7 Relationship-Destroying Political Questions Smart Women Are Starting To Ask Themselves
Marian Fil | Shutterstock Realizing I was gay has given me a lot of perspective — as has being in a gay relationship. It’s hard to explain to me the night-and-day difference I’ve noticed in my life. Since I started dating women, my interest in anything male around me has waned.
I always thought these revelations were just something queer people like me deal with, but lately I’ve started seeing something I’d never seen before. For the first time in my life, I’ve seen an overwhelming groundswell of women leaving men that would have been considered “gold standard” before.
It seems like hetero women are starting to drop men at lightning-fast rates, even when they are considered to be decent men by society. Sometimes, it’s because women find themselves overworked by “good men,” but it’s not just a matter of labor or cheating or other common issues.
I’ve started noticing something about many breakups I’ve heard of lately. It’s the timing of the breakups. I’ve noticed that it often happens around the time women start asking themselves questions. More specifically, I’ve noticed they ask questions we, as a collective, should have been asking for ages. Those questions end relationships and kill interest in dating as a whole.
Still, it’s telling that these particular questions have stopped women from committing to men. Not for nothing, but it truly shows why the Loneliness Epidemic is happening almost exclusively for men.
Here are the political questions women are starting to ask that are ending relationships fast:
1. 'How can I trust this man to be decent to me?'
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Right now, women are dealing with a crisis of faith when it comes to the opposite gender. A large part of it deals with what’s been hitting the news and social media over the past couple of years.
We’ve seen the Gisele Pelicot case show how a doting husband could actually be a monster who drugs and attacks his wife, records it, and shares it on the net as part of an "academy."
We’ve seen multiple “Good, Christian Men (TM)” who held positions of power and respect in communities abuse and even murder their wives. In the majority of these cases, the men were pastors who didn’t just cheat on them but ended their women’s lives.
We’ve seen the Cornell 7 talk so sweetly to an open-minded woman, only to turn around and allegedly attack her. Then, to make matters worse, over 50 men all covered for the individuals, and the school system tried to sweep it under the rug. When she came forward with her story, men tried to dox her and SWAT her.
Almost every woman I know has been pressured to explain common decency to a man on a date. Every single woman I’ve known who dated a man has experienced a man who either smugly refused to put in any effort on a date or made a date payment conditional on intercourse.
Women used to be able to trust that men would at least keep up the pretense of niceness or courtesy. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. Women get a “Trust me, bro” and are told to risk themselves, invest in men who might ruin their lives, and buck up, buttercup.
No, really. How is a woman supposed to trust a man these days? Where are the real-life ramifications for men who treat women badly? No one is psychic. We can’t tell by just looking at them! No one can, and yet that seems to be what men expect women to do.
The more ladies look around, the less they have reason to trust anything with male anatomy near them. This is doubly true now that women’s rights are under political attack from right-wing pundits.
2. 'If I treated him the same way he treated me, would he leave?'
I’ve seen way too many women treat men very well, only to get treated horribly in return. When women match their energy, men either freak out, get abusive, or leave. Today’s woman is far, far more aware of the double standards and excess workload than women were in the past.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I remember seeing moms literally scrambling around the mansion-like homes of my childhood to prepare for guests for a birthday party or a gender reveal party. Women did all the labor in the home and were also expected to be arm candy.
Divorces started to spike, and surprise: women were usually the ones who blossomed. It’s nice to see women refuse to let work consume them just to keep a man. How is this political? It’s simple. It goes back to the whole feminist equality thing. If it’s good for the goose, it should be good for the gander.
3. 'If God loves women, why does He insist on us being treated like chattel?'
As a person who knows a lot of people dealing with religious trauma, this is a big question I keep hearing people ask. Churches have done a number on women, especially those of us who grew up fundie, cultist, or cult-adjacent.
Most of us were expected to submit, to keep our freshness seals innocent, and to “keep sweet” even when men were horrible to us. Women who walked away from the church often told me they did so when they realized they felt like God hated women because of how they were treated in the church.
You might be wondering why this question was included on this list. More often than not, it’s the question women ask when their husbands spiritually abuse them and coerce them into giving up one too many things they cared about in the name of being a “Biblical wife.”
Here’s a hint: a loving God would want you to pursue your goals, and a loving partner would encourage you to do so. He wouldn’t want you to live out your future as a servant for everyone around you.
4. 'Why are so many men more focused on their discomfort with our suffering than they are on our pain?'
Every article I’ve written about the issues women deal with has drawn at least one comment from a man who doesn’t like what I have to say. It often involves one of the following:
- “NAWT ALL MEN!!”
- “But what about this one chick…?”
- “But what about me? I’m okay? Right?!”
- “She asked for it!”
- “If women only did XYZ, men wouldn’t ABC…”
- “[insert statistics pulled out of nowhere with no basis or shoddy science]
- “[Bible rhetoric]”
- “Women have to be feminine to deserve protection!”
