Do Good Men Still Exist?
If you haven’t gathered by now, men and relationships is an area where I do not excel. As I told the FBI agents who were interviewing me about my relationship with now convicted felon and former DC police lieutenant Shane Lamond, “I am smart about a lot of things, men just happen to not be one of them.”
That was my second to last relationship. My most recent relationship ended after he was unfaithful. There’s some irony in that considering I am a licensed private investigator, and it was he who encouraged me to become one. They say you only catch the dumb or unlucky and I think we all know which category he falls into.
While I had had my suspicions for months before I finally confronted him, facing the reality that a relationship is over is never easy. And a relationship built on and ending because of deceit is even harder. You make up excuses; you explain away the things you know are true because you want to believe this person wouldn’t do that to you. He respected and cared about you just enough that he wouldn’t deliberately hurt you.
Turns out, he didn’t and he would.
I didn’t confront him until I had irrefutable evidence, evidence that even I could no longer ignore. The last straw was me finding a social media account he had under a different name with a total number of followers one can count on their fingers and toes, the object of his affection being one of them, where he posted a love poem to her. It had not been posted years before or before we were serious. No, it had been posted recently, for the same woman who contributed to the end of his marriage years earlier. After he left his wife, this mistress told him she didn’t want to be a stepmother to his children. Someone rejecting my children would be a dealbreaker for me, but unbeknownst to me until the end of our relationship, it was not the dealbreaker for him. No, he holds that woman on a pedestal. The one who no other woman, not even me, could ever measure up to. She was the “right person” for him as the poem declared.
Maybe the two of them are meant for each other. Two shitty people who lack the moral integrity or emotional capacity to recognize the destruction and pain they leave in their wake, the kind of damage that can be generational. His young daughter sees the choices her father makes and the way he treats the women in his life, and it will have an impact on the future relationships she will someday have.
I worry about that, too, with my own daughters.
Will they see their mom as someone who stands up for herself or someone who lets men manipulate her? I’m not sure how I see myself right now.
What bothers me most is how the trust I had has been eroded. It’s not just the trust I have in men, but in the trust I have in myself. I can read every book ever written about attachment styles and watch a thousand videos on TikTok and Instagram with every life coach and armchair therapist out there telling me how it happened, to not beat myself up over someone else’s shortcomings, or why I choose the wrong men, but none of those things tell me how to do it right the next time. I wonder if right exists.
In one of the many heated exchanges at the end of our relationship, he asked in reference to why I had stayed for so long, “Are you not an adult? Do you have no responsibility for anything here?”
He’s not wrong. Or rather, he’s partially right. His questions, after all, were also trying to shift all the accountability and emotional burden onto me. He forgets he is the antagonist in this story.
I did make a choice to stay much, much longer than I should have. The red flags were there all along, well before I started noticing them. But how do you know when those subtle things that disappoint or don’t meet expectations are actual red flags? Where’s the line of when to call them out and when to turn your head? When do you believe what they say and when should you not? When do you trust him and when should you trust yourself? That’s the rub and those are the questions I have been asking myself often lately.
I replay everything that happened in the relationship over the four and a half years we were together. All the things that seem so apparent now were so opaque in the moment.
“I never had a pet name for you, if you didn’t notice,” my ex said to me as we were breaking up.
I had noticed but had dismissed it over the years we were together as simply that he didn’t like them. Julie. He called me by my name, like he was proud of who I was, an honesty and assurance that who I am was enough for him.
It makes me question if there are men out there who have some good to offer up to women or if they are all some version of that kind of cruelty, and if I’d even recognize it if I saw it. I have single friends who have sworn off dating altogether. One recently declared, “All of them are pieces of shit,” a cynicism borne out of years of unfulfilling and deceitful romantic relationships with men. Despite my uncertainty about whether I can trust again when it comes to men and myself, I’m also not ready to turn into some female version of an incel—my exile from Guyville is self-imposed and I’m sure not talking about being celibate.
I think most men do know when they are hurting you or at least know what they are doing could be hurtful, but they suffer from a sense of patriarchal entitlement that justifies in their heads that what they are doing is okay. It’s a position that places the burden on the woman to walk away if and when she’s no longer okay with the behavior—rather than the man stepping up and changing to become a better man—and when she does leave, many men use that to frame themselves as the victim. That summarizes my relationship with my ex in a nutshell.
It’s this dynamic that pushes women further away. I’m not suggesting women are without fault (reread that paragraph at the beginning of this piece—she isn’t single and appears to have no qualms about continuing to be my ex’s foil and temptation), but I am suggesting men need to come to terms with their role in a woman’s life if they, too, want a trusting and fulfilling relationship.
Most of the men today don’t yet fully appreciate that the role they fill in a woman’s life isn’t one of need, but rather it is one of want. A heterosexual woman enters a relationship with a man today because she wants him, not because she needs him. But treat a woman well, and those male partners will have a lifetime of loyalty and love.
What I want, even if I remain unsure of how to get it, and what I think most women want from a man is basic: safety (both physical and emotional), respect, and emotional availability. That’s it, yet so many men fall short of the mark. That’s what causes the erosion of trust because it becomes a tradeoff when you don’t get those basics fully, because you don’t know if there is someone out there who can give them all, as elementary as they are, so you settle. You negotiate, just as I did, in your head with what you’re willing to accept because you want that connection, you want companionship, and because you think if you just love him more, he’ll meet those basic needs. That’s why I stayed for so long and in retrospect, I don’t know if I made the right choice to stay because, as I discovered, he never had the capacity to meet those needs and he was never willing to learn how to meet them despite the grace I gave him to change.
I do, however, know with certainty I made the right choice to leave. That’s the lesson I hope my daughters take away from their mother—you won’t always get things right and after you’ve given the other person the opportunity to improve, have the strength to walk away when they don’t.
For me, I will learn to trust again, eventually, because I do believe that out of the four billion men in the world, there is at least one who is good and who will treat me right, and that someday, I’ll get it right. Trust is like glass and once it shatters, there’s no placing it together like it was before it was ruined. But just perhaps, all the fractured pieces can be put back together like the Japanese artform of kintsugi—making something beautiful out of that which has been broken.