The Economics of Centering Men

It’s 11 PM, and you’re reading his text again. You already answered it hours ago, after drafting your reply three times. But here you are, going over his last message once more, looking for something new in words that haven’t changed – the way you’d reopen an empty refrigerator expecting food to appear suddenly. All day you were handling business, but now the most valuable part of your day, where your mind is finally free, is going to a man’s phrasing, the same attention everyone else has to pay for.

And tomorrow the labor continues. You’ll pick the analysis back up with your coffee. It’ll ride through your morning calls, and if a girlfriend phones, he’ll get most of that hour too. Because somewhere along the way your friendships became a place where he gets examined instead of a place where you get fed.

This is what I want you to really think about, and it has nothing to do with heartache. Fuck the heartache – we’ve all cried over a man before. I’m talking about the economics. Every dollar you’ve ever made came from the same source: your attention. It built your business, helped you close clients, wrote your offers, and earned every cent attached to your name. So add up this week alone – from rereading texts, morning replays, to girlfriend hours – and put a price on those hours, the same way you would if a client was paying for them. You’ve been giving your most valuable time to someone who doesn’t even pay for it, and then you wonder why the empire grows slow.

Everything in your life organizes itself around whatever matters most to you. Your calendar, your energy, your decisions, and your body all fall in line behind it, whether you realize it or not.

Having a man in your life isn’t the problem. I want to make that clear right away, because this isn’t an essay about leaving him, hating him, or pretending you don’t want love. Love is fine. Love is good. A man in your life can be a beautiful thing.

But putting a man at the center of your life is a different arrangement entirely. It means his moods set the weather in your house. It means your friends get whatever’s left of you after he’s been managed, your family gets scheduled around him, and your work gets the remains of your focus after he’s taken his share. It means decisions that should’ve been yours alone have become joint property: where you live, the trips you take, when you start something new, all of it filtered through what works for him, what he thinks, and how he feels. And it means the question running through your days is some version of how are we doing, a question you check as often as the weather. You can run a company while living this way – plenty of women do. But you can’t truly run your own life, because you’ve given up control but kept the title, and you’ve called that love.

You’ve spent years building yourself – your skills, your work, your style, your mind, your body. You are the most valuable part of your life, and that was true before any man showed up. So look at the arrangement you’ve been running: you, offered up daily, at no charge, to someone who hasn’t done the bare minimum to match what you bring. There’s no version of that trade that stays contained to your love life. When you give away your most valuable asset for nothing in one area, every part of your life takes note of what you think you’re worth. Your money has just been listening the longest.

If you find yourself wondering how you got here, remember that you were taught to expect this.

Think about the stories you grew up on. The princess’s plot resolves when he arrives. In romantic comedies, the last scene is often the airport chase, and no one talks about what happens to her career after that. As a child, you were handed dolls to practice tending while boys were handed blocks to practice building. By the time you could read, you had already learned the lesson: a man is not a part of a woman’s life – he’s the point of it, and every other achievement is what she does while she waits. Your grandmother organized her existence around a husband because she legally and financially had to. Your mother did it out of habit and called it a partnership. And you, with your money, your options, and your degrees, do a modernized version of the same thing and call it being in love, because the training goes deeper than a bank account can reach.

Look, I’m not saying this to give you an excuse. I’m saying it because you can’t take back something you didn’t know was taken from you by design, and half the women reading this will think their male-centered attention is just their personality. It’s not. It’s an inheritance, and you’re allowed to refuse it.

I know what you might be thinking, because I hear it from successful women all the time. “I have a business, money, and a title. I’m nobody’s doormat. This essay is about those other women.” But look closer.

You built everything you have in the hours when you weren’t focused on him. Your business only gets what’s left of your attention, and it shows in ways you’ve stopped noticing. Think about the offer you never launched because that season of your relationship swallowed you. The deals you missed. The mornings when your best ideas went to replaying last night’s conversation instead of working on what actually pays you. And here’s the tell you can verify for yourself: your business grows during the gaps. The single periods, the stable stretches, the months while he was away – look at when your revenue increased, and compare it to what happened during the chaos. For years, your income has followed the ups and downs of your relationships, but you probably never thought to track it.

