A High Bar: Criteria for Loving Men While Destroying the Patriarchy
“Are you setting the bar high or are you protecting your heart from the possibility of its being broken again?”
It was a fair question. Had I not already asked it of myself and contemplated the possible answers in page after endless handwritten page in my notebooks, it would have made me defensive. Instead, I held my friend’s gaze, smiled with contented knowing, and said with calm, unwavering confidence: “I am setting the bar high.”
We live in a society that prioritizes relationship status over relationship satisfaction. Women especially are socialized to believe that being “chosen” and revolving their life around the centrepiece of a romantic partnership is the root of our worth. It means we rarely learn – let alone develop the skills to communicate clearly – our authentic needs, desires, and the boundaries around them. By the time I developed the ability to show up fully for myself in the search for love, I understood it would completely change how I operated within our social system.
What I hadn’t yet grasped was that in an age of the Epstein Files, an online “/ape academy,” and male figureheads falling left, right, and centre to allegations of assault, it would lead me to reject the entire system itself.
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In January 2022 I walked away from a relationship I had wanted to be in more than I had wanted anything else, ever. It wasn’t because the man I was in it with was bad. Or because our core bond was. But the circumstantial frustration, disconnect, and despair that had infiltrated our dynamic made me feel I had no choice other than radical self-protection. With hands shaking and vision blurred from eyes that had ugly-cried for the twelve preceding hours, I blocked him in all our communication channels and went no-contact with no warning. It was the hardest (and, in hindsight, perhaps the most cruel) thing I’ve ever done.
What followed was the most profound transformation I have ever undergone. More profound than being dumped via a conversation consisting of a single sentence and then starting life over at 39 years of age. More profound than losing fifty pounds and becoming a Boston marathoner at 40. This time I was on the cusp of 50 and needed to understand why I kept finding myself in relationship to men who loved me, often deeply, but who were absent — emotionally, physically, and sometimes both.
Every day for a year I dug deeper and deeper into my subconscious, looking for imprints and patterns. Both with guidance and on my own I explored, I journalled, I talked, I meditated, I workshopped. Relentlessly I dismantled myself until I was staring at what lay at my core: the belief that I must be exceptional and prove my worth in order to earn love. If I could be the smartest, the most athletic, the most multifaceted, the most interesting, the most impactful human I could be, maybe — just maybe — my father would come up from the basement where he spent his free time drinking and become present in my life. It’s not that he didn’t love me. It’s that his love didn’t provide one speck of emotional safety.
There it was, the mystery solved. No matter how fiercely intellectual, creative, political, strong, and impressive the men I was drawn to were (a combination of things I thought made them diametrically different from my father), they all had one thing in common: they could not offer an emotional haven. They could not be present in a way that built a foundation I could trust.
Here’s what I thought I was accomplishing with all the work leading to that grand revelation: a recalibration of my broken attachment radar. I saw myself in training for picking a different kind of partner when the time came, crafting a game plan for not repeating the pattern with the next relationship. Except somewhere along the line, the entire mission had shifted.
I unknowingly became a revolutionary when I uncovered, and destroyed, my belief that love must be earned. I became a revolutionary because I stopped seeking validation from external sources — especially men. Understanding that I was whole and deserving just as I am rather than only after I was “chosen” removed any kind of urgency I had felt for the pursuit of partnership. Instead, I lavished my attention on my rich and lively network of family and friends, on work I love, on the creativity that drives me, on the activism that gives me purpose, and on the myriad personal pursuits that energize me. Was I incomplete in any way because I lacked a life partner? No.
Being freed from a social narrative designed to make me feel lesser-than became a gateway for questioning every other aspect of the system we live in. Did I need a certain salary or job title to be a success? No. Was I required to meet unrealistic age and beauty standards to be visible as a woman? No. Did I have to practise church-and-state-sanctioned forms of relationship in order for my connections to be valid? No. And, most important, was I required to shrink myself, diminish my needs, be polite and quiet, and refrain from loudly disrupting the status quo of inherent violence and inequality perpetrated by the system? Hell, no.
What started as a journey to learn how to operate differently in relationship with men turned out to be a coming of age in feminist anarchy. No balaclavas needed here, just a steadfast commitment to trampling patriarchy, capitalism, and their systemic social scripts. Once I found genuine contentment within my own self, the system’s hierarchies, expectations, and rules became distasteful at best and unlivable at worst.
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Where does all this leave me when it comes to loving men?
I no longer consider myself in active pursuit of an anchor relationship. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t welcome someone into my life who has the desire and ability to add to it. But when your life is already full and thriving in the larger context of a society and world in peril at the hands of men in power, the stakes change appreciably — and so does the criteria for entry.
If a man is not actively participating in co-creating a world where I am equal and safe, he is actively participating in my harm. Do I want a partner to be intelligent, erotically compatible, creative, curious, emotionally capable, and a skillful communicator? Of course. But those things are no longer enough. I also need to know that a partner is conversant in consent. That he is actively making space for the disruption of social structures that uphold the patriarchy and capitalism (consumerism and resource-hoarding, hetero- and mononormativity, and environmental degradation, to name a few). That he holds other men to account for the violence and host of isms (sexism, racism, speciesism, ableism — the list is long) that surface in daily encounters. That he is raising any children he might have to be conversant in all these building blocks of a better world.
I’m told these criteria mean I’ll never find a partner. This statement is levelled at me as if it’s a threat.
But what happens when you build a life where love lives abundantly through your entire network and emotional intimacy is cultivated in multiple places is that you eliminate dependence on a single romantic relationship. I don’t need a traditional romantic partnership to be happy, fulfilled, cared for, and supported. And that affords me the luxury of setting the bar extremely high.
Imagine it: A collective setting of this high standard. Of women opting out until men break their silence, shrug off the protection and privilege the current system affords them, and step up to dismantle and rebuild with us. Together. The system would have no option except change.
Please let’s all set the bar high. The sky’s the limit. And our existence depends on it.
Image credit: Jeventudes Musicales on Unsplash
