Why So Many Smart Women Give Up on Love

You’re living through a very negative moment in history.

Inflation is high. Corruption is high. Fear of AI is high. Spend ten minutes scrolling social media and you’ll find endless evidence that the world is getting worse by the day.

Some of that fear is justified. The problem comes when negativity becomes your entire worldview. When you hear the same stories over and over again, eventually they stop sounding like individual experiences and start sounding like universal truth.

That’s how Debbie arrived in my program. Debbie is 67 years old. Smart, attractive, funny. And fully convinced there were no good men left.

Given her history, I understood why she felt that way.

Her father was patriarchal, critical, verbally abusive. There was no affection in their home. No warmth. No appreciation. Her mom felt trapped in a marriage with a man she didn’t even seem to like. Like many women, she thought that was the best she could do, and she unintentionally passed that belief to her daughter. 

Not surprisingly, Debbie married a man who felt very familiar. That’s not unusual, by the way. We recreate what feels familiar until we consciously choose something different.

Debbie’s husband lived his own independent life while she quit her high powered job to raise their children. There was no real partnership. Once their second son was born, she told me they were never truly alone together again. No intimacy. No emotional connection. No feeling of being cherished by her husband.

Eventually, the marriage ended, but Debbie’s story stayed the same: Men are selfish. Relationships are lonely. Love disappoints you in the end.

And who continues to reinforce that story every day? All of Debbie’s closest friends!

These are women in unhappy marriages they entered into decades ago. These are divorced women who have given up on the possibility of love. These are women who have plenty of evidence supporting the belief that relationships are draining.

Now, to be clear, their experiences were real. I’m not dismissing them. But it was still a very narrow slice of life. If everyone around you believes there are no good men, it simply becomes reality.

Then Debbie hired me.

At first, she wasn’t even talking much about men. She was talking about herself. How tired she was of feeling stuck. How lonely life had become. Solo trips. Museums. Girls nights out. Trying to fill her time while secretly feeling dead inside. She missed companionship. She missed affection. She missed feeling excited about the future instead of simply managing her disappointment.

And underneath all of it was something deeper: Debbie didn’t just stop believing in men. She stopped believing something better was still possible for her.

That began to change once she found herself surrounded by women who had a completely different experience of dating and relationships. Women with healthy boundaries. Women who understood men better. Women who had stopped chasing emotionally unavailable guys and started choosing men who actually showed up consistently.

Three months later, Debbie has seen five women in her mastermind finish the program with serious boyfriends. That shook her worldview in the best possible way.

Because both stories are true.

There are unhappy marriages everywhere. There are selfish men everywhere. There are people who stay together for forty years and barely even like each other.

There are also healthy couples. Loving marriages. Emotionally available men. Relationships where women feel safe, heard, and understood every single day.

Your life is shaped by which story you immerse yourself in.

If you wanted to get rich, you probably wouldn’t spend all your time around people explaining why success is impossible. If you wanted to get healthy, you probably wouldn’t surround yourself with people committed to unhealthy habits.

Yet women do this with love all the time.

They surround themselves with chronic pessimism, disappointment, and fear, then wonder why they feel hopeless about dating.

“My friends think I’m naive for believing in love.”

“My divorced friends tell me all men are terrible.”

“My married friends tell me marriage isn’t worth it.”

These people aren’t bad people. Usually they’re hurt people. But hurt people often mistake their personal experience for universal truth.

Your past is real. Your pain is real. Your disappointment is real. That doesn’t mean it has to become your future.

One of the biggest changes I see in women who succeed in love is that they stop reinforcing the same old narrative. They stop collecting evidence for why happiness is impossible. That’s what Debbie finally realized at 67 years old.

She had spent her entire life surrounded by evidence supporting one painful belief about men. For the first time, she chose to place herself in a different environment with different conversations and different outcomes. And slowly, her perspective has changed.

If this resonates with you, it may be worth asking whether the people around you are helping you move toward love or away from it.

And if you’re tired of trying to figure this out alone, schedule a private consultation with me.

Together, we’ll identify the beliefs and patterns keeping you stuck and help you create a path toward the healthy relationship you deserve.

Love,

Evan