Originally published May 22, 2026
Recently, I did a post about what I’ve learned about men, and I’ve been sitting with why it seemed to hit such a nerve.
I don’t think it was just because women related to the list.
I think it was because a lot of us know what it feels like to look back and realize we weren’t necessarily confused the whole time. We weren’t blind, dumb or sitting there like, “Wow, everything is wonderful here,” while the house was metaphorically on fire and the smoke detector was screaming.
A lot of us knew something was wrong. We just didn’t always have the language for it yet. Or the money. Or the exit plan. Or the emotional capacity. Or the housing situation. Or the nervous system regulation. Or the energy to start over while still trying to keep everybody fed, clothed, transported, and alive.
So we did what people do when they can’t change everything at once.
We found little things to hold on to. Whether that’s a slightly better conversation. A little more effort. One task he started doing. One apology that sounded close enough to accountability if you tilted your head, squinted your eyes, and wanted it bad enough. And sometimes, when you’ve been starving for partnership, crumbs start looking like progress.
The hope was real.
I want to be honest about something. I don’t think I was one of those women who spent years explaining away my husband’s patterns. That doesn’t feel accurate to me.
I wasn’t sitting around saying, “Oh, he’s just tired,” or “He’s overwhelmed,” or “He doesn’t mean it,” or trying to build a whole public relations campaign for behavior that was clearly hurting me. I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know what to do with that knowing.
There’s a very particular kind of helplessness that comes when you can see the pattern, but you don’t have a clean way out of it yet. So you cope. You compartmentalize. You focus on the things that did improve, because staring directly at what still hasn’t changed can make you feel like you’re gonna lose your damn mind before breakfast. And for me, hope turned into the thing I used to get through. Not the pretty kind of hope people put on mugs. I mean the survival kind.
The kind that says:
“Maybe if I give it more time.”
“Well, at least he’s doing this now.”
“Maybe this means we’re turning a corner.”
Hope can be beautiful. I don’t want to flatten it into something bad. Hope is part of why we keep trying, why we believe people can grow, and why we don’t give up on every hard thing the first time it gets uncomfortable. But hope can also turn into a drug. And listen, I was taking that drug daily… with water and a little snack for good measure. 😏
The laundry looked like progress.
Let me give you a regular, very unsexy example.
Laundry.
I know. Nothing says emotional breakthrough like my granny panties.
For a long time, I was the one doing the laundry. Everybody’s laundry. Mine, his, the kids’, the towels, the sheets, all of it. At the time, I was a stay-at-home-mom, so it was cool, but at a certain point, I was both in school full time and working full time, and things weren’t changing.
After a couple years of passive aggressive complaints, at some point, he started folding his clothes. And I remember registering that as progress. Because technically, it was.
I had gone from doing all of the laundry to at least not having to fold his. That was movement. That was a change. That was something I could point to and say, “Okay, see? Things are getting a little better.” But here’s the part I couldn’t fully let myself sit with at the time: he was doing part of his laundry. Not the household laundry. Not the kids’ laundry. Not the shared load.
His. And I was still responsible for everybody else’s.
That’s where hope can get tricky. Because when you’re carrying too much, someone matching their own socks can feel like a breakthrough.
And listen, I don’t say that to be shady. Okay, maybe a little shady. But mostly honest. Because in the moment, it didn’t feel like crumbs. It felt like evidence. Evidence that he could change. Evidence that things were shifting. Evidence that maybe if I just stayed patient, maybe if I gave it more time, maybe if I didn’t make a big deal out of the parts that were still uneven, the rest would eventually catch up. Maybe he’d match my socks too.
But a little less heavy is not the same as mutual. That’s the part I wish I had understood sooner.
Relief isn’t the same as repair.
When you’ve been over-functioning for a long time, relief can feel like repair. That’s one of the clearest ways I can say it.
If you’ve been doing everything and somebody starts actually doing something, your nervous system may want to celebrate. And honestly, fair. When you’ve been drowning, even one less wave feels personal. But relief answers the question, “Does this hurt a little less today?” Repair asks something deeper. Repair asks, “Has the dynamic actually changed?”
Those are not the same question.
When my husband started doing some of his own laundry, it brought a little relief. I didn’t have to do that specific thing for him in the same way anymore. But the larger arrangement was still intact. I was still carrying the household load. I was still the one tracking what needed to happen. I was still the one responsible for so much of the invisible labor.
And the same thing happened emotionally.
There were moments where something improved just enough for me to keep hoping, but not enough to actually change the relationship. A conversation would go a little better. He would make a small adjustment. He would seem to hear me in one area. And I would latch onto that because I needed it to mean we were moving somewhere.
But sometimes a small improvement is just a small improvement. It doesn’t always mean the foundation is changing.
And I know that sounds harsh, but I think it’s also freeing. Because a lot of women are out here tryna turn one improved behavior into a whole future. He did one thing differently, and suddenly our brains are building a three-year forecast.
“Okay, so if he did this, then maybe next he’ll do that, and then maybe this means he’s finally understanding, and maybe by summer we’ll have emotional reciprocity and a shared Google calendar.”
Girl.
Sometimes he just folded a shirt.
The part I kept trying not to look at…
The hardest part wasn’t that nothing ever improved. The hard part was that some things improved, and the bigger thing still didn’t. That’s what kept me stuck in hope.
