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!).

I’m also running a new survey on waiting in relationships and I’d love your input. These are the last 2 weeks I’m keeping it running. You can fill it in here. Thank you!

Reader Asks: If You Had to Fast-Track a Woman Out of a Bad Relationship, Where Would You Start?

“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?"

My Answer: You Don't Decenter Men by Leaving Him. You Leave Him by Decentering Him First.

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.

1. Stop asking whether he is capable of changing. Ask whether you want the life he is offering you now.

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.

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

2. Stop making his potential part of the evidence.

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.

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