Losing My Religion: How to break up with the gospel of being wanted

There is a whole category of dating advice that manages to survive every cultural shift, no matter how much language women develop around empowerment, self-worth, attachment, boundaries, or healing. It survives because it knows exactly where to hook women. It flatters the part of them that still believes love can be secured through better performance. It promises relief from uncertainty. It offers control where there is usually only longing. And it keeps delivering the same old message in fresh packaging: if you can learn how to affect a man properly, you can finally get what you want.

Sometimes the advice is clumsy and obvious, the kind of thing a vain little internet goblin barks into a microphone about how women should text less, ask for less, reveal less, and become the kind of creature a man cannot stop thinking about. Sometimes it arrives in prettier clothes, dressed up in feminine language, polished strategy, and pseudo-psychological nuance. It may tell women how to be more magnetic, more mysterious, more irresistible, more “in their feminine,” more skilled at creating male pursuit.

The moment a woman accepts that frame, she has already left herself. She is no longer asking the most important questions. She is not asking what she really wants, what kind of relationship actually suits her, what her body knows before her fantasy takes over, why she keeps choosing the dynamics she chooses, or why she still believes male desire is the most important proof available to her. Instead, she is studying him. She is learning to anticipate him, manage him, attract him, hold him, soothe & smoothe him, intrigue him, and remain legible to him.

The tragedy is that this advice is so normalized most women no longer hear how warped it is. They hear it as practical, savvy, mature, useful. They assume the problem with their love life is that they have not yet mastered the male operating system. They think they need more information about what men fear, what men want, what men respond to, what men find intimidating, what men interpret as pressure, what men find irresistible, what men need in order to commit. They collect these little fragments of supposed wisdom as though enough knowledge about men will eventually save them from having to confront themselves.

They know how to read them, explain them, excuse them, wait for them, caretake them, mother them, eroticize their unavailability, and mistake their inconsistency for complexity. They know how to become emotionally literate on behalf of men who cannot or will not meet them there.

What women are often far less practiced in is self-knowledge. They do not always know their own patterns with the same precision they know his wounds. They do not always understand why they keep choosing losers or why they feel compelled to keep trying to elevate men who are nowhere near their level. They do not always understand why they say there are no good men out there, while continuing to make themselves available to men who confirm exactly that story. They do not always know why they perform easygoing when they are anything but, why they go full people-pleasing in the presence of possibility, or why they keep handing their worth to men and then feeling disappointed when men mishandle it.

Women must stop slathering on whatever the metaphorical version of lipstick is when they are told to become “the woman men crave.” I have nothing against lipstick. Wear it, enjoy it, weaponize it, throw it out, whatever suits you. The problem begins when the whole project of love starts to revolve around ornamentation, performance, and strategic desirability rather than truth. A woman does not need to become more appealing to men in general. God help us. She needs to become more honest with herself. She needs to know why her relationships have failed in the past, why chaos still feels exciting, why steadiness may feel dull or suspicious, why she thinks smart, successful women are “too intimidating” for men instead of asking whether she keeps choosing men who are underdeveloped, resentful, or simply not peers. She needs to know where she still shape-shifts, where she overfunctions, where she bargains with her standards, where she mistakes anxiety for chemistry, and where she is still arranging herself around the possibility of being with a man.

That is the real work, and it is much less glamorous than learning how to text in a way that keeps him hooked. It is also far more consequential.

She becomes discerning. She becomes less available for what does not match her. She begins to understand that the point of dating is not to generate the widest possible appeal, but to become increasingly unavailable to what is beneath her, misaligned with her, or dependent on her self-erasure. That shift alone changes almost everything, because the female psyche has been trained for so long to treat being wanted as the prize. A woman can have a room full of attention and still be starving relationally. She can be desired, pursued, admired, lusted after, fantasized about, and not be one inch closer to love that is mutual, mature, respectful, and emotionally safe. Desire has never been the measure women have been taught to believe it is.

That is where male-centered advice fails so spectacularly. It tells women how to create a reaction, but not how to recognize whether the man reacting is capable of partnership. It teaches them how to remain alluring, but not how to remain themselves. It builds an entire fantasy around attraction while quietly bypassing the fact that plenty of women have already succeeded at being attractive and still ended up with men who were scrubs, users, cowards, narcissists, emotional toddlers, or merely ordinary men made to seem important because women had been trained to revolve around them.

And once you see that, it becomes impossible to take most of this advice seriously. You start noticing how much of it depends on women becoming less real. Less direct, less clear, less honest, less visible, less themselves. It may use the language of femininity, but at bottom it is still a lesson in managed distortion. A woman is encouraged to become more skillful at producing a response rather than more anchored in her own perception. She learns to ask, “How do I make him feel?” before she ever asks, “Who am I becoming in order to keep this connection alive?” She learns to monitor his pace, his behavior, his openness, his desire, his fears, his pullbacks, his capacity, his readiness, and his ambivalence. Meanwhile, her own interior life becomes secondary, sometimes almost invisible to her.

That is why so many women feel exhausted by dating long before they understand why. The exhaustion is not only about men. It is about the amount of self-editing required when the whole game is organized around him.

This requires a woman to stop asking smaller questions. It asks more of her than cleverness, and much more than charm. It asks her to understand the emotional logic underneath her own dating life. Why this man. Why this pattern. Why this tolerance. Why this fear. Why this performance. Why this old loyalty to a fake version of self that keeps showing up every time love is on the line.

And that is why the self has to be the center of the story.

A well-matched romantic partnership, one between equals, with mutual respect, attraction, admiration, and real adult intimacy, will never be built on a woman’s ability to put on the right metaphorical lipstick and become the thing men find impossible to resist. The foundation has to be much more solid than that. It has to begin with self-knowledge, self-trust, self-honesty, and the willingness to stop performing in order to be chosen.

There is no texting strategy in the world powerful enough to fix that.

The good news is that women do not need one.

What they need is to come home to themselves with enough honesty that the old performance begins to feel embarrassing. They need to see how much of the dating industrial complex depends on female insecurity remaining intact. They need to stop confusing male attention with evidence of value and stop treating being wanted as the highest form of proof. They need to become women who can resist what is not right for them rather than women who have mastered the art of becoming irresistible.

That is where things finally begin to change. A woman becomes harder to manipulate, harder to flatter into self-abandonment, less likely to confuse attraction with alignment, and less likely to waste years trying to elevate men who never had the capacity to meet her. She becomes more interested in truth than optics, more interested in congruence than tactics, more interested in who she is being than how she is landing.

And from there, love has a chance to become something other than theater.