Because if everything had been terrible all the time, maybe the truth would’ve been easier to hold. But that’s not usually how these things work is it? There are moments. There are tiny shifts. There are signs of effort. There are days when you think, “Okay, maybe I’m being too hard on him. Maybe this really is getting better.” Meanwhile, the deeper needs are still sitting there untouched.
For me, one of those deeper needs was intimacy outside of sex. That was a big one.
Many of you have heard me talk about this before. I didn’t just want sex to exist in the relationship. I wanted closeness. I wanted emotional presence. I wanted to feel like my inner world mattered. I wanted to feel cared for in a way that didn’t only show up when something was expected from my body. And I tried to explain that to my husband.
Lord knows I tried.
At some point, there was nothing else to say. I couldn’t keep finding new words for the same ache. I couldn’t keep trying to explain why emotional intimacy mattered to a person who kept reducing connection down to what he wasn’t getting sexually. So eventually, I stopped trying to explain that part as much. Not because it stopped mattering.
Because I was tired. And because once you’ve said the thing enough times and nothing really changes, the explaining starts to feel like another chore.
So I focused on what I could survive. I focused on what improved. I focused on the little pieces that let me get through the day without having to fully face the larger truth all at once. That’s not denial in the way people like to talk about denial. That’s coping. And sometimes coping looks like calling crumbs progress because naming the full hunger feels too overwhelming.
When better still isn’t enough…
This is the nuance I want to sit with: Something can be better than it was and still not be enough.
That’s hard for people to hold, especially when they’re invested in you being grateful for any amount of effort.
If he used to do nothing and now he does one thing, people might expect you to clap. And sometimes you do clap, because you’re relieved and because you want to encourage the progress. But after a while, you start realizing that clapping for basic participation can turn into its own form of exhaustion.
You can acknowledge progress without pretending it solved the problem. You can be grateful something improved and still be honest that the relationship isn’t healthy, balanced, or emotionally safe enough for you. You can say, “Yes, that changed,” and still say, “This is not enough for me to build a life on.”
That doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you honest.
I think a lot of women get stuck because we’re taught to reward effort, especially from men who weren’t doing much before. We’re told to appreciate that he’s trying. And yes, effort matters. I’m not dismissing that. But effort is not automatically partnership.
Effort has to be connected to real change. Consistent change. Change that doesn’t require you to supervise it, beg for it, track it, praise it, remind him of it, and then act like you didn’t notice when it disappears for three weeks.
If the improvement still leaves you carrying the relationship, it may be relief, but it’s not repair.
Why hope can keep you tired…
Hope kept me going for a long time.
I don’t regret that, exactly. I think hope was part of how I survived a season I couldn’t leave immediately. There were realities: Financial realities. Family realities. Emotional realities. Practical realities. The kind of realities people in comment sections love to ignore because it’s easier to say, “Just leave,” when you don’t have to pack the bag, pay the bills, talk to the kids, figure out housing, and rebuild your entire life from the studs.
So I want to be tender with the version of me who hoped. She was doing the best she could with what she had. But I also have to tell the truth about what that hope cost me.
Hope made me stretch little changes into big meanings. Hope made me focus on the parts that improved because I didn’t know what to do with the parts that didn’t. Hope gave me something to look at when the bigger picture was too painful. And eventually, I had to ask myself a question that I did not enjoy:
Am I seeing real progress, or am I using progress as a way to avoid the truth?
That question will clear a room.
Because once I stopped asking, “Is it better than it was?” and started asking, “Is this enough?” the answer changed.
That’s the whole thing right there.
Better than before is not always enough for what’s next.
A note about The Detachment Workbook...
This is one of the reasons I made The Detachment Workbook that so many of you are using.
Not because I think every woman needs to leave. And it’s definitely not because I want anyone to be cold or bitter. That is not the ministry over here.
I made it for the woman who is emotionally tangled in the gap between what she knows and what she can do about it.
The woman who keeps reaching for clarity from a situation that keeps confusing her. The woman who sees little changes and wants so badly for them to mean the whole pattern is changing. The woman who is trying to stop negotiating her needs down to whatever someone else is willing to give.
Detachment isn’t about pretending you don’t care. It’s about learning how to tell the truth without immediately softening it to make the relationship feel more survivable.
If that’s where you are, and you haven’t grabbed it yet, the workbook can help you slow down, name what’s happening, and start coming back to yourself one page at a time.
You can find it here:
Before you go...
I’ve been thinking about how much easier it can be to recognize crumbs when you’re not the one who’s hungry.
Looking back, I can see the difference between my husband making small improvements and us actually becoming better partners. But when I was living it, those little changes mattered to me. They gave me something to believe in, and I don’t think there’s anything foolish about wanting the person you love to grow.
I just wish I’d spent a little less time measuring how far he’d come and a little more time asking whether the relationship was becoming something I could actually be happy in. Because those are two different measurements, and they don’t always tell the same story.
So here’s what I’d love for you to think about: Is there something in your life that you’ve been calling progress because it’s better than it used to be, even though you’re still waiting for it to become what you actually need?
And listen, I’m not suggesting you throw out every relationship because somebody didn’t fold the towels correctly. Although, depending on how they fold them, I understand the temptation.
I’m saying you can appreciate a change without making it mean more than it does. You can recognize somebody’s effort without using it to talk yourself out of your own disappointment. And you can be hopeful about what might happen next without ignoring what’s happening right now.
Sometimes progress is real. And sometimes we’re just so relieved somebody finally picked up their own socks that we forget to ask who’s still doing everybody else’s laundry.
