Oops, I Accidentally Centered My Entire Life Around Men

is there an antidote?

I have never been able to break up with a man I truly loved, even when I was treated terribly. I have also found it nearly impossible to break up with men I don’t love. I just pray for things to get better while I secretly feel tortured. When I inevitably get broken up with, I have to deal with the narrative of having been rejected, which causes an existential crisis that drives everyone around me insane. Not being chosen by a man makes me passively suicidal.

This is embarrassing, because I’m in my late 30’s now, and haven’t I always called myself a ~feminist~? How many times have I said to my 7th grade girls, “ignore him,” only to go home and pine over some elven looking freak on Instagram?

I am now in SLAA, attempting to examine why I lose my entire mind every time a man doesn’t choose me. Could it be because, despite an east coast liberal arts education at an institution known for feminist ethics, I have unwittingly centered my entire life around the validation and approval of men? How did that happen?

It occurred to me recently that my understanding of feminism has been shallow at best. I did not read much feminist theory in college, because, I thought, all my friends did, and they would tell me about it, and I would agree with them. I wrote essays on The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper, denounced men for a while, and figured my work was done. I needed to spend my college credits taking experimental theater classes. I didn’t think I needed to read any of the seminal texts to know that I was a feminist.

However, here I am, fifteen years later, failing the Bechdel test. My last three posts have been about men. It seems writing about them being stupid has not eradicated my obsession with them, nor has it made me feel empowered in the long run. It has also not made me stop craving dick. As a brilliant bisexual friend of mine once said, “there’s just something so hot about a fleshy body part that can get hard and fuck you.” Declaring celibacy from this body part only to welcome it back at a later date has not fixed me, either. Every time I think I’ve “reset” myself, something disastrous happens again.

So, after allowing my summer to be ruined by yet another self-tattooed man who doesn’t care if I live or die, I have been asking myself earnestly how I got here. Why does it feel so impossible for me to have relationships with men? Why do I always choose the wrong ones, and why do they have so much power over me? Is my addictive, unstable personality really the whole problem here? (quite possibly yes)

I wanted to investigate the humiliation ritual of constantly performing for men despite the inconsistency of their approval, and why I have been so willing to engage in it. I decided the only way to stop being such a miserable idiot was to actually read some feminist texts about love and relationships.

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In Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks posits that girls begin an endless search for love when feminism is not a fundamental part of our upbringing. This makes sense to me, because it wasn’t part of mine. There was no language for feminism growing up in Texas beyond The Spice Girls and like, the Mia Hamm biography at the Scholastic book fair. The idea of “girl power” was trendy, but it did not teach any lasting feminist values. In the preface to Communion, which was published in 2002, hooks writes:

Girls today struggle against sexist defining roles in the same ways that girls did before the contemporary feminist movement. While strands of feminism here and there support that struggle, more often than not, girls feel besieged by mixed messages that come from being born into a world where women’s liberation has been given a small place, even as girls remain trapped in the arms of patriarchy. A measure of that entrapment is the widespread fear among all girls, irrespective of race or class, that they will not be loved.

In 1999, three years before this book was published, I went boy crazy and never looked back. I was in 4th grade when I began the search for the love of my life, something proximal to Jack and Rose in Titanic and the Disney movies I had grown up watching. I wanted insane, life-altering romance. It seemed that being beautiful and always slightly in danger was the way to attract the attention of someone who would sweep me away from my boring life. It never occurred to me that I had value outside of being a pretty, delightful girl.

hooks suggests that heterosexual women search and search for love because so many of us never learn our own value — not just in regards to men, but overall (hooks, 2002). Value, to me, has always seemed to be determined by some faraway entity, something entirely out of my reach. The only way to get it, I reasoned, was to impress someone. Thus began a life of endless performance. It was outlandish to think anyone could have value just for existing.

I remember being told in church that Jesus’s love was unconditional and that God brought each of us into existence with a loving, intimate knowledge of every cell of our being, every hair on our heads. However, if you did not accept that love as the salvation of your soul, you would be banished to an eternity of fire and brimstone (we were Baptist). This is how I learned that my only path out of hell was submitting to a patriarchal figure, one who supposedly loved me but wanted nothing to do with me if I did not dedicate my life to him.

This figure was not unlike my father, who is by many accounts a kind, loving, compassionate person. He showed unconditional love to me, his youngest daughter, but often not to any of his other children. He, too, claimed to love me unconditionally, but how could that be true if he had been so harsh on my siblings, and exhibited racism, sexism, and fatphobia to everyone else? I wanted to believe that his love was unconditional, so I did everything in my power to be exceptional to him.

