She Was Hungry and Pregnant. We Discussed Her Choices.

There is a woman I know — I will not tell you her name or exactly where she lives, for reasons I hope are obvious — who is heavily pregnant and, on more days than I want to count, hungry.

Not because there is no food to be bought. Because the man she is living with spends money in a specific sequence: first on things that make him visible — the iPhone upgrade, the rounds bought for people whose respect he is purchasing, the casual generosity performed in public — and then, when the money runs out, on whatever the car needs to get him out of the apartment and away from the inconvenience of a woman who needs things.

She hissed at him once. There was a fight about the hiss.

He bought her a phone afterward. Not because he felt remorse. Because the phone was useful — it kept her contained, kept her communicating with him on his terms, gave him something to point to when the version of the story that reached other people needed editing.

I know about the hunger. I know about the phone. I know about the hiss and the fight and the baby that he wanted because his ego required the proof of it, not because he had thought clearly about what it would mean to provide for a child.

And I am going to tell you the first thought that arrived in my mind when I understood the full picture.

It was about her choices.

It arrived before I could stop it — before I had even finished processing what I was looking at. Automatic. Pre-loaded. Sitting there waiting for a situation exactly like this one, ready to deploy.

She should have seen this coming.

I caught myself on the edge of that thought and I stayed there for a long time, because I recognised it. Not from the women who had said it about me. From Marcus.

He had used different words. But the logic was the same.

Different Vocabulary. Identical Function.

When I was in the relationship, Marcus never told me directly that what was happening to me was my fault.

He didn’t need to be that direct. He had a more efficient method: he simply ensured that every conversation about his behaviour ended with a conversation about my response to it. What I had done to provoke it. What I had failed to do to prevent it. What a woman who was better at relationships would have done differently in that situation.

The subject was always me. He was always the context.

When I finally left and started talking about what had happened, I met a different version of the same structure.

Not from everyone. Not always. But enough times, from women who loved me, who considered themselves feminist, who had read the right things and said the right things and genuinely wanted me to be okay — enough times to notice the pattern.

“You stayed for two years. At some point that’s a choice.”

“You knew what he was like early on. What made you think it would change?”

“I just feel like you have to take some responsibility for the dynamic you participated in.”

These sentences were delivered with care. With the specific gentleness of someone who believes they are helping. And underneath each one was the same architecture as everything Marcus had ever said to me:

The problem is your choices.
Not his behaviour.
Yours.

I want to be precise about this because I am not accusing those women of being like him. They were nothing like him. Their intentions were entirely different, their love was real, and they would be horrified to hear this comparison.

But intention is not function.

And the function of every one of those sentences was to place the weight of his behaviour on my shoulders — and leave him, once again, outside the frame of examination.

The iPhone Tells You Everything You Need to Know

I want to go back to the woman I described at the beginning, because the iPhone matters and I want to explain why.

The iPhone is not evidence of poor financial management. I want to be clear about that. A man who cannot budget is a different problem from a man who budgets with a specific set of priorities that place his visibility above her survival.

He had money. He made decisions about where it went.

It went toward the things that made him appear successful to the people whose opinion he wanted to manage — the people outside the apartment, the people who would form the public version of him. It did not go toward her, because she is not the audience he is performing for. She is the resource he is performing with.

This is the narcissistic economy in its clearest form. Not chaos. Not irresponsibility. A deliberate allocation of resources toward status and away from anyone whose needs might reduce his margin.

She is hungry because that is where she ranks in his structure.

And the question “why did she choose him” has him nowhere in it.

He chose to spend money on a phone upgrade while she went hungry.

He chose to leave in his car rather than stay and solve the immediate problem.

He chose to frame a hiss — a single sound of exhaustion from a heavily pregnant woman — as a grievance that required a response, rather than a signal that the person he had made responsible for carrying his child was at the end of something.

These are his choices.

They are not in the conversation.

The only choices being examined are hers.

Blaming Her Choice Is the Most Useful Thing He Could Ask For

I did not understand, while I was with Marcus, why the conversations I had with people about what was happening always seemed to end in the same place.

I would describe something. They would listen. And then, eventually, in some version or another, the conversation would arrive at what I could have done differently. What I should have noticed. When I should have left. What I was getting from the relationship that made me stay.

I was the variable. He was the constant.

It took me a long time to understand why this kept happening — why even people who believed me, who were angry on my behalf, who had no love for Marcus or interest in protecting him, still managed to arrive at a conversation about my choices.

The reason is this: examining his behaviour requires holding him accountable for it. And accountability — real accountability, not the performative kind — is uncomfortable. It requires naming someone as the agent of harm. It requires assigning responsibility in a way that cannot be distributed or softened or shared.

Examining her choices is easier. It keeps the conversation in a space where something can be done, where improvement is possible, where the future can be different if she makes better decisions. It produces something actionable.

His behaviour doesn’t produce anything actionable unless you are willing to say, directly, that he is the problem. That his choices — not hers, not the dynamic, not the relationship — are the thing being examined.

Most people are not willing to go there.

And so the conversation stays with her.

And he drives around in his car.

I Almost Became One of Them

I want to say something that is uncomfortable to say.

I understood the women who questioned my choices. Not because I think they were right, but because I had, before Marcus, before I understood what I was looking at from the inside, thought similarly about women in situations I could see from the outside.

She’s been complaining about him for two years. At some point you have to wonder.
She knew what he was like. Everyone knew.
Why does she keep defending him when he clearly doesn’t deserve it?

I thought these things. Not with cruelty — with a kind of frustrated affection, the specific impatience of someone watching someone they care about make choices they cannot understand from the outside.

What I did not understand was what it looks like from the inside.

I did not understand that by the time a woman is defending a man who doesn’t deserve it, she has usually been systematically trained to defend him — through the slow, patient work of a relationship that has made her unreliability to herself its primary project. I did not understand that the choices that look inexplicable from the outside are usually entirely explicable from the inside, once you understand what the inside looks like.

I ran out of patience for the cycle before I understood the cycle.

And when that impatience met a woman I didn’t know personally, in a situation I could only see partially, the thought arrived the way all conditioned reflexes arrive: fast, clean, and certain.

She should have known better.

I caught it. I held it. And I thought about all the women who had caught the same thought and not held it — who had let it become a sentence, a question, a conversation that ended, as all those conversations end, with the woman being examined and the man being nowhere near the room.

“Should have known better” is not a high standard.

I want to say that plainly, because it presents itself as one.

It presents itself as rigour, as clear-eyed assessment, as the reasonable expectation that women apply discernment to the choices they make. It sounds like respect. It sounds like the opposite of treating women as helpless.

It is the lowest possible standard — because it asks nothing of him.

A standard that places all its scrutiny on her choices and none on his behaviour is not a standard. It is the effective removal of any standard applied to him. He is outside the frame. Unexamined. Free to move to the next situation carrying the same behaviour, having been accountable to no one, having had his choices examined by no one, while the conversation about the previous woman’s discernment is still running.

There is a woman in northern Nigeria who is heavily pregnant and sometimes hungry while the man she is living with upgrades phones and buys rounds for people whose respect he is purchasing.

The question of why she chose him is not the interesting question.

The interesting question is why he gets to keep doing this while the only scrutiny in the room is aimed at her.

And the answer to that question is not about him. It is about what we are willing to examine, and what we are willing to leave outside the frame.

The logic that says a woman’s choices are the problem is the most useful thing an abusive man could ask for.

It keeps him out of the conversation every single time.

And we keep handing it to him.