How Do You Decenter a Bad Partner? (Reader Asks)

Welcome to my feminist advice column. You can read all previous entries HERE. For those of you who want to write me a letter, you can fill in THIS FORM directly. I will answer your question in a letter here in about a month (or potentially more, my backlog is a bit crowded, sorry!).

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“Therapist here and loved your article about therapy not being useful for most men. I completely agree.

Question: if you had to condense / fast track your process for getting women to stop centering men / stop trying to fix him / stop waiting for him to change and *leave*- what do you think are the steps that need to happen first, and in what succession?"

I love this question because it connects directly to what I’ve been writing about in the recent Decentering Men series. We often talk about leaving as though it is primarily a logistical decision: recognize that the relationship is bad, make a plan, pack your things, go. But for many women, the logistics are actually the easier part.

The much harder process is the psychological part. You have to stop treating this man’s behavior, feelings, potential, childhood, mental health, and willingness to change as the central problem around which your entire life revolves. By the time a woman physically leaves, I would ideally like her to have already begun the much more radical process of mentally moving him out of the center.

If I had to compress that process into a sequence, I would probably put it something like this.

This is the first cut I would make.

Women can spend extraordinary amounts of time investigating the possibility of male transformation. Is he depressed? Is he traumatized? Does he have ADHD? Was his father emotionally unavailable? Does he have an avoidant attachment style? Would therapy help? Does he understand what he’s doing? Does he really mean his apology this time?

Those questions can be interesting. They can even be clinically relevant, especially for therapists like you. But they are often completely irrelevant to the woman’s actual decision.

Then there are the other questions which are laced with internalized blame and and unfair share of responsibility for the relationship’s ultimate outcome: What can I do to get him to be more emotionally present? Is he so detached because I’m doing something that pushes him away?

The question that really matters is much simpler: If nothing about this man changed, would you willingly choose this relationship?

Not if he finally understands. Not if he starts therapy. Not if he stops drinking. Not if he becomes emotionally intelligent or if he finally recognizes everything you’ve been explaining to him for the past five years.

Him. As he is right now, not as he was in the beginning. Would you choose him?

If the answer is no, then you’ve already learned something extremely important.

This is where I think the feminist concept of decentering men becomes particularly useful.

A woman will often tell herself: ‘But he’s not always like this.’ Of course he isn’t. Almost nobody is unpleasant every second of every day. But you shouldn’t focus on whether you can find enough good moments to justify staying. Ask yourself whether the relationship as a whole is giving you the life you want.

Likewise, an apology is not evidence of change. Tears aren’t evidence of change. Promises aren’t evidence of change. A man telling you that he finally understands isn’t evidence of change. Changed behavior is evidence of change and nothing short of that will do.

And even then, you don’t owe him continued access to you while he demonstrates it.

This is an important distinction because women are often taught to treat a man’s potential as an asset they have already received. He could be wonderful. Fine. He could also become wonderful somewhere else. You don’t have to spend your life being the rehabilitation center where he develops into the person he might someday become.

This is probably the biggest one. As I was saying in my main essay on decentering men, women are trained to become anthropologists of male behavior.

We study the childhood, we wonder about the attachment style, the love language, the family dynamics, on whether his pornography use is within ‘normal’ ranges.

We then wonder about the mother wound and the work stress. The testosterone levels, since we’re on that particular cultural obsession, apparently (looking at you, MAGA!). The depression, the trauma and his communication style.

And somewhere along the way, understanding and empathy become substitutes for using our sound judgment. You can understand exactly why someone behaves badly and still decide that you don’t want to live with the consequences.

This is one of the reasons I think feminist therapy can be so valuable, and I assume this is the kind of therapy you are trying to implement. Kudos for that! A good therapist can help a woman understand herself and prioritize herself without this turning her into an endless research project on her partner.

The goal isn’t to produce the world’s most sophisticated explanation for why he behaves like an asshole, it’s to help you decide what you are going to do about it.

This is where decentering becomes behavioral rather than just intellectual or hypothetical. (Of course, bear in mind that this is only actionable advice in the situations where the man is not overtly abusive; because otherwise this decentering behavior can make abusers more dangerous.)

Stop trying to prevent his bad moods and overwork your hypervigilance into supernatural levels of intuition.

Stop phrasing things perfectly so he won’t become defensive or monitoring whether he’s upset. Stop rushing to reassure him and to repair every conflict he refuses to repair himself. Stop making your plans according to what mood he’s likely to be in, or treating his disappointment as an emergency.

If he’s angry because you established a perfectly reasonable boundary, let him be angry. If he’s disappointed because you’re no longer available to provide something you’ve been providing at your own expense, let him be disappointed. If he thinks you’re becoming selfish because you’re finally developing a life that doesn’t revolve around him, let him think it and stop trying to defend your right to have your own needs and feelings.

