(Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

Women don’t want to be caretakers of badly raised, ill-mannered or generally troubled men. Essentially, women don’t want to raise men, we want to grow together.

After years of trying to help Mac Miller sober up, ex-girlfriend Ariana Grande left him and was soon accused of abandoning him after his death by overdose.

Earlier in the month Donald Glover also used animation in his work portraying Michelle Obama as Kanye West’s saviour. According to the rapper and actor, Kanye needs a strong powerful black woman to fix him.

But who’s going to save black women or any woman from their issues? Issues like addiction, mental health, family troubles. Why do we not have the same expectation of men to be emotional caretakers of women?


This messaging is both confusing and infuriating. Black women have our own issues yet we're supposed to fix everyone else's. Who is there to save us? https://t.co/qubwvQmPzg — Danielle(Vote Like A Black Woman)Montague (@Typicalblkchick) September 2, 2018

If a man leaves a woman dealing with issues, he is said to have ‘dodged the bullet’ but a woman who endures his financial problems, violence, mental health issues, is praised, or encouraged to stay and help him turn his life around.



In this way, female endurance – a woman who stays with her man through his troubled years – is romanticised; she is seen as loyal. And that loyalty seems to be expected of women.

The idea is that she’s proved her worth; she’s not a golddigger, she didn’t just abandon him while he was making something of himself. And rarely is it reciprocated. Men staying with women who are finding themselves is not commonplace. Men staying with women who are ‘troubled’ is a rarity.

Especially when it comes to addiction, women are expected to stay. This can be extremely challenging for a partner like it was for Ariana. And yet when she left, she was vilified for it, so much so that she had to disable comments on her Instagram after hateful messages poured in.

Ariana Grande being blamed is symptoms of a society where women are expected to be mothers, housekeepers, therapists, and rehab centers for the men they date. — Third Force (@NalediMashishi) September 8, 2018

Courtney Love famously shared a similar fate of being vilified when her partner Kurt Cobain took his own life – a time in which she was in rehab herself.

One of the most high profile breakups – the demise of Brangelina – also showed how society views female responsibility.

The tabloids speculated that it was Angelina’s lifestyle choices, her devotion to humanitarian work, her jealousy, she was too unattentive, while the media made excuses for Brad Pitt.

In doing so, they showed they prescribed to the idea that marriage, like relationships, is a woman’s responsibility to maintain.

Why do we not push men to be more nurturing of relationships?

Women are not rehablitation centres for badly raised boys — Zahra Zaraa Danejo (@tinkizee2) February 22, 2018

Even in non-romantic contexts, like in Childish Gambino’s music video Feels Like Summer, a troubled Kanye West has his spirits lifted by Michelle Obama – one of the biggest black female icons.

Whether it’s by virtue of being a mum, a grandmother, or agony aunt, women are expected to do the emotional heavy lifting and help men become better. Women are expected to be fixers, to keep it together, even when they’re filling from an empty cup.

Why do we not encourage men to be better caretakers of their own emotional well-being – to speak openly about their problems, to be in touch with their feelings?

Why is it left to a woman to coax those feelings out of him, to nurture him, to help him grow?

Marzana Rahman, a south Asian divorcee, was a victim of domestic violence. She told Metro.co.uk that despite the horrible circumstances she found herself in, some people still expected her to try to work through their tumultuous relationship.

‘He (my ex, his family), expected me to stay and emotionally blackmailed me because he was “broken”,’ she said.



‘It’s an absurd tactic that perpetrators use in making victims feel guilty and, as a result, stay.’

So if women are the caretakers, then who takes care of women? Society has conditioned and commodified us in such a way that we are pitted against one another. The patriarchy further perpetuates the idea that women are bitchy or catty and inherently don’t get along.

It feels like a divisive tactic to prevent us from uniting against the patriarchy. So who exactly are we supposed to turn to? Because men are clearly not rehabilitation centres for women, neither are they willing to be.

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