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Powerful women are a fierce force of nature. We are strong, independent, resourceful, and resilient. We take our challenges and turn them into growth opportunities, and we never quit. We’re secure in ourselves, authentic, and deeply in love with who we are as human beings—flaws and all. We support and encourage other humans, realizing that empowering others doesn’t take anything from us.
As powerful women, we often attract men with the same qualities that later repel them. In fact, it’s easy for men to say that they’re looking for a strong, empowered woman. It’s much less easy for some of these men to keep up with us when they aren’t secure in their own personal power. All of the things they proclaimed to love about us come back to haunt them, as they realize they aren’t prepared to stand strong beside us as equal partners.
Toxic, fragile masculinity is a key reason that some men are unable to maintain relationships with strong women. They want to be the alpha and have no concept of what partnership means. While they might have initially been attracted to independent, authentic women, they might find later that the qualities they were hoping we would adopt include submission, compliance, and a more traditional (antiquated) role in the relationship. When those qualities don’t magically manifest themselves, the relationship begins to crumble under the weight of disappointment and unmet expectations—expectations that never accounted for the woman’s true identity.
Women who are strong in their self-worth and personal power are often direct about who they are. We don’t pull any punches, and it’s mystifying when men who claimed to value our qualities suddenly find them abhorrent. After all, it’s never a case of bait and switch. Instead, it’s a case of men thinking that we will suddenly become Stepford wives once we are coupled, happily giving up our own interests and identity in favor of merging into a shared relationship identity. This thinking ignores everything that we have said and done to show who we are and what we want. We’re told we’re too much when we’ve been who we are all along.
Misogyny is an underlying factor in these attitudes. Instead of looking at women as potential partners, many men still expect a significant other to take a secondary role. This role is less important, and yet it carries most of the relationship responsibilities including housekeeping, child-rearing, cooking, planning, budgeting, and even the emotional labor of the relationship. Even though many women do all of this and more, we are often expected to take a backseat when it comes to power in the relationship, rather than sharing power in a mutually considerate and respectful partnership based in love.
Unfortunately, misogyny doesn’t just impact how men behave. It also has influences on women who feel that they are supposed to do the lion’s share of the work in the household, regardless of the fact that most women are also working in other capacities as well. Men are then given a free pass on not being able to cook a meal or do laundry because this has been relegated to women’s work rather than shared responsibilities. With child-rearing, it’s still mostly women taking care of meals and hygiene, caring for sick children, often missing work to do it, and participating in school and extracurricular associations. The distribution of work is massively skewed, and powerful women often opt out of these unions, choosing to be alone if we’re going to be expected to do the majority of the relationship work anyway.
I don’t have to be told not all men or women, too. But our culture continues to perpetuate double standards that encompass all aspects of our life and includes distribution of work, relationship roles and expectations, aging, parenting, and even self-care. These cultural norms have the effect of making an independent, powerful woman a strong asset and a greatly desired life partner, and yet also make it difficult for a man who isn’t evolved enough to have confronted misogyny to maintain a relationship with her.
Strong women need strong partners. This has nothing to do with physicality. It has to do with awakening and a growth mindset. Strong women got that way because we learned from our life experiences and found opportunities in them. We’re unpacking our baggage and dealing with it, not hoisting it onto the next partner. Our strength doesn’t lie in being aggressive toward others but in knowing who we are, living enriched lives, and refusing to compromise our values.
The system that strongly supports misogyny makes sure women can maintain a household, balance finances, and care for children, but also cripples men by making so much of that work the province of women, which puts men at a disadvantage when it comes to caring for themselves properly. This is how we get generations of man-babies, waiting for a partner to take over and finish raising them. It’s also how we have men who say they want strong partners but secretly fear the strength of women who possess those qualities.
Fear may seem like a strong characterization, but think about it. When a man who isn’t secure in himself finds a sense of discomfort in the very qualities he once claimed to admire, there’s often a link back to fear. Whether it’s being afraid of not having control or of being left or even a fear of living in a different way than he might have been raised and can easily understand, the root is the same. It all goes back to being attracted to a lifestyle that his own self-development and journey isn’t yet ready to partner.
Strong men aren’t waiting around for a partner to take care of them because they are also unpacking and addressing their baggage, meeting life challenges and turning them into growth opportunities, and figuring out how to take care of themselves effectively. These strong men aren’t looking for a mother to raise them; they’re looking for a strong partner to walk through life beside them, each supporting the other.
It takes a strong man to partner an empowered woman. Or perhaps I should say—making this less heteronormative and cis-gendered—that it takes a strong person to partner an empowered person. The kind of partnership that doesn’t involve a hierarchy but successfully fosters equality is what strong people desire. Otherwise, we’re happy staying single and content with our lives.
People who admire empowered women can become strong themselves to effectively partner them. But this can’t be done without addressing misogyny, toxic and fragile masculinity (which go hand-in-hand), and working on themselves and their own issues. It’s not an impossible goal, but it is necessary to have a strong partnership.
It’s not enough just to say we want strong women in our lives. We have to do the work to be strong partners ourselves—secure, authentic, independent, resourceful, and capable of living our lives alone rather than settling for an unhealthy relationship.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Tanja Heffner on Unsplash