A colossal amount of heterosexual women’s emotional labor consists of making men’s unpleasant emotions disappear before those emotions become inconvenient for the men experiencing them and everyone else. Decentering him means allowing him to experience the consequences of his own personality, although he will of course not see it this way and blame you.

Your relationship will become worse immediately, but only because you’re no longer investing effort to hide the unpleasant strains of his behavior underneath extra effort on your side. If he complains that you are not getting along anymore, that’s just his own emotional incompetence rising to the surface.

This is where I would actually caution women against making leaving their new full-time obsession. Because you can technically stop centering a man while making your entire existence about escaping him.

You spend every waking hour researching divorce lawyers, reading abuse forums, analyzing his latest behavior, monitoring his reactions, discussing him with friends, and trying to predict what he’ll do next. He’s still the center. He’s just the center of your exit strategy.

Of course, when the situation is dangerous because he’s an abuser, all this caution is warranted. But even so, you can still find ways to center yourself and your own life at least a little bit. Start building things that have nothing to do with him.

Rebuild friendships. Get your own money organized. Find interests that disappeared during the relationship. Reconnect with your body and your own pleasure, if you want. Make plans he isn’t invited to. Develop professional goals. Read books that have nothing to do with relationships. Spend time with women who remind you who you are outside of partnership.

Build a life that is interesting enough that the prospect of leaving him begins to feel less like losing your life and more like getting your life back.

This is the point where psychological decentering meets practical reality. If leaving is likely to be difficult, don’t announce every step of your preparation, just line things up before you are ready to leave. There’s a middle ground between deciding to stay and to leave a bad marriage.

Get your finances in order. Understand what accounts and assets exist. Make copies of important documents. Strengthen your support network. Identify somewhere you could stay if necessary. Talk privately to a lawyer if you’re married. Think about housing, employment, childcare, transportation, and healthcare. If there is abuse or coercive control, make the safety planning considerably more careful.

And I want to stress that planning to leave is not the same thing as promising yourself that you will leave tomorrow.

A woman can have extremely good reasons why she cannot leave immediately. Children, money, housing, immigration status, disability, fear of retaliation, lack of family support, or simply needing time to become psychologically ready can all matter.

You don’t have to solve your entire life today. You do, however, want to stop making yourself more dependent on a man you already know you don’t want to depend on.

This is the part that I think can take women the longest and I think you, as a therapist, will probably agree with me.

They want him to understand. They want him to acknowledge what he did. They want him to admit that they were right. They want him to say, “Yes, I really did treat you terribly, and you were completely justified in leaving.”

Sometimes they even stay because they are waiting for the relationship to end in a mutually agreed-upon narrative. You may never get that.

A man who benefited from your self-sacrifice has very little incentive to validate the realization that your self-sacrifice was unreasonable. So he will just reject your reality because he is more invested in protecting himself from any and all accountability.

He will call you selfish, say you’ve changed. He will accuse you of giving up. He may suddenly become extremely interested in repairing the relationship. He may promise to become the man you’ve been begging him to become for years.

And this is where all the previous steps become important. If you’ve spent the last several years making his transformation the condition for your happiness, you’ll be extraordinarily vulnerable to that final performance.

If you’ve already decentered him, it becomes much easier to say: ‘I hope you figure yourself out. I’m still leaving.’

And that, ultimately, is what I think the fast track to decentering a bad partner looks like. Not to convince yourself that he is evil or stop loving him. Not wait until you are angry enough. Not even necessarily get him to admit that you’re right.

Instead:

See the relationship clearly. Believe what you see. Stop investing in potential. Stop managing his emotions. Stop making his psychology your project. Rebuild your own life. Build your practical exit route. Then make your decisions based on what you want rather than on what he might someday become.

And there is an interesting paradox here: decentering men makes leaving easier precisely because leaving stops being the central objective.

The objective becomes much bigger than getting away from him. It becomes building a life in which he is no longer the organizing principle. Once you have started doing that, leaving is no longer an act of destroying the center of your life. It’s simply removing someone who was never supposed to be the center in the first place.

Couples Therapy Is a Trap If Your Partner Is Abusive

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Apr 21

Before I get to my main essay of today, I want to ask a quick favor: I’m currently running a survey about how exclusivity is discussed (or not) in relationships. If you have 3-4 minutes to spare, please consider taking it HERE and help me uncover the power dynamics in these intimate negotiations. Thank you!

The Abuser's Shame Spiral

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Jun 27

One of the most confusing experiences in an abusive relationship is discovering that your pain does not stop the abuse, but it intensifies it.