You produced everything you’re proud of while running on half-empty, and because even that took you further than most, you decided it was enough. But you’re not stuck because you can’t go higher. You’re cruising at exactly the altitude a woman can reach when a man is guzzling half her tank, and there’s a cap on that altitude no matter how good the view is.

That’s why it’s so hard to notice this pattern when you’re successful. When you’re struggling, it feels like a crisis. When you’re doing well, it just looks like balance. But the limit is always there, and it’s set by how much attention you have left to give.

Here’s the other exemption, and it’s even trickier. You know all the right words. You’ve put in the work. And now you have standards. You vet, you don’t chase, you’ve listened to the podcasts, and you could probably give a TED talk on red flags. Decentering men? You’ve done that too. Just ask anyone.

Except look at what all of it is about.

The vetting rules are about men. The standards you set are about men. The healing journey you narrate to your girlfriends is about a man. Your journal entries, voice notes, podcast queue, and therapy sessions all keep coming back to him. The compatibility charts and late-night conversations – men are at the center of it all. You renovated the building, but he still owns it. Strategizing about men is still centering men. Analyzing men is still centering men. Even for some women, hating men is still focusing on them. Resentment is just another form of devotion, and the real estate he takes up in your head doesn’t care whether the tenant is love or litigation. Decentering men isn’t about how you feel about them, good or bad. It’s how many of your surplus hours they occupy, in any form.

And if you’re feeling defensive right now, good. Pay attention to that. Defensiveness is just the old pattern trying to hold on.

Some of you reading this are single and feel relieved. No man, no problem. But some of you are already thinking about a man you haven’t even met yet – the future one you’re currently preparing for.

You know if this is you. You keep your life a bit flexible in case he shows up. You soften your edges so you stay choosable. You hold back your ambition so it won’t scare anyone off, because you’ve figured out what being your full self might cost in the dating market, and you’ve been paying the difference with your future. Hours given to dating apps, which you treat like a part-time job with no salary. Dates that go nowhere, postmortems on dates that also went nowhere. You keep manifesting, preparing, and staying ready. There’s no man, but he’s still at the center – a vacancy you organize your life around. Auditioning for a man who isn’t even here yet means putting him first before he exists, and some women do this for years, waiting for a tenant who never signed anything.

Here’s a harder question: Why does a woman who is so capable still put a man at the center of her life?

It’s because he fills a role for you, and you know it even if you’ve never said it. You know how to make money. You can run a company, command respect, and solve almost any problem with enough focus. But what you haven’t figured out yet is how to feel okay on your own. You still look outside yourself for that. His attention is where you go to check whether you’re okay. His mood tells you how much you’re worth. This relationship was never just about love. It’s your verification system, and you check it with the compulsiveness of someone checking a vital sign, because for you, it is one.

Here’s why having wealth can actually make things harder. As you become more self-sufficient everywhere else, there are fewer places where you still need anyone, so all your remaining need ends up focused on him. Your mother’s approval stopped mattering years ago. You outgrew your mentors. Now you sign the checks, and every outside source of reassurance has been replaced – except for this one. He’s the last connection, carrying all of it. That’s why his silence can hit you so hard, even if you just closed your biggest deal of the year. The deal can’t give you the answer he does. Nothing you’ve built can, at least not yet. And the bitter joke is that he’s terrible at the job. His moods – data you watch so closely – are really about his hunger, his stress, his phone battery, or his fucking fantasy league. You’re looking for meaning in noise that was never about you. Even the most rigorous woman I know can run her business on hard numbers and run her worth on a man’s exhale.

You can’t fire a vendor while you still need the service. That’s the trap, and it’s why no amount of simply knowing better has ever been enough to help you move on.

