“Well you know how it is, men grow up under a good woman’s care.”
No. I do not know how it is. Please explain it to me slowly, preferably with diagrams, because what you just described is a fully adult man outsourcing his development to a woman who did not apply for the position of Emotional Finishing School.
Notice the asymmetry hiding in plain sight. A woman who has “daddy issues” is framed as defective, unstable, hypersexual, unserious. Her openness, her reluctance to commit, her desire for autonomy—these are pathologised as personal failures. She is blamed for the gap. She is told to heal quietly and stop making it everyone else’s problem.
But a man? A man is “unfinished.” A work in progress. A rough draft. And somehow this is not his responsibility. It is a woman’s moral duty to sand him down, civilise him, teach him empathy, time management, emotional literacy, and possibly how to locate the dishwasher. She is praised for her patience. She is told she is good for him. Her exhaustion is romanticised as nurturing.
If a man “shapes” a woman, controls her growth, conditions her behaviour, or frames himself as the authority on her becoming—everyone correctly names it grooming. Alarms go off. Red flags wave. Entire podcasts are born.
When a woman does the same emotional labour for a man, it is reframed as benevolence. As destiny. As the only way he will ever be “a good man.”
That is not growth. That is deputised motherhood with a romantic filter slapped on it.
The quiet horror here is how normal it all sounds. How casual and baked-in. As if men are perennial adolescents and women are born with a user manual for fixing them. As if women exist in a perpetual state of readiness to sacrifice time, ambition, nervous systems, and selfhood so a man can someday be tolerable to other people.
And if she refuses? If she opts out? If she says, “I am not your developmental milestone”?
She is cold, selfish and bitter. Funny how often “bitter” just means “declined unpaid labor.”
Oh the structural absurdity that has been normalized through repetition and politeness! Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The sentence stops sounding wise and starts sounding like a shrug over inequality.
Yet! If a woman assumes a man will care for her, she is called a gold-digger!
Calculating. Lazy. Manipulative. Morally suspect. Her motives are interrogated like she is applying for parole. We zoom in on her desires with a magnifying glass and ask what kind of woman expects support instead of earning it.
And the speed with which that label gets slapped on is… athletic.
But flip the script.
A man who assumes a woman will take care of him—emotionally, socially, domestically, developmentally—is not called a gold-digger. He is called lost. Or immature. Or just not there yet. His dependency is rebranded as potential. His neediness is framed as something a “good woman” will naturally want to remedy.
Money is treated as vulgar and transactional.
Care is treated as invisible and infinite.
That is gutting. Care does not look like currency, so we pretend it is not one. But time, attention, emotional regulation, planning, remembering, soothing, encouraging, teaching—this is labour. It has value. It has cost. It drains bodies and futures just as efficiently as a bank transfer.
So women are scolded for wanting material security while simultaneously being expected to provide unpaid psychological infrastructure. One desire is mocked as greed; the other is sanctified as love.
And the insult itself is revealing. “Gold-digger” implies extraction without contribution. Yet somehow a man extracting emotional labour, domestic stability, and personal growth from a woman is never framed the same way. He is “investing in himself”, “working on things” or (my personal favourite) “trying.”
If a woman expects provision, she is opportunistic.
If a man expects care, he is human.
That double standard is not accidental. It keeps women defensive and apologetic for their needs, while men are allowed to arrive unfinished and expect applause for becoming functional adults.
Once you see that, the word “gold-digger” starts to sound less like a warning and more like a silencing spell.
