How to Keep Your Man – The Best and Only Way

Like the post? Share with people you love!

Every few weeks, a new article appears telling women what they need to do, be, have, or become to keep their man.

The list is always some variation of the same things: oh, be beautiful, cook well, be interesting, be intimate, be independent but not too independent, be submissive but not boring, be everything he needs before he even knows he needs it.

And women read these articles and take notes and work on themselves and try harder.

And men still leave. Men still cheat. 

Let’s Go Through the List Anyway

I know some of you are reading and thinking, ”What about being a good wife? What about everything I was told?”

Fine. Let us go through it.

Beauty.

Men are visual, we are told.

Look good, and he will stay.

But some of the most stunning women you know have been cheated on, left, and humiliated by men who chose women who were, by every conventional standard, less beautiful.

How much beauty is enough? Nobody has ever answered that question because there is no answer.

Beauty is not a retention strategy.

Food.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

Maybe in 1987.

There is good food everywhere now — restaurants, delivery apps, women who cook better than both of us.

If all it took was jollof rice, no marriage would end.

Intimacy.

Give him what he wants, when he wants it, how he wants it.

I have heard this advice given to women so confidently and so frequently that it makes me tired.

You can give a man everything he wants in the bedroom and he will still be looking elsewhere if looking elsewhere is what he has decided to do.

Physical intimacy is important in marriage, but it is not a leash.

Intelligence, independence, spontaneity. All wonderful qualities to have……..for yourself and your own fulfillment! Not as tools to retain a man who has not decided to stay.

I am not saying these things do not matter in a relationship.

They do.

A good marriage needs attraction, effort, friendship, intimacy, and a hundred other things.

But none of them work if only one person is committed to making it work.

Faithfulness Is a Decision He Makes, Not a Reward You Earn.

Loyalty is not something a woman extracts from a man through enough beauty or enough submission.

It is a decision he makes every day, to choose you, honor what you built together, and to keep himself for the person he committed to.

That decision is his. Not yours.

You cannot make it for him or love him into making it. 

And when a man cheats or leaves, it is not evidence that you were not enough.

It is evidence that he made a choice. His choice, about his character, his values and about the kind of man he has decided to be.

That is on him, not you.

Stop Asking What You Did Wrong

When a man leaves or cheats, we start asking, 

What did I do wrong?

What was she giving him that I wasn’t?

Was I not attentive enough, attractive enough, available enough?

If I had done this differently, would he have stayed?

Those questions are the wrong questions.

The right question is not what you failed to do.

The right question is what kind of man makes that choice, and whether that man deserves another moment of your energy.

A man who cheats is not a man who was failed by his woman.

He is a man who failed himself and his covenant.

He looked at everything you built together and decided his impulses mattered more.

That’s his reflection, not yours. 

Your job in a relationship is not to be so perfect that leaving becomes impossible.

Your job is to show up as your best self, to love well, and be the partner you committed to being.

What he does with that, whether he honors it or wastes it, is entirely his business.

The Right Man Will Not Need to Be Kept

 

Here is what I want to leave you with.

A man who loves you with his whole heart will not need to be convinced to stay.

He will not need to be strategically managed or perpetually impressed.

He will keep himself for you because he wants to.

Because you matter to him and losing you is not something he is willing to risk.

You will not have to work to keep that man.

You will only have to be yourself.

And any man who requires you to perform endlessly and compete with every woman in his orbit that man was never really yours to keep.

Let him go.

And stop reading those articles.

Like the post? Share with people you love!