Dear Men

What's happening inside the women you love right now

I want to start by saying this is not a fight. This is me sitting down next to you, taking your hand, and trying to put words to something you may have already felt between us but didn’t know how to ask about.

Something is happening in the women around you right now, and I think you’ve noticed it even if neither of us has known what to call it, and I wanted to try.

I started noticing a pattern in conversations with my girlfriends, the kind that begin as a quick check-in and end with both of you sitting in a parking lot an hour later saying things you haven’t said out loud yet.

At first I thought it was just us, just this season, just the news cycle doing what the news cycle does. But it kept coming up, with different women, in different cities, in different kinds of relationships, and every single one of them said some version of the same thing: I love my husband, I’m not mad at him, but I feel so alone in what I’m carrying right now.

Women who adore their partners, who are building beautiful lives beside men they deeply respect, and who still feel like something massive is moving through them that the person beside them cannot quite see.

So I asked the question publicly: how many of you are in a loving relationship and still feel completely alone in what you’re processing right now?

Hundreds of women answered within hours, and the speed of it took my breath away because it meant this wasn’t just happening in my kitchen or my group text, it was happening everywhere, in homes full of love, and no one had named it yet.

One woman wrote that her partner is a good man but he doesn’t understand the weight she is carrying right now, that he wants her to be quieter because he doesn’t know what to say, and it’s easier to ask her to be silent than to ask the system to change.

My partner is one of the best men I know and this still lives between us, because supportive and understanding are not the same thing, and understanding something you have never felt in your body is almost impossible, and that’s not anyone’s failure, it’s just the truth of how differently this moment is living in us.

You deserve more than I’m fine.

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Here is what women mean when they say I’m fine right now.

She is watching families torn apart in their own neighborhoods, watching systems she was taught to trust reveal themselves as unwilling to protect the most vulnerable among us, watching power protect power while the stories of women and children are treated as an acceptable cost.

And she is absorbing all of it while packing lunches and answering emails and holding it together for everyone around her because that is what women have always done, and her body is keeping score even when her face is not.

She read a headline this morning and felt it in her body before she could process it with her brain, because every story about a woman who was harmed is a story that has already happened to someone she loves or almost happened to her or could happen to her daughters, and she doesn’t get to read the news the way you read the news.

You can see the injustice, but you will never see your own face in the victim’s story the way she does, and that difference, the one neither of you chose, feels like an ocean.

She is carrying things she never fully processed, things that happened to her body, her sense of safety, her worth, years ago, things she filed away because the world kept moving and she kept moving with it, and they are all surfacing at once in a way that feels less like falling apart and more like finally, terrifyingly, coming together.

She lays next to you at night and loves you so much it makes her chest ache and still feels a million miles away.

If you are still reading, that matters more than you know.

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There is a knowing between women right now that doesn’t require a single word of explanation, a recognition, a quiet exhale of you too?, and we don’t have to explain it to each other because we are already living inside of it.

We want so badly to find that knowing with you, because you are the person we want to be known by most, and we keep reaching across the bed, across the counter, across the silence, trying to hand you something that only makes sense from inside this body, and we can see you want to take it but you don’t know how to hold it.

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Something ancient is waking up in women right now.

One woman described it as the weight of all the women before us moving through her, the ones who had to stay quiet, endure, survive, carry injustice in their bodies, and she said she can’t unsee it anymore, that this isn’t anger, it’s clarity, and she is done pretending not to feel it.

The parts of ourselves we were taught to hide, the voices we swallowed to keep the peace, the instincts we buried to make ourselves easier to be around, they are all surfacing at once and we are done pushing them back down.

The little girls who were told they feel too much are now women learning that their depth was never a defect, that the thing the world tried to shrink in them is the very thing the world needs most right now.

For many of us this moment is not new information, it is recognition, it is our bodies saying here it is again, the same patterns, the same protections, the same silence dressed up as waiting for proof.

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The women you see right now who seem consumed, who can’t stop reading, who are up at midnight researching things they never thought they’d need to know, who are crying in the car after school drop-off and then wiping their faces and walking into the building like nothing happened, we are not spiraling.

We are the hands and the feet, we are sowing seeds for daughters we will never meet, and we cannot and will not do that with our eyes closed.

