Why Most Women Never Grow Up.

Most Women Are Teenagers in Adult Bodies

The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that age equals maturity. Most girls have never seen a grown woman in their lives—what they've seen are girls who happened to reach the legal age of consent (in the good cases), had sex, and produced children. This is the dirty secret nobody wants to acknowledge: we have generations of women who are psychologically and maladaptively underdeveloped, raising daughters who inherit the same stunted emotional responses. These women never developed past the stage where daddy was supposed to fix everything, so they spend their adult lives searching for substitute daddies—husbands, bosses, government programs, anyone who will take responsibility for the hard decisions.

My mother looks at me as a source of strength, and I don't even know how to begin to untangle that mess. When my uncle—my favorite uncle—died recently, my mother immediately turned to me, her daughter, to provide the stability and clear thinking that the situation demanded. Not because I'm older or wiser, but because she's never learned to regulate her own emotions during a crisis. This isn't an anomaly; this is the average woman.

The worst thing about women's underdevelopment isn't that they act irrationally like men do—it's the opposite. They don't act at all. They overthink themselves into paralysis, analyzing every possible outcome until the moment for action has passed. They create elaborate mental scenarios about what might go wrong, what people might think, what the consequences could be, and use this analysis as a shield against actually making decisions. Instead of actually making a choice, they create an elaborate procrastination MLM scheme where they can only act if every single piece of the journey is aligned.

I became everyone's emergency contact not by choice, but by process of elimination. When life inevitably happens—and it always happens at the worst possible moment—I'm the one they call because I don't fall apart. Last week proved this point perfectly when my friend's crisis arrived, as they do, just before work on a Tuesday morning, with me in a completely different time zone.

Her car had been towed from her apartment complex. The management had implemented new parking fees but failed to send her the email notification, then had her car towed for "non-registration" of the new payment system. She called me after she'd already done all the crying, needing me to help her think through the problem while I was half-awake and she was running late for work.

When she spoke to the landlord about retrieving her car, her voice became meek and apologetic. Instead of demanding they return her vehicle immediately because they'd failed to properly notify her about new parking requirements, she sent an email asking for a "partial refund." The mistake was entirely on their end—they had no right to tow her car without proper notification—yet she approached the situation as if she were the one who had done something wrong.

This is a woman who handles complex projects at work, who manages her finances responsibly, who gives thoughtful advice to friends. But put her in a situation requiring confrontation with authority, and she reverts to being a little girl hoping the adults will be nice to her.

We talked afterward about how this is why women seek men in their lives—to handle life's difficulties, to be the voice of authority when things go wrong. But relying on others to fight your battles atrophies the very muscle you need to face life's hardships. When you handle the small confrontations, you develop the strength to handle the larger ones. When you avoid them, you teach yourself that you are powerless.

It also feeds into the dangerous illusion that you can control life, that if you just find the right person to protect you, nothing bad will happen. We are all at the mercy of forces beyond our control. I've written before about how brutally disappointed women become when they confront the fact that their man cannot save them from everything. Your man is human too—he gets sick, he dies, he loses jobs, he makes mistakes. The woman who has never learned to advocate for herself in a parking dispute will be completely unprepared when life delivers its bigger blows.

I've always asked: who is God in your story? Listen to someone talk about God for five minutes and you'll know exactly what kind of deity they've conjured up, because God is nothing more than a metaphysical projection of whatever psychological security blanket they're desperately clutching. That's why I get it—why women make God male despite being the literal manufacturers of human life. If we must contend with the fact that we are animals just like any other animals on a dying planet in the middle of nowhere, where we're up against forces both large like hurricanes and small like cancers that we can't seem to stop, and ultimately generations from now nobody you know or care about will be alive, so all of this might absolutely be for nothing—after the super majority of existence proves that's the case—yeah, I too would hope that somebody was in charge of this thing to make some sense of it. We want order, and order seems like a male thing.