As hooks writes, “Knowing we were loved was not enough. We needed to feel it.” I have always believed my parents when they say they love me, but their love manifests as obsession and control. Despite everything they have given me, it is hard to believe they love me because they do not actually know who I am, nor do they want to. I have always felt this with men, too: the sense that really knowing me would make me impossible to love. Many men, after aggressively pursuing me, fade away as soon as they realize I am a real person.

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Six years ago, my mom sent me this horrendous article from Bari Weiss’s blog. She always sends me articles when she wants to let me know she doesn’t like what I’m doing. I was incensed when I read this one, and did my best to debunk the whole thing in my response back to my mother. I guess we’ll just never agree on some things, she had written back, which incensed me more. What got to me the most was that parts of the article did ring true for me. Rebelling against my Baptist, virginity-signing-contract childhood by having sex with as many people as I could only made me crazy. I was on the verge of conceding that maybe my mother had been right when she warned me at 16 that my boyfriend wouldn’t think I was special anymore if I had sex with him.

She turned out to be right about that, but not because feminism has failed us. The truth she’s unknowingly getting at is what feminists have been saying all along: that straight men under the influence of patriarchy are inherently sexist and cruel, and people with bleeding open hearts and fragile egos are not equipped to deal with them. As bell hooks writes in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “patriarchy promotes insanity.”

In this text, hooks asserts what I believe is the fundamental truth about men. They have very little resources or literature to teach them how to be truly loving. What they learn under patriarchy is to kill, be angry, and generally assert power-over dynamics, which are prolifically disseminated through churches and schools. It is still pervasive no matter how convincingly feminists have challenged it (hooks, 2004).

Even — and sometimes especially — “woke” straight men operate under patriarchal ideals, whether they realize it or not. We may assume that their progressive politics mean they have done the work to undo the sexism in their own thinking. I have often fallen for men who are feminists in theory, but not in practice. These are the most devastating exchanges of all because my expectations of these men are always high. The higher my expectations of a man, the harder the disappointment hits when they inevitably do something like ghost me.

I always wanted to be completely sexually free and open with someone, but often after I let my guard down with a man, they see me differently — not as a partner, but as a conquest. Any time I open myself up to a man, it later feels like a mistake. I feel pathetic and regret being vulnerable or honest in any way, wishing I could take it all back.

In Communion, hooks revisits the question of whether it is possible to build on feminism while maintaining intimate relationships with men. An ex-partner of hers had been willing to be equitable in all aspects of their life together, except when it came to sex. He believed he was entitled to sex whenever he wanted it, and balked at any resistance to it (hooks, 2002). “While it may give them [men] a thrill to encounter an independent female, that thrill lasts only if they undermine and subordinate her power,” she writes.

As hooks points out, men love sexual agency in a woman when it means she will try anything he wants, but so much of the time they’re not actually on board for true sexual agency in their partners, especially if it means their partners might sometimes refuse sex (hooks, 2002). I think about all the times I’ve feigned enthusiasm about sexual acts I didn’t particularly care for, and how I have been willing to endure pain because I thought it would inspire some sense of attachment or faithfulness in my partner. If I couldn’t get a man to love me for who I really was, then I would just play straight into his hand and try to give him exactly what he wanted. I justified this by imagining that I was committing to the bit. It was performance art. It made me feel great in the moment, but when there was no reassurance or emotional connection the next day, it left me with a void to fill.

In the hundreds of interviews that Betty Friedan conducted for The Feminine Mystique, many women said that sex was the only thing that made them “feel alive.” To quote one of her interview subjects, “I was looking for something, I’m not sure what, but the only way I get that feeling is when I’m in love with someone.” I’ve looked for this feeling since I was a child. The search for it is what makes me think I need to be in SLAA. My own addiction to sex is that it can feel like love in the moment. The love is what I really want, and what none of the men I’ve fucked have been capable of. The being loved and desired aspect was what I thought I could attach to my identity.

Friedan calls this “sex without self, sex for lack of self.” Sex in the absence of self-knowledge is often disappointing. Friedan argues that the seeking of identity in sex with men keeps women stuck in patriarchal beauty standards. It keeps us attached to our adolescent beauty, which causes disordered eating and obsession with plastic surgery (Friedan, 1963). Friedan writes,

As long as women’s needs for achievement and identity can be channeled into this search for sexual status, she is easy prey for any product which presumably promises her that status—a status that cannot be achieved by effort or achievement of her own. And since that endless search for status as a desirable sexual object is seldom satisfied in reality for most American housewives (who at best can only try to look like Elizabeth Taylor), it is very easily translated into a search for status through the possession of objects.

I take this to mean that sex in search of validation turns women into optimization projects. If I see myself as an object, of course I gravitate towards whatever Instagram ad or cosmetic procedure promises to make me become the best version of that object. I have had so many ambitions throughout my life, but underneath all of them has been a desire to be loved, to be adored, and to be beautiful — not to be human. This objectification of self is what drives me to seek endless validation from men.

