This Could Be So Much Better

This is a love letter (a slightly profane one), and because it is coming from me, there is a pretty good chance I am going to tell you something you don’t really want to hear before we are finished.

I have this funny (bitchy) habit of walking into a beautiful restaurant, hotel, cocktail bar, house, pretty much anywhere someone has clearly spent an obscene amount of money making things gorgeous, and immediately beginning to redesign it in my head. I’ll look around and think, Damn, this is cool, and then five minutes later I have mentally changed the lighting, ripped out a rug, moved the bar six feet to the left, replaced something on the wall, and planted a giant olive tree in a corner where nobody asked me to put one.

It doesn’t mean I hate the place. Quite the opposite. Usually I’m noticing it because I can already see how good it is, which makes the unrealized potential almost impossible for me to ignore.

And lately I have realized that I look at women’s lives in much the same way.

I see women who have built extraordinary things. Women who have created careers, businesses, families, homes, friendships, communities, financial security, beautiful lives full of people who depend on them and admire them. By almost every external measure, they are doing well. Often extraordinarily well.

And still I find myself wondering: do these women wish this could be so much better?

I don’t mean bigger, richer, thinner, busier, easier, or more impressive. I mean better to live inside.

Because those are two very different things, and high-functioning women can become astonishingly skilled at confusing them.

You can have the beautiful house and dread the life waiting for you inside it. You can have the marriage everyone admires while feeling profoundly lonely next to the person sharing your bed. You can have the career you worked twenty years to earn and realize that you hate the woman you have to become every morning to maintain it. You can be surrounded by people who love you while recognizing that very few of them actually know you, because somewhere along the way you became so good at being useful, agreeable, capable, easy, impressive, or needed that you stopped asking whether you were being yourself.

From the outside, everything looks amazing. But you know. You always fucking know.

The conversations we’ve been having here over the past several weeks have crystallized this for me in a way I did not expect. We have talked about unhappy marriages, gray divorce, women quietly quitting relationships, overfunctioning, withdrawal, resentment, intimacy, invisible labor, men who stop participating and women who stop compensating. The comments have been passionate and personal and, at times, hilariously committed to determining who started it.

We fucking love a prosecution.

Blame is incredibly satisfying because it gives pain somewhere to go. If I can identify the person responsible for my unhappiness, I can spend a tremendous amount of time studying what they did, what they should have done, why they did it, which childhood wound explains it, whether their attachment style caused it, and whether a jury of my closest friends agrees that I was treated unfairly.

He may have behaved terribly. She may have been controlling. Your parents may have failed you in profound ways. Your boss may actually be exploiting you. Your ex may have lied. The system may genuinely be unfair. Sexism, racism, class, money, family history, trauma, access, luck, health, and power all shape the conditions in which we live. I have never been interested in pretending otherwise.

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Facing something does not mean assuming responsibility for causing it… but it requires becoming willing to see reality without requiring reality to first become more convenient.

Maybe your marriage is lonely. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe you have outgrown a friendship you have been maintaining primarily because of history. Maybe you keep choosing people who cannot give you what you say you want. Maybe you have organized your identity around being indispensable and are now furious that everyone depends on you. Maybe you say you want intimacy while instinctively retreating whenever someone gets close enough to really see you. Maybe the life you have built is perfectly functional and increasingly unbearable.

Facing any of those truths does not require you to immediately blow up your life, but it does require you to stop bullshitting yourself about it.

I want women to trust themselves enough to know what they know without convening a committee first. I want you to become intimate enough with your own internal life that your dissatisfaction matters before it becomes a crisis, and your desire matters even when nobody else understands it. I want you to know what you want before you automatically begin calculating whether everybody around you will approve.

Look, women have been trained to treat selflessness as such a moral virtue that putting the self anywhere near the center can feel vaguely criminal. I am not interested in how selfless you can become. Women have already proven we can make just about any-fucking-thing function through selflessness.

Give us a marriage with very little intimacy and we will construct an entire emotionally satisfying life around it. Give us a coworker who does not pull his weight and we will quietly do the missing work because explaining it/asking for help/complaining about it feels more exhausting. Give us a chaotic family and we will manage everybody’s feelings, keep the holiday traditions alive, bring the pie, and then wonder why we are exhausted in the bathroom before serving it up.

Good for you. Honest for you. Alive for you. Whether the woman inside this beautifully managed operation would consciously choose it if she were designing her life today.

