Work on yourself first: what that advice actually costs you

You've heard it kindly, from people who love you, usually at a table with wine on it. Work on yourself first. Be happy on your own first. It'll happen the moment you stop looking. Get your vitamin D checked, it's been a long winter. Maybe go and talk to somebody about it.

Every one of those sentences takes an ordinary want, the same want the women saying it had answered years ago, and files it as a symptom of something wrong with you. The swap is small and almost nobody notices it happen. It changes everything about what comes next.

A want has a next step, and the next step happens between two people, out loud, in a room. A symptom has one next step, and it's more repair. Repair has no finish line. There's no examiner, no pass mark, and no evening on which anybody is declared ready, so the work can only continue, and continuing gets mistaken for progress because it looks so much like effort.

The tiredness isn't a condition and the quiet evening isn't a symptom. They're reasonable feelings about a real situation, arriving on time, in a woman whose life is already running.

What the advice turns into once you take it seriously

It doesn't look like a breakdown. It looks like diligence, which is why it survives for years.

But me enough that every date becomes an audit of my tone. Was I too direct. Did I look like I needed nothing. Did I say what I wanted before he had time to decide whether he wanted it too. Did I make my life look so finished that there was nowhere for him to stand.

from the chapter I'm the Problem, But I Won't Lower My Standards

Read those four questions again and notice that not one of them can be answered. There's no second person in any of them. The audit opens after everybody's gone home, on evidence you gather yourself, against a standard you invent on the spot, and it returns the same verdict every time, because the verdict was written into the instruction that started it.

Underneath the whole apparatus sits the sentence you say out loud when somebody pushes you on it: I'll work on myself, but I won't lower my standards. The book agrees with the second half, and gives it one word.

You shouldn't lower a standard because keeping it got expensive.

from the chapter I'm the Problem, But I Won't Lower My Standards

What it refuses is the confession bolted onto the front of it, and that half never gets argued with at anybody's dinner table.

A Tuesday in March

There's a woman in the book called Ruth. She's thirty eight, and she did every single thing a book like this is supposed to tell a woman to do. Changed her approach, stopped accepting less, got more selective. At thirty seven she met a man who was a good fit, and for a year it was fine.

Before all that, though, there was a Tuesday in March, and the Tuesday is the part that stayed. He'd told her he'd be late. She didn't want to eat at home with the television on, so she went to the Japanese place on her own and sat at the counter with a bowl of ramen. Her phone went off on the wood beside the bowl. It said: Did you eat?

She ate in silence and didn't answer him until eleven, when she was already in bed. She told him yes, it was good. He said, "Ok." No fight, no drama.

That same week a project she'd carried for three months had been taken off her by a four line email at 4:47 on the Friday, and she'd told nobody. By Tuesday she couldn't think of a way to say it that wouldn't land as a complaint. So she read "Did you eat?" and thought: he doesn't know because I didn't tell him, and if I didn't tell him, what am I doing being hurt about it.

That is what killed me. Not the job in another city. That Tuesday. Because if he did not know whether I had eaten, what else did he not know?

from the chapter I'm the Problem, But I Won't Lower My Standards

There was nothing to point at. That's exactly why it took three months to find a name for it.

The bargain underneath the advice

The reason it's so hard to put down isn't that it sounds true. It's what it quietly promises in exchange for the work. Do this correctly and the ending will justify the work. Hold the right standard and the right man will respect it. Become independent without becoming cold. Be direct without becoming frightening. One demand for every way a woman can be got wrong, and then the line the whole arrangement was built to deliver.

Get every part exactly right, and love will have no reasonable excuse to leave.

from the chapter I'm the Problem, But I Won't Lower My Standards

Except love doesn't need a reasonable excuse. Sometimes two lives ask for different answers. Ruth's ending was two sentences long and neither of them was about her.

So the book turns and looks straight at the trade.

But if it means every ending can be traced to a defect in you, it's just control again. Painful control, but control. Because if you caused every ending, then one day you can become perfect enough to prevent one.

from the chapter I'm the Problem, But I Won't Lower My Standards

Nobody takes on a defect as an insult. You take it on for what comes bundled with it, and what comes bundled with it is enormous. If you caused it, you can prevent the next one, and nothing from here on is out of your hands. The price is that every quiet evening from now on has to be read as evidence about you.

What goes in the space it leaves

Take the defect away and a hole opens where all that work used to be, because the work was the point of the arrangement. What goes in the hole is much smaller than a year of self repair. It takes about four seconds and it happens in front of a witness.

I stopped making the relationship an exam he didn't know he was taking. I say what I want. And then I watch what he does with what I told him.

from the chapter Say It Out Loud

Look at what that retires. The audit and the exam are the same instrument pointed at two different people. One grades your own tone at midnight, the other grades his answers in secret, and both keep the two of you in separate rooms working from evidence the other one never sees.

Nothing is promised at the end of that, and the book is unusually honest about it at its own expense: Blair met the man she lives with at a dinner a friend put together, and she says so, with the luck left attached. What the sentence gives back is time. Say it in month two and you know where you stand by month three instead of by next autumn.

It was never your judgement, and it was never the size of what you wanted. You were handed a rule that made an ordinary want look like a fault, and then you were admired for how seriously you worked on the fault.

You are allowed to want him. And you are allowed to say no.

from the chapter The Sentences

If the next step is the sentence, it's written out here. If you're already past that and reading his week, start here instead. If the working-on-yourself has turned into running his life for him, that's this one. And if what you want is a number rather than a feeling, there are four of them.

Take the year of repair away and the evening still has to be spent somewhere. There's a way to spend four seconds of it instead: you say what happened, and what comes back is one plain sentence in your own words, and nothing at all about what's wrong with you, because that was never the question. It's on the phone that's already in your hand at eleven.

Find out what you've actually been working on.

Ruth's Tuesday, and the chapter that argues with the reader who closed the book at page twelve, are both in Castles Want Queens, Not Princesses.

Is therapy a waste of time then?

Nothing here says that, and plenty of women say the work was worth having for its own sake. What this page is about is one specific use of it: as the thing that has to be finished before you're allowed to say what you want out loud. There's no evening on which that gets finished.

What if I actually am the problem?

The book keeps half of that and throws the other half away. If it means your own choices are the part of your life you can examine, that's useful. If it means every ending traces back to a defect in you, it's control wearing humility's clothes.

I'm forty four. Was this written for someone younger?

There's a chapter that opens by naming the reader who closed the book at page twelve for exactly that reason, and argues with her before she can put it down. Its author names the woman she wrote it for, and she's nobody's magazine cover.