You and Accountability

The following is Chapter Four from my book, Auditing Your Dating Patterns: So You Can Stop Dating the Same Men in Different Bodies. The book every woman should work through before her next date.

Being honest with yourself will take you a lot further than lying to yourself ever will.

When I made my debut on Instagram over a decade ago, I stepped onto the scene in a time when “you deserve better” style quotes aimed toward women were the bread and butter of the platform, and men (whose names I will never give airtime to, but if you know, you know) were making a pretty coin from pandering to women.

Meanwhile, I was the antithesis.

Much of my work was pulled straight from the pages of my journal, pieces I would later turn into several books and use as the foundation for the lessons I taught in my classes and with my clients. And a lot of those pieces were about the role I had played in my past heartbreaks and toxic relationships. Because, you know, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and honest reflection is how we actually learn from our past and grow.

I was writing about the red flags I saw in the very beginning but chose to ignore, the low levels of self-love I had for myself back then, along with the lack of boundaries and standards. The ways I would place the men I dated on pedestals. The ways I would essentially reward their shitty behavior by staying with them, or taking them back.

When I tell you… women lost their ever-living shit.

I’m talking full-on outrage in my comments.

“Why are you shaming yourself like this?”

“You’re shaming other women.”

“This is internalized misogyny.”

“You’re blaming women for what men do.”

And I remember sitting there like… what the hell are you talking about?

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

Granted, before I broke free from all the echo chambers, I had been used to women in my everyday life helping me evade my own consequences. But to see it on that kind of scale? Hundreds of women every month in my comments and DMs either attacking me for taking accountability for myself and encouraging other women—adult women—to do the same, or trying to talk me out of it?

That… was extremely eye-opening.

And that’s when I knew we, as women, had a problem.

There’s a big difference between shaming yourself and owning your shit. And ten years later, there are still way too many women who flat out refuse to acknowledge that difference.

The second the word “accountability” is spoken, women take it as a direct attack, a punishment even. And to be fair here, I get it. 

People, including you, tend to throw that word at someone when they are at the absolute end of their rope with them.

You see it in the gender wars on the internet all the time, you’ve probably heard it from your parents a lot (especially as a teen), and I know you’ve yelled it at the men you were fed up with, “I’m so sick of your shit. Take some goddamn accountability for yourself!”

So yeah, I get. The word feels like a punishment. But just like in dating, we have to stop letting our feelings override reality.

And the reality is, tone, energy, and feelings around the word aside, we’re inclined to push back against and resist even the idea of taking full accountability for ourselves because, well… that’s extremely hard work.

It’s so much easier to make everyone else the villain, the antagonist, or the entire problem in our stories, because then we don’t have to center ourselves. If we centered ourselves, we’d have to look at the roles we play in our own shit, and that would mean recognizing that a lot of the shit in our lives is a domino effect of our own adult decisions.

Walk with me.

If someone who didn’t know anything about your past relationship asked you why it didn’t work out with your ex, would your sentence start with:

“He was a piece of shit.”

“He was toxic.”

“He was an asshole.”

“He didn’t have his shit together.”

“He always gave me the bare minimum.”

If so... voilà. There’s your story.

“He” is who you’ve centered. He’s the main character. And because your story always revolves around him, it absolves you from having to look at your role. Your story gets to be, “The men I get with are always doing something to me,” and never:

“I attached myself to him even though I knew he was bad news.”

“I saw the red flags and ignored them because I wanted to believe things would be different for me.”

“I wanted to fix him.”

“I wanted to prove I was better than his ex.”

“I thought I could be the one he finally changed his ways for.”

And let’s keep it a buck—some of us knew from day one that man wasn’t what we actually wanted or needed. We knew we were signing up for a damn near guaranteed shitshow, but instead of walking away, we stayed and tried to make it work. 

Maybe because we were lonely, or we thought we were above the program, or the dick was good, or we convinced ourselves that if we just loved him hard enough, he’d rise to the occasion.

But I’m sure at this point in your dating and relationship career, you can see that’s not how this works.

Until you sit down and really ask yourself, “Why am I so comfortable always making men the main characters in my life?” and answer that question with complete honesty, you will keep getting met with the same lesson to learn, over and over again.

Two things I want you to remember about accountability:

1. Taking accountability for your role does not absolve others of theirs.

Your ex may very well be a piece of shit.

You saying, “I attached myself to him even though I knew he was a piece of shit in hopes that I could change him,” doesn’t suddenly make him an amazing man. Girl, he’s still a piece of shit.

All you’re doing is being honest about your role so that, moving forward, you know what not to do again. That’s it. That’s all.

2. Accountability is not punishment.

Accountability is actually a master key that opens doors to set you free. (Yes, I made it rhyme on purpose so you can use it as a chant. You’re welcome.)

Remember what I said in the chapter about my values? Accountability is the foundation of my house, and my house is the relationship I have with myself. Without accountability, none of my other values can stand.

It’s no one else’s job to make sure I live my life with integrity, make me happy, make sure I’m honest with myself and others, or even give me peace.

I’m a grown-ass woman. Those jobs are mine.

It’s my job to recognize when something or someone isn’t for me, then walk away.

It’s my job to respect, honor, and value myself.

It’s my job to realize when I deserve better, then do better for myself.

It’s my job to believe that what I want exists for me, then put myself in the position to receive it.

All of that requires accountability, and because I taught myself to see accountability as one of the best things I could do for myself, my entire life changed… for the better.

Listen, the girl I used to be had low self-esteem, so I accepted the bare minimum a lot. Making excuses for men who treated me like shit might as well have been one of my favorite hobbies. And staying with toxic men because I thought I could “change them”? 

My longest stint, and also my last, lasted just shy of eight years.

Sure, there were a lot of reasons why I became that girl, and they all traced back to my childhood. Daddy wounds, abandonment wounds… you know, the classics.

But there came a point where I realized you can only blame your childhood for so long. Eventually, you have to make peace with the girl you were because of it, and decide what kind of woman you want to be moving forward.

I decided I wanted to be a woman who was in control of herself and her own life. And not taking accountability for myself meant letting my past wounds run my life, and letting the men I dated do the same.

So I concluded that I would never again make it a man’s job to do or be better for me. It would be my job to do and be better for myself. Which meant that when a man showed me his true colors, if I didn’t like them… it was up to me to leave. End of story.

So my question to you is this: what kind of woman do you want to be? The one who keeps letting men be the main characters of your story, or the one who’s the main character of her own?

Now, if this excerpt made you rethink the way you've been showing up in your dating life, don't let it become just another thing you read on the internet and forgot by tomorrow.

Change happens when we actually do the work, not just read about it.

So do yourself a solid, click here, and... do the work.

You’ll go through twelve chapters, each one created to help you see yourself, and the men you’re used to dating, from a completely different perspective, followed by homework that pushes you to go beyond the conversations you’re probably used to having with your homegirls, your therapist… and yourself.

Oh, and your future self will thank you.

XO,

Cynthia B.W