- “Choose the bear then!”
- “Men are women’s protectors!”
- “Equal rights, equal lefts!”
All of these are meant to derail the conversation and argue in bad faith. Men really don’t like the fact that women are done trying to coddle their feelings. It’s not all men, but it’s enough men that every woman I’ve spoken to has started to just assume it’s all men.
Rather than men waking up and saying, “Holy! We as a gender are horrible to women!”, they’ve made the choice to try to get us to shut up and go back to how things are. It’s not working.
Women are rapidly realizing that men care more about their emotional comfort than they do about women’s physical safety. I know two women who, when they realized that, stopped dating altogether. It’s hard to find men desirable when you realize they don’t care about you.
By the way, if you haven’t guessed, turning the conversation to men's problems will get you banned from this article’s comments. Wait your turn; I've written plenty on men’s issues while getting berated by men, too.
5. 'Can I actually afford to leave a toxic relationship if I commit further?'
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As women’s social safety nets increasingly diminish, more and more women are starting to look at relationships like a risk rather than a reward. Having a man was once considered to be a universal flex — a sign that you “made it” as an adult woman.
That is no longer the case because way too many horror stories of horrific abuse hit TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and the evening news. When women started to ask that men be held accountable for their misdeeds, it often culminated in law enforcement doing buck nada.
The economy used to be good enough to make most women feel like they could bounce back. Nowadays, that’s not the case. More and more women aren’t sure they can rely on their friends and family to save them from a coercive creep like JP Miller.
So, women started to adapt. Most women now see relationships as a liability rather than a reward. They ask, “Okay, if I find myself miserable, can I leave? How can I avoid being trapped? What do I have to do? Is this man worth it?” Surprisingly, it’s led many women to walk away from men who wanted commitment.
6. 'What is this guy’s political and religious affiliations?'
No, most women don’t want to hear that a guy is not political. No, most women don’t want a man who is okay with sacrificing our rights for economic reasons. No, most women don’t want to hear that a guy is super Christian, because that’s often a dog-whistle for a white nationalist.
We know that silence means complicity. But we also know men will say and do anything to score. Men even came up with a term for it: woke-fishing. It’s caused even more trust issues among women.
7. 'What exactly am I even getting from dating at this point?'
Let’s be real honest here: Is hetero dating even remotely enjoyable for women? Men treat it like a horrible chore and throw fits if they don’t get any reward on the first date. Women have to worry about physical safety, not to mention STI’s, emotional safety, and time wasted.
For men, they might be out $100 and two hours if a date sucks. For women, a bad date can lead to being beaten or assaulted. Or, a less awful date might flip out and threaten her and tell her, “You know, I could overpower you. You’re lucky I’m nice!”
Men’s promise of protection (FROM WHO?) and provisions are no longer holding water. Women are now the majority of household breadwinners. Men’s promise of companionship? Yeah, also not holding water for the vast majority of women.
With men refusing to act as providers, protectors, or partners while they continue to act entitled to women’s bodies and labor, it’s not surprising that the refusal to date has become a political statement as much as a self-preservation choice.
Allow me to explain something to the inevitable flood of misogynists who say women are acting unnaturally and need to be corrected. Let’s bring this to a nature-based window. Humans are still animals at the end of the day. We eat, drink, mate, and have social cues and habitats like any other critter.
A healthy animal generally wants to find a mate. What we’re seeing happen in society is deeply alarming because it means something is very, very wrong on a grand scale. In nature, it takes a lot for otherwise physically healthy animals to not want to mate.
In nature, a lot of animals will settle for the next-best mate. What we’re seeing in society isn’t even having that happen. It’s something a little worse. Women (and some men) are just flushing their hopes of a family down the toilet.
Humans generally don’t go into heat. We’re always in mating season, and that makes the implications even worse. What does it mean when animals don’t want to mate at all, even in mating season?
It often means that an animal is in an unhappy environment, deeply stressed, or otherwise unable to meet its own needs. Pandas struggle to mate in captivity because the setting just isn’t good enough to make them ease up enough to want to breed.
Another reason animals might not mate is a lack of a decent mate. Many animal species will skip a mating season if they can’t find a good partner. In many cases, animals die without ever finding a mate.
Not getting it? Okay, let me spell it out: men managed to create political and social conditions so toxic, so awful, and so uneven that women lost their interest in dating, marriage, and kids.
Forcing women to have relationships won’t fix this either, gents. That’s a great way to end up with abused, abandoned, and otherwise unwell children who will hate your guts. So, if you’re going to bring up Alpha Chad silliness, remember that what you’re seeing now is a natural outcome of increasingly declining conditions for women.
If guys want to see more long-term relationships, it’s up to them to fix this. After all, it’s not women doing the systemic abuse here, is it?
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
