A woman asked me something I have heard in many forms, from many women, over many years. Why do capable, accomplished women, women who run businesses and hold households and make excellent decisions daily, choose men who are not good for them?
I do not think the answer lives in the choice. I think it lives one layer beneath it. Which part of you is doing the choosing?
Think about how you buy a house. You bring in an inspector. You check the foundation, the wiring, what is hidden behind the walls. You ask the hard questions before you sign anything, because you know what you are building a life on top of. Because you understand the seriousness of the decision. There is a is a mature woman in the room. She is careful with what she is about to carry.
Now think about how most of us choose a husband. A different woman steps forward for that one. Younger. Giddier. She has been dreaming of this her whole life, and she is not checking the foundation. She is already decorating the house.
You know her. You have felt her take the wheel, that quiet handover where the careful woman steps back and lets the dreamy one drive. It is not a failing in you. It is simply what happens when no one has ever told that dreamy part of you that she does not have to be the one deciding. It’s a misunderstanding. You’re putting a part of you at the head of the table who has no idea the significance of this decision. The dreamy part of us isn’t able to decide this for us. She has her value but not here.
Choosing who you lie beside, whose field you merge with, whose presence enters every quiet corner of your life, matters more than any house or car or career choice you will ever make. And yet so often we hand that decision to the part of us least equipped to make it.
Here is what I have come to understand about this. There is a seed of real knowledge inside us, quiet, deep, already whole. It speaks. It says the small thing, the pause, the flicker of hesitation you feel and then talk yourself out of. And so often we override it, because the giddy part of us wants what she wants, and she is not interested in being told to wait.
You can probably point back to a moment like this yourself. A pause. A subtle knowing in the chest. A deeper, quieter voice inside that says, wait. We call it a red flag afterward, once the damage has become visible. But it was rarely a red flag in that first moment. It was you overriding your own knowing, because Miss Dreamy, underdeveloped and filled with hope, wanted what she wanted more than she wanted the truth. An honest seeing.
That underdeveloped part of us is not the enemy. She is not something to silence, or fix, or be ashamed of. She simply should not be the one holding the keys. And the goal is never to become someone new, or to go looking for a perfect man; there is no such person waiting on the other side of enough discernment. The goal is only to remember there is a wiser, deeper ‘us’ who sees, knows. The woman who checks the foundation. The woman who was never actually missing, only quietly overruled.
There is something else worth naming here, because it is where so much of this disorientation begins. Somewhere inside you, likely, lives the sense that a partner will complete you. And there is a thread of truth in that. Not the truth you have been told, not that another person exists to rescue you from yourself, but that within you is a masculine and a feminine, and an intimate other can support the meeting of the two. When you give a relationship a higher purpose than simply wanting and being wanted, it becomes something closer to what it was always meant to be. But when you take that thread of truth and twist it into a story about being saved, that is where the underdeveloped, immature part of us does her best work. Not with a lie. With a truth she has mixed.
So before the next question, before what to look for or what to avoid, there is a truer place for you to begin. Not with him. With her, the one inside you who is choosing.
Return to her first. She already knows what a home is built to hold.