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Undoubtedly, the most obvious way men have been the center of my life is in my devotion to the beauty standard. I always thought I was just born with an eating disorder, but when I really thought about it, I realized the impetus to shrink myself was a direct result of my feelings towards men and being chosen.

When I was 14, I saw myself become less desirable as a cheerleader (I took competitive cheerleading very seriously at the time ok) when I was no longer light enough to get tossed in the air and was moved from the front of the routine to the back. I saw that the girls who were getting tossed in the air, who were still front and center, were the skinny ones with boyfriends. I wanted a boyfriend, so it only made sense to me that the way to get one was to lose 30 pounds as quickly as possible.

I did this very deliberately by starving myself, vomiting, and overexercising. As soon as I started losing weight, I got the attention from boys that I wanted. I’m not sure if this was due to the weight loss itself, or the confidence it gave me, but I got the same kind of dumb boyfriend all my friends had. I also broke all the knuckles in my left hand because I had become so physically weak. I had to get surgery and will have a screw in my hand for the rest of my life, which occasionally dings metal detectors and makes my hand ache when it rains. My passion in cheerleading had been tumbling, and I didn’t tumble much again after that.

When she speaks of beauty, Friedan uses this Simone de Beauvoir quote from The Second Sex:

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body. (Part II: Lived Experience)

What started as a seemingly temporary little trick to lose weight quickly evolved into a lifelong disease that did, in fact, devastate my body. I am lucky that I don’t have osteoporosis and that I still have all my teeth. I’m lucky that I never had a heart attack or stroke due to malnourishment and electrolyte imbalances. There was a time in my life when I thought I was having a stroke or heart attack every day, and I knew it was because of my eating disorder.

I am in recovery, but I admit that I am still very much entrapped by the beauty standard. When I say I am “in recovery” what I really mean is that I only have so much recovery. I am recovered enough that I don’t throw up my food, skip meals, or spend hours at the gym anymore. But I am also very aware of exactly how much I can eat and how much I need to exercise to stay relatively thin.

I experienced a lot of grief this year and “unintentionally” lost weight. I deliberately used my job to distract from sadness, which made me a workaholic, which made me “less hungry.” I feel like I have attracted positive attention from even this marginal weight loss, which makes me terrified to gain any of it back. I keep wondering at what point in my life there will ever be true freedom from this. In a very cynical way, I have almost come to accept that this entrapment is just a condition of my existence. It’s easier to opt out of beauty culture when you’re in a secure, loving partnered relationship, and this is the thing I’ve never really had. I have an irrational fear that any deviation from the image I have carefully built up will make me unlovable. Meanwhile, the irony is that I have made myself unlovable by committing to such a shallow way of being. All of my vanity has been an attempt to become worthy of love, but I’ve lost myself in the process. What is left to love if you no longer have a sense of self?

There’s a chapter in Communion titled “Loving to Age, Aging to Love” where bell hooks talks about menopause as the opportunity to finally break free from not only the expectation to bear children, but the expectation to keep up pleasing appearances (hooks, 2002). It reminded me of this moment in Fleabag where, after winning some sort of women in business award, Kristin Scott Thomas’s character Belinda assures Fleabag that menopause is the “best fucking thing in the world.”

“Yes,” she continues, “your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares, but then you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person (in business).”

Despite all the time we spend fearing aging and trying to evade it with botox, fillers, and plastic surgery, actually arriving at a turning point like menopause is a profound relief from the expectations we live with for so long. It is the point at which we are allowed to stop being objects and return to our humanity. Up until this point, many of us succumb to patriarchal expectations because we are terrified that opting out will sideline us.

There is a perception that everyone else is opting in, so won’t we be left behind if we don’t fall in line? Diabolical Lies just came out with a fantastic episode which, in my opinion, pretty convincingly challenges this. As it turns out, going into debt to stay on the “beauty hamster wheel” does not guarantee happiness. The Instagram-face-clean-girl-starving-chic aesthetic is not coming from reality. It’s not even coming from men. It’s manufactured by algorithms that prey on insecurity. This should seem obvious, but the proliferation of filtered influencer imagery very effectively obscures the truth.

The truth is we don’t have to wait until menopause to have freedom from beauty terrorism. It is possible to just opt out. Many women do, and report epiphanies similar to what hooks and Belinda describe. Opting out is scary if you are someone who has committed your entire life to fitting into impossibly narrow standards, especially if those standards have been your reference for safety and belonging. They have been for me. It is tragic that so many women, myself included, wait to taste freedom until they are “forced out” of the beauty standard by age. I would like to experience it, and I don’t know if I’m going to live long enough to reach menopause. We literally only have one life and it can end any moment! Am I really going to spend the next big chunk, perhaps the last bit of it that I may have left, in fear? So many of us do.

