There's Always a Second Side of the Story, Even With Men

I had just finished writing about performative vulnerability, when I saw myself

I just published the last in an important essay series with Traver Boehm on Medium. Our essay series (start here) has done so well there.

I was writing about performative vulnerability in men — men who cry for control, who turn emotional collapse into a shield, who hide from accountability inside their own pain stories — and the essay felt earned and clean. I published it and sat with what I’d made.

Clarity, once you’ve built it, follows you home and sits down across from you and waits. Like a really good parent does when they know you have lied.

I believe in mirrors. I sit across from clients and ask them to look at what they’re creating in their lives, and I cannot do that work without being willing to do it myself. So I turned the mirror around. What I found there wasn’t comfortable, but it was familiar, which is so much worse.

Seeing yourself kind of sucks, right? Like I get why it doesn’t sell as well as six pack ab programs and high end sunglasses do.

I’ve been asking myself what most people do not want to ask: what is my part in my own drama? Not my part in being mistreated. My part in the pattern. Because the pattern is mine. The men changed. The story did not.

Maturity is growing out of blaming the actors you cast in the supporting roles of your adult life and taking a look at the main character — you.

I know all too well the man who arrives already drowning.

Most women do. He shows up with his whole wound on the table before you’ve finished your first drink. He tells you things about his past, as he pries into yours. He commits. He pours the glue down under your feet. He pulls you into the deep end of his life before you’ve decided whether you want to swim.

Something in me has consistently read that as intimacy.

Because of that, I have often sat in my own hard real life moments — health issues, accidents — frightened, genuinely needing support — and watched it get swallowed whole by a man’s bigger collapse about something fully within his control or something that happened so long ago he’s not sure it’s real anymore. And instead of saying I need you right now, and holding that position which if you look at the facts was rightfully mine, I did what I always do. I held him. I became the steadier one.

That is my version of the grift. It is just quieter than his.

There is a difference between being attracted to someone and being activated by them.

Attraction is warm. Activation is urgent. One makes you move closer. The other makes you fix, hold, save, manage, absorb, monitor, wait, placate, look away, pretend you can accept — and mistake all that labor for loving someone well.

The men who have shown up regulated and steady, who see women as completely equal to themselves instead of special prizes or mothers or transitory friends with benefits — they do not set off that same thing. They have so often just felt flat to me. And I give them less. Less attention, less of the complete I see you that I pour without thinking into the man who is drowning.

Men sense this. I barely notice. Because, quickly, I am already waist-deep in someone else’s flood.

My leak is rescue.

I show up with far more patience than the moment deserves. I have even allowed men to write untrue stories that cause me to take equal blame in their stunning failures. I bend until bending feels natural and standing straight feels selfish. And I call this being a good partner, when what it actually is, is a woman who does not believe her simple and obvious needs alone — drama free — are enough to keep a man in the room.

It is not exactly low self-worth.

I am the boss. I am a strong parent. I write publicly. I coach people through their hardest seasons. There is authority in my life and I built it myself from a very shadowy backstory. There was no silver spoon in my mouth.

It is narrower than that, and worse. I do not trust that who I actually am — a woman with needs, with high standards, with strong opinions that take up space — is going to be chosen. So I remove everything that might cause a no. I shrink what I need down to almost nothing and then I wait to see if what is left gets picked.

That is a rigged test.

He is choosing a woman who asks for nothing. And when he does, it does not land. Because I know that was not really me in there. So I need him to choose again. And again. The bar drops and I call it generosity. That’s so fluffy but that is the only way I can describe it.

The proof I am looking for — am I worth choosing in my fullest form — can never arrive this way. Not because I am not. But because the woman being chosen is a small, weak, smothered version of me with all the edges filed off. In this drama I will never know if he would choose the real one, because I never put her in the room.

I do not merely tolerate the flood in men. I reward it.

I become the most generous, most attuned version of myself — but only when someone is falling apart. Even if there is almost nothing I really physically want on the table. This teaches people that crisis is the price of admission to my full attention.

The stable man that enters my orbit is getting a different woman. He is. And he knows it.

I leave now. I recognize it faster and I pull the plug sooner and I am proud of that in the ways you are proud of things that should not require pride. But I admit I still at times enter through the same door.

The question that matters for me is why a sticky emotional emergency of a connection feels like an invitation to intimacy. Why another person’s pain and overshare gives me a sense of purpose that I cannot seem to generate by simply being there, being wanted, being chosen without earning it through endurance or by pretending to be just as messy as they are so they don’t feel small. I am so damn good at that.

I think it is because I learned somewhere that love is something you prove through what you can withstand.

That a good woman holds. That a strong woman absorbs. That the right woman stays soft, sexy and stops needing anything you can’t give when everything around her is loud and sharp and falling down.

All of that sounds beautiful until you realize it means you have arranged your life to feel needed only when someone is in pain.

The quiet man — the one who does not need me to hold him together — is offering something real. Partnership without emergency. A relationship where I do not have to earn my seat by being the most patient, kindest, and perpetually sexiest woman in the room.

But if he’s not falling apart and I am not pretending to follow him, what am I grabbing hold of?

So I wrote about men who perform vulnerability so well they lose access to the real thing.

My version is that I perform capacity so well I lose access to my own real needs.

I become so good at holding other people that I forget I walked into the room with my own hands open, wanting something too. I had a list of needs and I hid it once I realized he couldn’t check it off.

I also quoted Traver that, “Integrity before collapse is the option most of us never take.” I think it means standing in the hot discomfort of your own limits and needs when your trauma candy is inviting you to rise up into a storm of activation.

My integrity would say: this is not depth. This is a pattern. You know the difference.

My integrity would say: the man who meets you without drowning is the one worth sitting still for. Sit still long enough to feel it. You can open to him too. You can re-orient.

We are not broken. But we are hopefully evolving.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.