With Valentine’s Day coming up, I have been thinking about the inevitable discourse that comes alongside it. For a long time, I’ve watched and listened to my friends complain about their respective boyfriends, situationships, exes, etc. I’ve been in the same position, but it seems like we’re all stuck with the same issue — why do we continue to stay? Is it not just easier to leave what we know to be a toxic, unhealthy relationship? I couldn’t help but fixate on these questions and think about my own situations — was I insecure and just desperate to cling on to any semblance of love? No, I know myself enough to have strict boundaries when it comes to men, so what exactly was it that made me fixate on a guy who showed no initiative? And why do I keep hearing about not only my friends’ experiences with this problem, but also almost every woman under the sun? Why are there seemingly more and more albums recently written about how you can’t stop thinking about them, and why has yearning for toxic, emotionally unavailable men become such a phenomenon amongst Gen Z? Why is the blame almost always put on the woman, instead of the man who is the one doing wrong?
Knowing I definitely don’t have the expertise to answer all these burning questions, I did what I knew would give me more perspective and asked my girlfriends. The largest thing I found was actually summarized by a quote from The Perks of Being A Wallflower — “We accept the love we think we deserve.” A friend explained it in a way that when women are constantly fed the narrative on social media that they are unattractive because of their side profile, their body, or any other current self-deprecating fad going on, and when they internalize this mindset, they only believe they are worthy of men who are toxic. A lot of my friends felt as if this happens most consistently when you’re in your teens, you tend to be easily impressionable and don’t have a framework for how relationships are supposed to be. A friend said, “It’s easy to assume that the way you’re being treated in a relationship is just ‘how it goes’ when you’re that young, because you don’t have any experience to know otherwise.” Another friend talked about how, more often than not, women who are notorious for choosing “toxic” men are doing so because they have an “I can fix him” mindset, but the emotional bread-crumbing that comes from these men is what makes them stay.
“Women who get trapped in bad relationships or with evil men just have very soft hearts, and they want to believe that he’s not evil.” This quote alone is what shifted my perspective on the issue entirely. I have always been the friend who begs their friends to block or stop seeing these men who I perceived as walking all over them — but I think it came from the perspective of not understanding. I couldn’t understand why my gorgeous, intelligent, sweet friends knew the men they were with were bad, but took no action to separate themselves from the relationship when I would’ve left a long time ago. What I’ve learned now, though, is that it’s the women in these relationships who deserve more empathy and care more than ever. My friend used the metaphor of Santa in order to explain why women choose to see the best in their romantic partners. “When you’re a kid, you buy into Santa because your stupid sweet little heart wants to believe in the magic of Christmas so bad it feels real to you.” I was that kid who believed in Santa once, too — and offering more empathy to girls in these situations is what we all should be doing instead of judging them.
With my initial question answered, I continued to think about the societal aspect of it all. When I go on social media, I get the occasional video of women demeaning other girls in these toxic relationships, stating they were okay with being disrespected, not girls’ girls, and will do anything for male attention. Why is it that women are constantly subjected to belittlement and judgment when they’re the ones being treated poorly?
Simple answer: Misogyny.
I know we all know some part of this, but I think a lot of the time we can become complicit in this idea, which in turn shows itself in our friendships, and we end up being that girl consistently telling your friend, “I don’t understand why you don’t break up with him!” with begrudging annoyance. But when you put yourself in a position of “having more respect for yourself”, you are inherently giving into misogynistic ideals that have been instilled in us. Placing yourself above another woman for “choosing better” only helps bolster the idea that some women are entirely to blame for how men act — when in actuality, the men are the ones acting a fool.
I feel as if this entire discourse of women being in toxic relationships has gotten so bad to the point that there have been dissections and discourse after discourse about Carrie Bradshaw. I mean, her character can be characterized as “male-centered”, but the entirety of Sex and the City is about the core-four’s ever-evolving love lives, with the only consistent thing being their intense soulmate bond with each other, which I argue, was incredibly feminist at the time. At some point, I begin to wonder: when we have an incredible amount of discourse about men who have no backbone and why the women continue surrounding them, at what point does it become productive or produce legitimate criticisms about the patriarchy? In my opinion, I don’t think it does. I think it centers men in a way that paints them as blameless and not the problem, when in reality we should be putting more pressure on men to be better.
Maybe by next Valentine’s, we’ll be drinking Cosmopolitans and making presentations on how men can do better.