I’ve long suspected that women subconsciously accept some version of the belief that we’re supposed to want secure romantic relationships more than anything in the world. The logical extension of that is an expectation that we should want to stay, to make it work, the moment we find ourselves with a partner who is decent and willing. It’s still a broadly accepted facet of collective pseudoscience that while men are biologically compelled to spread their seed, we women are wired to be bond-formers, family-builders, nature’s natural nurturers.
You could say that our cultural understanding of women’s autonomy isn’t totally in sync with the logistics of twenty-first-century partnership, and the internet would appear to agree. A 2015 thread on Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes board opens with a PSA: ‘You can break up with someone for any reason, or for no reason at all,’ it reads. ‘You don’t have to have a “good reason” to end a relationship.’
Posting under the handle MissPredicament, the page’s writer muses over the observation that an astonishing number of women in Reddit’s relationships forum seem to be mired in the same existential conundrum. They are unhappy in relationships that don’t really have anything wrong with them. ‘I wish someone had told me when I was much younger that I didn’t have to have an airtight legal case for a breakup – all I had to have was a desire to no longer be in that relationship,’ she writes. ‘I would have saved myself a lot of time.’ The post received over a thousand replies.
There are others like it. ‘Have you ever broken up with a good guy? Or have you ever broken up with a good girl?’ reads one, on Reddit’s AskWomen board, a plaintive call for some proof of precedent. An essay on the website HelloGiggles sketches the author’s toughest breakup, with a ‘nice guy’ she calls Sam. She steels herself to complete the deed, only to realize that her nice guy wants to stay together. ‘My guilt ran around inside me, beating every organ like a gong,’ she writes.
‘The problem with some guys is they’re not a problem at all,’ reads another essay, this time on MTV.com. When women end partnerships, it seems that the emotion we feel perhaps more acutely than the eviscerating grief of love lost is the guilt of having pushed it away.
This sub-genre of women’s-advice-cum-confessional writing appears to confront what is so often perceived to be the dominant expectation of the opposite sex – that far too many men are unwilling or unable to commit to a relationship. Women and men both are raised to believe that boys will be boys and men will be scoundrels, a truism reinforced by headlines and hashtags in testament of bad male behaviour. We call it toxic masculinity, and are taught to search for a prince among all the warty frogs. In the face of perceived scarcity, opting out of a stable partnership with a good man carries a weight of ethical frivolity. Breaking up with a man who actually wants to be there, and who is good and decent, seems irresponsible at best. It’s like scoring big in the lotto and torching your winnings for sport.
Of course, the perception of scarcity is just that: a perception, a myth. It is facile and essentializing to paint any gender as more or less willing than others to engage in the labour of a relationship. Yet for women who date men, in the context of a patriarchal society, life isn’t short on reminders that a Good Man can be hard to find.
Despite the advice of so many personal essays and Reddit threads, the Family Relationships category of Amazon’s self-help section is conspicuously short on books that speak to a woman’s right to call it quits, let alone her desire to. When I looked, it appeared that even the most reasoned, professional-counsellor-authored tomes on twenty-first-century romantic dissolution hinted in some way that breakups with men were the result of fundamental brokenness: in men’s behaviour, in women’s selection criteria. It might not shock you to learn that there is no self-help book marketed at straight women titled Trust Me: Lose the Nice Guy.
There seems almost to be a tacit assumption that the heartbroken women nursing solitary bottles of wine (and yes, in the materiality of self-help cliché, the drink is always wine) are imbibing to numb the ruminations unique to falling for fuckboys – millennial shorthand for men who expect to play the field without much care for emotional repercussions.
Fuckboys are the unnamed ‘you’ in breakup songs from Kesha’s ‘Thinking of You’ to Taylor Swift’s ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ The ‘I know you want it’–leering narrator in Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ is absolutely a fuckboy. So is Drake’s judgmental and horny alter ego in ‘Hotline Bling.’ Fuckboys – these noncommittal charmers who want nothing but to love you and leave – are the scourge of our time, the literature seems to tell us.
But this type of man, or the conception we have of him, predates the current terminology. Throughout history, men have taken from women, of women. The Spanish conquest of Latin America is written neatly into my own DNA, a story of white men and the brown women they’d conquered. ‘A cow never gives the milk away for free,’ my Salvadoran mother advised me the moment I began dating, as though the only thing any boy could possibly want from me was sex. Withholding it, without regard for my own desire, was understood to be the sole bargaining chip at my disposal.
The bulk of relationship guidance aimed at women who date men is presented as some variation of a fuckboy recovery manual, which, by process of elimination, leaves the elusive Good Man as the secret to romantic success. The dynamics of communication, care, and personal agency that so heavily figure into any type of interpersonal relationship are touched upon only in service to the hypothesis that most men are trash, but you probably still want them anyway. You idiot, you.
The women in these books tend to share the burden of big hearts and low standards. In her introduction to It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt (whose husband and co-author had previously co-authored the bestselling ‘advice’ manual He’s Just Not That Into You) assures her female readers: ‘I’ve been the girl who not only suffers through an unhealthy, demoralizing relationship but then goes back to it in hopes that time