That is why everything I care about comes back to the self.

Other people matter enormously: love, partnership, children, community. We have obligations, consequences, interconnected lives, and responsibilities to people we care about. I am not advocating some narcissistic fantasy in which everybody else becomes a supporting character in the grand production of your personal fulfillment.

But you are still the only human life you have jurisdiction over.

Your husband has his 100 percent. Your wife has hers. Your mother gets hers. Your grown children have theirs. Your friends, colleagues, exes, bosses, neighbors, and whoever else has been starring in the latest prosecution happening inside your head all have their own lives to run.

And you have yours. One hundred fucking percent of it.

When I say, “Boo, you are the problem,” I am not saying you caused every problem in your life. I am saying that the minute your solution requires another person to become somebody they have repeatedly demonstrated they are not, you have placed your life in their hands.

If you can only feel secure once your husband becomes emotionally available, your security belongs to him. If you can only feel worthy when a man chooses you, your worth belongs to him. If your peace requires your mother to finally understand you, she controls your peace. If your freedom depends upon your boss recognizing your brilliance, your freedom is sitting in somebody else’s office.

That is a terrifying arrangement.

You can change what you believe, how you behave, what you tolerate, what you keep explaining, where you invest your energy, whom you give access to, which truths you acknowledge, and which consequences you are willing to face. You can stay somewhere consciously instead of telling yourself you are trapped. You can leave something even though leaving hurts. You can admit that you were wrong. You can decide that something you tolerated for twenty years will not be tolerated in year twenty-one. You can stop using another person’s refusal to change as the explanation for why your own life must remain exactly the same.

And because apparently every conversation about heterosexual relationships eventually summons the War of the Sexes into the comments section, let me be clear that I am talking to men too. All of it applies.

If you are a man in a lonely marriage, if your wife has disengaged, if you feel unseen, if you hate the life you built, if your entire identity has been swallowed by work, or if you have become so consumed by explaining what modern women are doing wrong that women now occupy half your waking thoughts, come on in. Same deal.

Your 100 percent belongs to you.

I have no interest in flipping the hierarchy and replacing “women are the problem” with “men are the problem.” I want all of us to become less fascinated with prosecuting the other person and more interested in inhabiting ourselves.

Imagine what happens when that energy comes home.

Imagine a woman who no longer disappears to maintain love, but who also no longer needs to spend her life cataloguing everything men have done wrong. Imagine a man who can acknowledge where he has been hurt without making women responsible for restoring his sense of power. Imagine friendships where belonging does not require performance, motherhood without martyrdom, ambition without proving, and relationships between two people who can remain deeply connected without making either person responsible for completing the other.

Imagine arriving at the later chapters of your life without discovering that you spent the first ones faithfully performing a role you never consciously chose.

That is what I mean when I say your life could be so much better.

And let’s not conflate better with easier. After all, truth has a nasty habit of creating administrative problems.

Once you admit you hate your job, you may eventually have to find another one. Once you acknowledge that your marriage is over, there may be houses and money and children and lawyers to consider. Once you see that a friendship is one-sided, you may have to endure some loneliness instead of continuing to fill the calendar with people who no longer fit. Once you recognize that you have been holding an entire family system together, somebody will get pissed when you stop.

Sometimes we avoid the truth because we are cowards. More often, I think we avoid it because we are smart enough to understand that truth comes with consequences.

BUT it also comes with possibility. And the possibility is the part I cannot stop seeing when I look at you.

I want your actual life to feel as good as it looks. I want you to want the relationship you are in rather than merely possess the skills required to survive it. I want you to walk into your own home and feel at home in your life. I want pleasure to be something you experience, not something you earn after everybody else is satisfied. I want you to stop being quite so impressed with your ability to tolerate things that make you miserable (look at me, I’m just so selfless is not the flex you think it is).

Maybe the restaurant is already beautiful. Maybe nothing needs to be demolished. Maybe we just need to rip out the rug, change the lighting, and put the giant fucking olive tree where it should have been all along.

Or maybe you walk outside and realize you never liked that restaurant in the first place.

Either way… your life does not need to be terrible before you are allowed to want it to be better.

And wanting better does not mean wanting more. Sometimes it simply means wanting more of YOU inside the life you already have.

That is self, centered.

No courtroom, no prosecution, no blame game required.