One woman wrote, I cannot look away from the things happening, I will stand and bear witness, I will stand and fight back against the unjust system that’s in place, and five hundred and sixty-one women pressed their hearts against that sentence because they saw themselves inside of it.

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When you tell us to stop looking, we know you’re trying to protect us.

But when the words come out as calm down or you’re too much or you’re being dramatic, they land on something older than this conversation, the oldest wound women carry, the one that was placed in us before we had language to refuse it, the one that says our depth is a defect, our fire is something to be managed rather than marveled at.

Every woman you love has that wound somewhere inside of her, and every time the world tells her she is too much for caring too deeply it presses right into the center of it.

It is easier to ask us to be silent than to ask the system to change, and what we are asking for is not your silence alongside ours but your willingness to sit in the discomfort with us long enough to understand why we can’t be quiet anymore.

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The woman in front of you, the one who cries more easily now, the one who gets quiet in a way that feels different from before, the one whose eyes are a little more open and a little less willing to pretend, you are not losing her.

You are finally meeting her.

She was always in there, underneath the performing and the people-pleasing and the years of making herself smaller so the room could be more comfortable, and she is not going back.

She doesn’t need to be fixed or quieted, she needs your hand in hers, not to carry what she’s carrying but to believe her when she tells you it’s heavy.

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The same systems that taught women to shrink taught men to go numb, and I think we forget that sometimes.

Somewhere along the way you were handed a version of strength that required you to disconnect from the very things that make you powerful, your tenderness, your grief, your ability to sit in something uncomfortable without immediately trying to fix it or flee from it, and I wonder how much of the distance between us right now is not because you don’t care but because you were never given permission to feel things at this depth.

What we are longing for is for you to come back to yourselves.

What would change everything right now is not words of comfort or being reminded that you’re one of the good ones, it is something more primal than that, something women can feel in their nervous systems, the sensation of the men we love turning toward us instead of away, of daily life actually pausing because what is happening right now deserves to be interrupted, of hearing you say I see it too and it’s not okay even if you don’t have a solution.

We want you to see what is being built right now alongside what is breaking, the women showing up for each other, the communities organizing, the mothers raising children who will not inherit this silence, because that is what we want you to be part of.

We are longing for something to wake up in you the way it is waking up in us, not because you have failed us but because we have seen what you are capable of when you let yourselves feel the full weight of a moment, and this moment deserves your full attention.

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One man left a comment on the original post. He wrote, husband here, I’m really trying to understand it all and see it, I want to know because my three-year-old daughter is in this and since her birth something changed in me, I’m sorry it took so long. And a woman responded that his words triggered a huge sigh from deep in her chest and she thanked him for daring to lay down his ego and really try to understand.

That exchange is everything this letter is reaching for.

We want to reach for you first, we want you to be the one who knows, we want to stop saving the realest version of what we’re going through for the group text and the parking lot phone call and the friend who just understands without us having to explain, because you are the one we chose and we want to let you in.

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We are not helpless and we never were, the world just worked very hard to make us believe that, and right now, woman by woman, mother by mother, conversation by conversation, we are remembering what they hoped we would forget.

We are remembering that our empathy is not weakness but a kind of sight, that the fire in us is not something to be extinguished but aimed, and that the seeds we sow right now in the way we raise our children and the conversations we refuse to stop having and the things we choose to look at instead of away from, those seeds are the future of everything.

They say women’s rage will heal the earth, and perhaps it will, but what we long for is something deeper, for our healing to be shared, for strength and tenderness to stand side by side in all of us, because the weight of this moment was never meant to be carried in women’s bodies alone.

The feminine is waking up, and we are asking you to let it wake something up in you too, to let this moment sharpen you instead of numbing you, to move toward the women in your lives and listen, really listen, and to trust the part of you that has always known what is right and has been waiting for permission to act on it.

Take our hand. Let us show you what we see.

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Someone called these “posts to the willing” and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. If this is living in your relationship right now, send it to the person beside you, not as a weapon but as an outstretched hand.

And if you are the man reading this because someone you love sent it to you, thank you for staying until the end. The woman in front of you has never been more herself than she is in this moment, and she chose you to witness it, and that is not a burden, that is an honor.