The Competence Trap: Why Smart Women Stay in Bad Relationships

I’m running a new survey on waiting in relationships and I’d love your input. This is the last week I’m keeping it running. You can fill it in here. Thank you!

There is a persistent fantasy and myth about women who end up in abusive relationships: that they must have been unusually vulnerable to begin with. Perhaps they were financially dependent, poorly educated or had low self-esteem, few options, little social support, or simply didn’t know better. The fantasy is comforting because it allows everyone else to believe that abuse is something that happens to those women rather than something that can happen to women generally.

This of course also contributes to the extra layer of shame that abused women face when they consider talking to people about what they’re going through.

But there is no vaccine against abuse.

Being educated doesn’t immunize you. Having money doesn’t make you immune either. Being psychologically sophisticated, professionally successful, socially confident, or exceptionally good at reading other people doesn’t immunize you against the possibility and probability of being abused. These things can provide resources that make some situations easier to navigate, and economic independence in particular can increase a woman’s options. But none of them creates an invisible force field around her that makes abusive men bounce harmlessly off.

In fact, I think there is a particularly interesting problem when the woman in question is extraordinarily competent. Because competence has a peculiar weakness: competent people tend to believe problems are solvable.

If you are the kind of person who has spent your life fixing things, you don’t necessarily conclude that being in a difficult relationship is a reason to leave it. You interpret it as a difficult relationship. Which means you start working on it.

And if the problem happens to be an abusive man, this can turn into one of the longest and least rewarding consulting contracts and project management tasks of your life.

The woman who can fix everything except the man

Think about what we mean when we call a woman ‘competent’. She is probably good at anticipating problems. She notices patterns and communicates well. She takes responsibility, she can manage competing priorities and she’s capable of negotiating, compromising, organizing, researching, troubleshooting, and figuring out what needs to happen next.

She may be the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.

At work, this is an excellent quality. Give her a crisis and she will produce a spreadsheet. Give her a dysfunctional team and she will schedule a meeting. When she faces a complicated problem with twelve moving parts, she’ll identify the moving parts, establish priorities, and develop an action plan.

Now give her a boyfriend who screams at her, apologizes, promises to change, behaves beautifully for three weeks, and then does it again.

Her instinct may not be, This man is abusive. It may be, Okay. What are we missing?

Maybe they need to communicate more clearly. Perhaps he needs therapy. Perhaps she needs to set firmer boundaries or maybe they need couples counseling. Maybe he’s just under more stress than usual. Perhaps his childhood explains some of this.

Or she should stop bringing things up when he’s tired. Perhaps she needs to phrase criticism differently or to be more affectionate. Could be that they need more time together or more time apart.

Perhaps they need a holiday, or less alcohol, or a better division of domestic labor (conceived and planned by her, of course, because he can’t be bothered to think of things, only to vaguely offer to ‘help’ if she tells him what to do).

Maybe Mercury is in retrograde.

At some point, the competent woman can find herself running a full-scale organizational restructuring project on a man whose principal contribution to the process is continuing to be terrible. And because she is competent, she keeps iterating, trying and failing and trying harder.

The competence trap

This is where I think the usual question people ask, especially people who didn’t experience abuse directly, namely “Why didn’t she just leave?”, brutally misses the mark.

A competent woman may not experience herself as trapped at first. She may experience herself as working on a problem. This is a hugely different place to be at, mentally.

If you have spent your entire adult life learning that effort produces results, then abandoning something because it is difficult can feel premature. You’ve learned that relationships improve when people communicate, that misunderstandings can be resolved and that apologies can lead to behavioral change. You think that people can grow and conflict can be repaired.

All of these are generally useful beliefs. Which may very well be true when we’re dealing with people who are interested in all that and who are fundamentally decent people at their core. Abusers are not.

These beliefs become dangerous when applied to someone who benefits from keeping the problem unsolved.

The difference between an ordinary relationship problem and coercive abuse is, among other things, that the latter is not a malfunction awaiting the correct intervention. The instability is itself part of the mechanism of control.