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We were told to “find a man” first instead of “find yourself.”
Some of us think this mindset no longer applies. We have degrees. We have therapy. We have boundaries and bank accounts and red flag detectors.
But I want to invite you to look more closely.
Because we haven’t charted as much new territory as we’d like to believe.
And here is why that is so hard to see: the map is not out there anymore.
We cannot rage against it on a protest sign. We cannot unfollow it on Instagram. We cannot out-therapy it or out-knowledge it or out-feminist it.
Because it is not in the so-called “culture” anymore. It is in our body. It was placed in our nervous system where we learned what love feels like before we had a single word for it.
And that changes everything about how we have to approach it.
This “love map” has very specific directions:
You are only safe if you are chosen. As long as you are the hottest thing he has ever seen, you are valuable, so stay pretty.
Give him multiple chances. Don’t ask for too much because you want to seem agreeable and understanding. Your love will ultimately save you by saving him.
Build your life around the relationship and the rest will follow.
We did not question these directions. They were handed to us before we were old enough to understand.
Romcoms. Lyrics. Our own mothers. This map was unknowingly passed on to us by a culture that needed us to build families and make the world go round through the invisible labor on our backs. Relationships first. Ourselves last.
And we followed them faithfully. Even the most self-aware of us did.
You get the point. You’ve probably been quite surprised when your actions reflected this old map even though you knew better. The directions run deep.
And nowhere is this more clear than in the rise of the situationship—the almost relationship.
We have named it, analyzed it. We know our attachment style, and read every article on why he pulls away. We know the patterns. We know the term “intermittent conditioning” by now.
We are smart and aware and solid and stunning and secure now. Ultimately, we know better. Or so we think.
But those hooks grip deeply. That illustrious yearning of the “chemical cocktail” is written into our layered body. The anxiety, the hope, the almost, the intensity, the pullback. Oh, and the juiciest of them all—the relief when he texts back. Yum.
We’d like to think wisdom comes with age. But I have worked with women in their forties and fifties—women with decades of expensive therapy, hard-won wisdom, acronyms after their names—and yet, they too are waiting at midnight for that little ding on their phones.
We cannot simply psych ourselves out of this. We cannot claim naïveté. We cannot just “know better.”
Because this was never a knowledge problem.
We’ve studied our trauma for ages now. We have read the books, listened to the podcasts, dove into therapy, followed online gurus. We can tell you how to communicate boundaries and why we need our own bank accounts.
We’ve done “the work.”
But we haven’t brought our bodies along.
That’s why women I work with report feeling numb after the divorce, situationship, or drawn-out break up. They either want to shut down from dating entirely—totally justified—or feel a terrifying pull right back into another relationship. Many can’t sit in the discomfort of being in this in-between.
But they all wonder the same thing:
“Am I broken?”
Nope, honey. You are not broken. You are simply very good at following directions without listening to your inner compass—and that is how the world wants you to be.
No one has taught you to bring your body along.
But I have to say this clearly: this isn’t your fault.
The map was handed to you before you could read it or question it or sense you were headed in the wrong direction.
You were a child when your nervous system learned what love feels like.
You were a teenager when romcoms confirmed it.
You were a young woman when the culture rewarded you for following it.
By the time you were old enough to question it, you believed it was your choices that brought you there.
That is the setup.
It was not your choice. And your mother, your best friend, your therapist, your favorite podcast never asked you to pull out the map and ask who drew it.
The old map still runs strong. It just has the cities renamed.
It’s still being taught because it places our sense of calm outside ourselves—in his eyes, in his texts, in whether he stays. We can’t settle inside ourselves until someone out there confirms we are wanted.
Some of us are getting it, yes. But we are still running on scripts instead of somatics.
The map states very clearly where our safety lies—not in our body but in his response. In whether he texts back. In whether he shows up. In all the million little ways you can sculpt your story around his past hurts.
Everything we do still seems to require an audience to be real. We have traded one audience for another. Still performing for likes.
So, I am asking you to come back to your body.
Come back to the ways the words feel when they are leaving you. Come back to the body’s intelligence.
I know the world is loud and demanding and tells you about what you should want and how you should feel. But listen to your true requests.
You want solitude to come back home to yourself? Yes, do it.
You want to listen to your needs in a more honest way? Yes. Amen, honey.
You want to build a life that doesn’t depend on your attachment to a man as the only way to feel safe? (That last part isn’t new. We’ve known that part of the map for a while now.)
It takes that alone time to come back to ourselves because we really didn’t do it the first time around.
The situationship is the course correction.
The intensity, the longing, the crushing feeling that you would do anything right this very second to be out of that misery, well, they are all body signal light houses.
Be proud you are listening to what your body is saying and orienting yourself to a new direction. And know that sometimes it takes a second time around to see the map and change course. And a third. And a fourth…
Seeing the old map that still lives in us even though the world says we have a new one is a slow process.
You followed it because it promised you safety. Of course you did.
But we have to bring along our bodies now.
Our nervous systems help us write new maps.
It starts with pausing. With listening to our bodily responses. Not reading more books. Not rushing to the internet to read “5 Red Flags You Didn’t Know About Yet.”
The fear, the freezing, the fawning—it lives inside. No matter how much we profess we are learning.
We already know this to be true—the wanting to retreat, the numbness, the anger, the swallowed expression—because we feel it.
We have put language to it. Beautiful. Don’t stop there.
The next step is to burn the map that told our nervous system that relationships are the only way to feel safe.
Our hearts will come back online. I promise. But it starts in our body. In the daily doses of safety we give ourselves.
Once we do that, the “finding yourself” part gets embodied differently.
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