Supporting your partner through her period can be daunting.
Do you buy chocolate? A hot water bottle? Take over bedtime? Nod sympathetically while she explains, through tears, that she has just watched a video about how pigeons were once domesticated by humans before we abandoned them to fend for themselves on city streets with only Greggs crumbs and discarded vape cartridges for sustenance?
You’re thinking like a loving partner. This is not the vibe. You must think like middle management.
You must sit her down and ask the lord to make her less emotional, more ambitious and, above all else, more productive. If there's one thing every woman wants while her uterus is trying to claw its way out through her abdomen and her emotions are as batshit as they come, it is this.
Sorry what was that? You think that sounds like an objectively terrible way to support someone you love?
God, you’re old fashioned. We’re not comforting women anymore. We’re KPI-ing them (Keeping Periods Invisible). Duh.
Every now and then I think, right! (in the way only British people can say ‘right’!) That’s enough internet for today. I’ve extracted the last remaining ounce of batshittery from the algorithm. Surely there’s nothing left for me to write about.
And then Instagram looks me dead in the eye and says “actually Jennie, have you considered a man praying over his wife’s period so she remains productive?”
No, Instagram. I hadn’t. But I’m sure you’re going to show me…
And show me it did.
So there I was, watching a Christian influencer announce to the camera that his wife had started her period before explaining that they like to “start her period in prayer.” Fair enough, I thought. I'm not a religious woman myself. Personally if I'm menstruating I'd probably lean more towards a bar of Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut and 45 minutes of uninterrupted silence than divine intervention but hey ho, each to their own, I’m not here to judge.
Perhaps he’s going to pray that she’s in less pain or that she gets some rest or that she feels comforted, that would be nice wouldn’t it? As I said, I’m not religious myself, but I don’t think you need to believe in God to appreciate someone hoping your uterus might stop behaving like it’s trying to escape your body.
Unfortunately, this is not the direction we were headed… Instead I watch as a man thanks God for his wife’s healthy body that is “working properly” (good to know) before asking that she “wouldn’t be driven by her emotions” or her feelings, praying against “the enemy” who would try to make her “unproductive and unfruitful”, and speaking “life”, “blessing”, “ambition”, “energy” and “productivity” over her.
Now, I appreciate that as someone whose own prayers generally begin and end with “please let there be some Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut in the cupboard”, I may not be the ideal person to critique somebody else’s conversation with the Almighty. But I have to admit that “please maximise my wife’s output while she’s menstruating” wasn’t where I thought this was going.
I used to be one of those annoyingly smug women who thought people made a bit too much fuss about periods. Mine were inconvenient but manageable - nothing to write home about. Then I had my son, and now there are a handful of days a month where I stand at the sink sobbing, genuinely convinced I am the shittest mother and the shittest person to have ever lived, wanting to burn my entire life to the ground. Is this PMDD? I ask myself every month without fail.
So to watch a man gather his wife and their daughter onto the bed before praying to God, but very much within earshot of his wife, that she wouldn't be “driven by her emotions”... Well, I must admit, it got my back up ever so slightly - not least because of the pass agg nature of it all. You know, the way old ladies at the supermarket tell you off about your child's freezing feet by cooing “Ooh, did Mummy forget your socks today? What a naughty Mummy!” at a 1 year old who cannot answer back and was never actually the intended audience. This guy isn't talking to God. He's talking to his wife, via God, which is somehow worse than just saying it because now nobody's allowed to be annoyed without also being annoyed at the Lord.
Anyway, as someone who has menstruated for getting on 2 decades and who has recently had a glow down in the period stakes, what helps on the hard days is not being told this is shameful or something I need to suppress or an inconvenience I need to pray my way out of. What helps is actual support.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but when somebody tells me they’re in pain or feeling emotional, my instinct isn’t usually to wonder how efficiently they’re going to tackle the admin that afternoon. It’s giving less “Lord, ease her suffering” and more “could we perhaps circle back to those deliverables?”
At one point I genuinely forgot he was talking about his wife and not an underperforming regional sales manager. And I thought what in the Jesus, Mary and Joseph is going on here then?
And then I had one of those deeply irritating moments where your own brain starts making connections you'd really rather it didn't. Because I felt like I’d heard this bloke before. Not him specifically - although, given the state of my Instagram algorithm, there’s every chance I have. I mean I’d heard this way of talking before.
A few months ago I wrote about Clavicular explaining that female orgasms are “low ROI” as though women everywhere were NFTs nobody wants to admit they bought in 2021.
We’ve got men all over the internet popping up to tell us about “sexual market value” and “high value males” which, you’ll be interested to know, rests on three pillars - physique, resources, and status. I don't know why but I pictured this on a slide. A man called Dave from Strategy clicking through a PowerPoint presentation at an away day in a Premier Inn conference room gesturing at a triangle. “So if we can just leverage our synergies across the three pillars going forward...” before someone at the back writes “low hanging fruit” in their notebook with the free pen. Nobody in the room is talking about romantic relationships… and yet…
Every week another man appears, ring light on, podcast mic out, ready to explain that human relationships are actually just an under monetised branch of business studies.