It might have seemed true, in my extremely narrow perspective at 14 years old, that skinny, pretty blonde girls were the only ones being “chosen.” But now, in adulthood, in reality, the women I know in secure relationships are not the ones on the beauty hamster wheel. What I am learning, especially from my own experience, is that the women on the hamster wheel are the ones who are alone, because being on a hamster wheel is an incredibly isolating experience. Life actually is bigger than being an object of desire, and I am coming to understand that the longer I stay committed to beauty principles that do not serve me, the longer I will feel alone.

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There has been a lot of writing in recent years about how the “manosphere” is a backlash to the #MeToo era, and how in response to that we must now de-center men. I agree on the surface, but I think what these pieces lack — and what I myself have lacked — is any concept of men’s humanity. When I wrote this piece about Taylor Swift, I was fresh off a rejection from a man and full of visceral hatred. While many of the comments on that piece were ridiculous, some of them did make me reconsider my stance that Taylor’s latest album is just an ode to following a big dumb man off a cliff. I still think that, but I allow for the possibility that there’s just something about it I am unable to appreciate.

I can’t attest to Travis Kelce’s interiority (only to what I perceive as his inFERIORity), but what bell hooks lays out very clearly in The Will to Change is the fact that men are suffering under patriarchy, too. Not being able to love is a miserable existence. Kelce might be dumb, but he still wants love. If he and Taylor’s bond is real and not just the product of a PR stunt, then I have to say I admire his commitment to loving an insane woman.

Women yearn for loving relationships with men, but men are often not willing nor do they have the language to let go of the advantages afforded to them by patriarchy (hooks, 2002). In chapter five of Communion, “Gaining Power, Losing Love”, hooks writes, “Our heartache came from facing the reality that if men were not willing to holistically embrace feminist revolution, then they would not be in an emotional place where they could offer us love.” Men may yearn for love, too, but they have to be willing to fully embrace feminist values — that is, becoming willing to be known and allowing for feminine agency in all aspects of a relationship — in order to get it (hooks, 2002). The tragedy for those of us who desire men is that so many of them will never do this work, and we cannot do it for them.

I have worried so much about finding love with a man that I accidentally centered my whole life around it, not realizing that I was already surrounded by love the whole time. hooks talks about finding unconditional love in feminist consciousness raising groups, among other women and queer folks. This is where I have also found love: in college, in grad school, in writing workshops, and in 12-step recovery groups. The depth of love I have experienced over shared passions in these spaces far surpasses any individual romances I’ve had with men. I sincerely regret all the times I neglected these friendships because I was either pursuing or pining over a loser.

hooks suggests that there is lasting love and romance in friendships. As she notes in Communion, many heterosexual women will only know true love in the context of their friendships with women and gay men. In chapter 14, “Lasting Love: Romantic Friendships” hooks explains non-sexual erotic passion in platonic relationships. These friendships acknowledge that there is an erotic dimension to the relationship, and that rather than being threatening, it acts as “an enhancing force, deepening ties.” hooks encourages us to value all deep bonds equally, rather than only prioritizing the sexual ones. She writes, “Romantic friendships are a threat to patriarchy and heterosexism because they fundamentally challenge the assumption that being sexual with someone is essential to all meaningful, lasting intimate bonds.” It seems if you’re a heterosexual woman, the best thing you can do is stop prioritizing sexual relationships with men and start appreciating your friendships as anchoring sources of partnership and love in your life.

What depresses me so much about living in Texas is the distance between people. Everyone is coupled off with their individual families, often miles of interstate away from friends. This seems like such a futile way to raise a family. Everyone I know is fretting over how they will pay for childcare. It takes an entire second income just to cover those costs. I hardly see my friends here because we all live at least 50 miles away from each other. This typical in Texas. I do believe that both single people and families would be happier and better served if not for this immense gulf of distance between us. We would be in better positions to help each other.

The idea of going to live with a man now, of going off to some suburb and starting a family that no one ever sees feels so absurd and deeply unappealing. It feels cursed. There’s a sort of running fantasy between some of my friends and I that someday we all just live in a giant house together as a family. That’s the only future that makes sense to me: one centered around mutual care and friendship, regardless of whatever men are doing.

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works referenced:

• hooks, bell. Communion: The female search for love. William Morrow, 2002.

• hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, masculinity, and love. Washington Square Press, 2004.

• Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton, 1963.

• Perry, Louise. (2022). I’m 30. The Sexual Revolution Shackled My Generation. In

  The Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/im-30-the-sexual-revolution-shackled

• Burke, C. C., & Tassin, K. G. (2026). How “The Botox Psyop” Broke Our Brains in the Name of Beauty [Podcast]. Diabolical Lies. https://www.diabolicalliespod.com/p/how-the-botox-psyop-broke-our-brains

• Fleabag, Season 2, Episode 3. Created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.