There is no force more stubborn than the love we give to a project—especially when that project is a person. Not a home renovation, not a side hustle, but a breathing, flawed, history-wrapped man.
And many women, particularly Black women, have been taught to see themselves as both lovers and lifelines. Raised in a world where salvation often wears lip gloss and heels, they inherit the myth that healing/growing a boy into a man is a form of ascension.
I know many who stay. Not out of ignorance, but out of some misguided hope. They think they see who he could be. They think they see the raw potential, his gentle side, his over all sense of decency. And yet, they also see the echoes of his bad choices, of past partners whose value systems reflect everything they are not.
Why did he choose that, they ask? And now he chose me? I’m so different from HER!
I know a few who left. That wasn’t the hard part. It’s the returning that twists the knife. The ritual of convincing themselves that things will change, that he will rise like the sun, that his past chaotic choices are just phases, that love is enough if they just hold on tight enough.
It’s the kind of hope that wraps itself around disappointment and calls it faith.
But this is not about the men. Not really.
This is about what it means to live in a house with someone you do not respect. To wake up beside a man who treats you well but does not sharpen you. To feel alone while partnered; to parent in parallel rather than in unison; to love someone’s potential more than their presence; to trade your truth for their comfort. To speak without being heard. To touch without being held. To say “I’m fine” and mean “I’m vanishing.”
A lot of them tell me they don’t want to be the teacher, the coach, the counselor, the correctional officer. They want a peer. A man whose very presence calls them to push higher, not baggages that drag them down.
And still—some stay. Is it because they fear the cold space of absence more than the lukewarm company of compromise?
The world wrote an unfair script for successful Black women. It tells them that loyalty means carrying the full weight of emotionally bankrupt and financially broken men on their backs until their pussies dry up and the men leave them for younger women–and the cycle starts all over again for the new victims.
The narrative also wants women to call it devotion, even love. But let’s be clear: there is no fidelity or heroism in self-erasure. There is nothing sacred about the slow decay of a woman who keeps giving and giving from a well that was never filled in kind by her partner.
Philosophers would call this a Failure of Authenticity. Game theorists would see a Suboptimal Equilibrium: a series of repeated decisions that look like love but function like entrapment.
Women are naturally strategic in their mindset–to a fault sometimes–playing a long game with short payoffs; trading temporary peace for long-term growth. Every time a sistah stays, she resets the board, thinking maybe this time she’ll win. But the rules never change.He won’t either.
The children are watching, ladies. You’re teaching them what love looks like, what power tolerates, what womanhood must endure.
And that is perhaps the most dangerous inheritance of all—the quiet lesson that it is normal to shrink, to compromise, to teach a man how to be a man when you’re still learning how to be free.
The truth is: love should not be a syllabus. Relationships are not workshops. Black women, you are not ministries of rehabilitation for Black men with arrested development. Allow yourselves to want more. To want mutuality. To want someone who brings something to the table besides an appetite.
It’s ok to outgrow a man who stayed still.
The world won’t applaud you for it. But your soul and sanity will.
And that, ladies, is more than enough for an emotionally and intellectually fulfilling life.