Which raises a genuine question. Is this actually happening in offices? Are there men out there right now, with commutes and lanyards and a normal boss called Steve, going home and asking their wives to be more “fruitful”? Or is this specifically a tripod problem?
I've been thinking about this far more than any sane person should and I honestly can't picture it. I can't picture a bloke leaving a day of meetings, driving home, kissing his wife hello and saying “before we put the tea on, I'd just like to have a quick conversation about maximising your output during menstruation.” I think most men would die of embarrassment before the words even reached the end of the sentence.
Maybe that’s because if you’ve got a normal job, you’ve already had your daily allowance of corporate bollocks. You’ve spent eight hours discussing productivity, efficiencies, deliverables and quarterly targets. You’ve already asked whether we can “circle back” and whether something is “adding value”. You’ve scratched the itch so to speak. The last thing you want to do when you get home is start speaking to your wife like she’s an underperforming branch of Currys.
And yet online it feels like we’re surrounded by men who simply cannot help themselves. Every conversation about women ends up sounding like a shareholder update. Relationships have become investments. Attraction has become market value. Sex has become ROI. Periods have become productivity issues.
I genuinely wonder what these men are like on first dates.
“So... tell me about yourself.”
“Well, I’m really looking for someone with strong long term growth potential.”
Christ alive.
Or perhaps “I think there's a really exciting opportunity for us to leverage our existing chemistry.”
No mate, you’re in All Bar One, not presenting a merger. Fuck sake give it a rest.
Love isn’t a business. It isn’t supposed to be efficient. If the person you love is ill you don’t ask how quickly they can get back to full capacity. If they’re grieving you don’t wonder whether they’re still being sufficiently ambitious. If they’ve had an awful day, you don’t sit them down and ask what the ROI is on listening to them cry for half an hour.
You make them a cup of tea. You pick up the slack. And by golly you order the fucking takeaway. You let them have a moan without trying to turn it into a personal development exercise. That is, quite literally, the entire point of loving another person.
The moments that matter most in relationships are often gloriously, wonderfully unproductive. Sitting beside somebody in silence, rubbing their back when they're sick, taking over bedtime because they've got nothing left in the tank, listening to the same story for the fourteenththousandthmillionth time because it's still upsetting them. None of these things would make a particularly inspiring graph in a PowerPoint presentation.
Thank God.
Because human beings are not projects. Which is why this language feels so strange when used in this way. Men online really do seem to have accidentally wandered into relationships carrying the vocabulary of a corporate retreat and the women in their lives stopped being people to love and became something they were managing.
Which brings me back to my original question.
Is this a man problem? Is this an internet problem? Or is this what happens when you spend so long consuming content that tells you everything in life can be improved, optimised, ranked and measured that eventually you start looking at the person you love and wondering where the growth opportunities are?
These men are obsessed with talking about traditional values. About men being providers and women wanting a strong, masculine man who knows his purpose. But there is something very modern about all of this.
I mean, there is nothing remotely traditional about treating your marriage like a start up. Nothing traditional about spending your days talking to a phone propped up on a stack of protein tubs. Your granddad did not do this. Your granddad went to work, came home, and, whatever else he got wrong, did not narrate his wife’s uterus to a camera for content.
These men don’t need another podcast about masculinity or another book about becoming high value and they certainly don’t need another man on the internet explaining the secrets of female psychology while standing in front of a Lamborghini he definitely does not own.
Maybe they just need somewhere else to put all this energy.
A job.
A proper one.
Somewhere they can use all these beautiful business words in the environment they were designed for.
So, with that in mind, I have put together a helpful list of careers for men who are desperate to talk about ROI, value and optimisation but have accidentally started applying them to their girlfriends.
Recruitment - You already talk about people like they’re assets to be placed. Might as well get paid for it.
Middle management, any industry - You’ll get to say “let's circle back” and “what's the ROI on this” to actual colleagues, about an actual project, in an actual meeting, about an actual spreadsheet, and nobody will ever have to hear about anyone’s uterus again.
HR - You’re already conducting unsolicited performance reviews on people who did not ask for one. You’ll fit right in.
Estate agency - You clearly enjoy describing things in terms of “potential” and “value.” There’s a 3 bed semi in Woking with your name on it.
Motivational speaking, but the boring corporate kind, not the leggings kind - Full days. Whiteboards. A lanyard. Somewhere to put “unlock your potential” that isn’t your girlfriend’s bedside.
Life coaching - You already have strong opinions about how strangers should live their lives despite having no qualifications, so congratulations, you've actually been training for this one.
Literally anything with a quarterly target - Anything. A Vodafone shop. A Nando’s. I don’t care. Just somewhere that isn’t your relationship.
And if you really must pray, how about this instead.
Dear Lord. Thank you for my wife. She is in pain. Please help me shut up, make the tea, and not turn any of this into content. Amen.
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