From the beginning, I said that your attention is the source of every dollar you earn. It’s not about talent. Many talented women never build anything, and it’s not about time either, since we all have the same hours in a day. Attention, compounded, is the entire game. You’ve seen the proof in your own revenue: when you’re focused, you earn more, and when you’re distracted, you earn less. You know the difference between a week when your mind is on your work and a week when you’re stuck on a conversation you keep replaying. One of those weeks brings in money. The other one costs it.

So run the audit like an investor, because that’s what you are. The man in your life is holding the biggest share of your time, energy, and focus. But what are you getting back? If a fund manager gave you these results, you’d fire them. You wouldn’t let a business partner use up your best resources and give you so little in return. The only reason he still has this role is because no one showed you how to measure this kind of value. Each year, this position compounds against you, because attention invested in your work returns clients, offers, and reach, and attention invested in monitoring a man returns more monitoring. The real question isn’t whether you can afford him. You can afford almost anything. The real question is what your empire could look like if you took back that space for yourself. Deep down, you already know, and that’s probably why reading this makes you uneasy.

So here’s what taking it back looks like.

Decentering men, in its true sense, isn’t about breaking up or making a vow. It’s more like changing seats. Put yourself at the center of your life, your work, your body, and your name on the throne of your existence, and everything else finds its orbit around you, including a man, if you want one. A good man belongs in your orbit. He was never supposed to be the thing you revolve around.

Begin by honestly tracking your time for one week. Each day, notice the extra hours that are truly yours and see where they go. Pay attention to time spent thinking about men, talking about men, consuming content about men, or preparing for men. Count the girlfriend calls too, and be honest about what percentage of those conversations are about him. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just get the real number, because you can’t reclaim your focus until you recognize where it’s going, and I promise the number is bigger than you think.

Then comes the part nobody warns you about, so I will. At first, trying to pull your attention back doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like anxiety. You might catch yourself reaching out, then stop, and the urge lingers. Your mind will offer him up in every idle moment – in line for coffee, sitting at a red light, or whenever your focus slips – because that’s when you used to check in. This checking wasn’t just a habit. It was your regulation system. It’s how you’ve been managing the question of whether you’re okay for your entire adult life, and removing it leaves you raw before it sets you free.

Some women make it a few days before they manufacture drama, pick a fight, or send a message they didn’t need to, just to feel that old connection again. It’s not because something is wrong. It’s because the silence where you used to monitor things feels unbearable at first, and any contact – even if it’s negative – brings back a sense of normalcy. If this happens to you, don’t see it as a failure or a sign you’re doing something wrong. The discomfort means you’re closing that old loop. It’s like your attention is returning to a home it hasn’t been in for years. Just like any homecoming after a long time away, the first few nights feel strange before they start to feel good.

On the other side, you’ll find what you’ve only experienced in glimpses throughout your career – those rare times when your mind was fully focused on your work and everything just flowed. When you take your attention back from him, it doesn’t disappear. It redeploys, and the first places it goes are your work and your body. This isn’t just a figure of speech; it’s how things actually work. You’ll start to see the first returns within a month.

But here’s what I know from the inside, and why this essay alone can’t solve everything. You didn’t decide to center your attention on him, so it can’t be undone by deciding. You need to start finding your sense of okayness within yourself, or your focus will drift back to him whenever you’re not paying attention, no matter what you decide while reading this. That shift doesn’t happen just by understanding the problem. You might understand every word here and still end up messaging him by next Thursday, because the body doesn’t take orders from insight. It takes reps.

This is exactly what I help with in my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. For two weeks, you get one assignment each day, tailored to you based on what you share with me the day before. Together, we focus on where your sense of okayness really comes from, why your attention goes back to him when you’re not watching, and how to stay centered, even through the withdrawal, until it finally feels safe to do so. By the end, you’ll feel in control again, and everything you work on will come from a place of real strength for the first time.

It’s $397, which is less than what you might lose in just one week by letting your attention stay stuck.

It's time to center yourself