Why Do We Always Think Men Will Change?

From Jane Eyre to Bravo’s Summer House, it’s a tale as old as time.

There is a moment in Season 10 of Bravo’s Summer House that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Amanda Batula’s voice plays over two images in sequence: first, a clip of her and Kyle Cooke kissing, and then Kyle behind a DJ platform, “ON THE AIR” sign blazing, crowd phones raised. He is jumping up and down and pumping his fist in the air, as Amanda’s voiceover goes: “I wanted him to stop going out and partying, and he found a career where he goes out late and parties.”

Here is what she wanted; here is what he did instead.

Watching it, I felt the specific vertigo of recognition, the kind that arrives not in the moment, but in retrospect, when someone else finally names the thing you have spent years learning to see. I separated from my ex-husband five years ago. During the in-between of finalizing our divorce, I was fixated on locating the moment my marriage ended. But I always arrived at the same uncomfortable answer: It didn’t end because of a moment. Sure, some actions and words tipped the scale. But the truth is, I had just slowly and then all at once stopped editing out what was right in front of me.

My ex-husband had consistently shown me who he was from the beginning. But when we met at 21, some mixture of hope and inexperience assured me that what we hadn’t figured out when we married at 26, we would eventually work out. We were moving toward some still-foggy destination where everything would finally ebb and flow in sync.

What stays with me isn’t Amanda’s heartbreak, but the grammar of her words. I wanted him to stop partying. He found a career partying. Two complete and independent clauses, each doing its own thing, with no conjunction between them. It’s not the story of a man who failed to change. It’s a story about two people who were always moving in different directions and, despite all available evidence, believed they could somehow close the distance.

It’s a pattern that reality television is uniquely positioned to expose. What would it have been like to see a play-by-play of all the moments in my marriage? Maybe I still wouldn’t have noticed it was falling apart at first. But when the cameras record a man, season after season, being exactly who he is, and a woman, season after season, believing that this time something will finally shift, it becomes impossible to ignore the gap. That gap is usually where the drama lives. But it is also, I’ve come to think, where a great deal of real life lives, too.

---

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gives us what may be literature’s most enduring template for this particular form of hope. As the story goes, Jane loves Rochester not despite his darkness but, in part, because she believes his exterior conceals a capacity for goodness that only the right love can unlock. Love, Jane Eyre tells us, can indeed transform. The fact that it requires a man to be blinded and lose everything—well, make of that what you will.

This love-will-prevail architecture is seductive enough to make transformation feel like something you can love someone into. But what makes the plot of Jane Eyre so dangerous as a cultural inheritance, is that every once in a while it’s true. With that one success story, we are made to believe that with the right kind of attention, the right patience, the right faith, the right amount of pleading, a person will eventually be molded into who we want them to be.

---

I’ve been sitting with that particular distinction since my divorce: the difference between loving someone as they are and loving who you imagine they could become. The latter, author bell hooks argues in The Will to Change, is not really love; it’s a kind of substitution, a relationship conducted with a projection rather than a person.

In the early days of my separation, my thoughts would frequently return to an evening when I was crying, and my ex-husband watched me from across the room. He rarely cried—I can count the times on one hand—and when I did, his expression always seemed like one I can only describe as managed. He spoke in a voice so practiced and controlled that it felt less like calm and more like he feared that if he, too, showed emotion, he might unearth a crying beast in me that could not be put back in its cage.

I had always been too much for him, and I knew it. Yet I still told myself it was temporary, that eventually, proximity to my emotions would soften him into them. That living alongside someone who cried at books and wept at school concerts might slowly teach him something about his own interior life. I made the mistake of translating his withdrawal not as incompatibility but as something to work around. Either he would change, or I would just get it together and reduce the emotional surface area I was consuming. Maybe then we could avoid whatever was happening.

Around the time my ex-husband told me he no longer loved me, I found a book called It Takes One to Tango by Winifred M. Reilly, a marriage and family therapist. The premise, as the title suggests, is that one partner changing their own behavior can shift the entire dynamic of a marriage; that you don’t need two people to begin, you only need yourself. The book includes case studies of couples who used the method and “fixed” their relationship. Reilly’s own marriage is one of them. I read the book with the desperate attention of someone hunting for a lifeline, highlighting passages, adding sticky notes to pages I wanted to return to, and calling my mom to read sections to her, searching for validation that it was possible.

What I understand now is that Reilly’s argument is more honest than I was able to hear at the time. She isn’t saying that if you change yourself, you can change your partner. She’s saying that if you change yourself, you’ll get clearer on who you are, what you need, and whether this marriage can actually provide it. The endpoint of that process still might be leaving, but I couldn’t see that then. I kept trying. I tried to bend and morph myself into our relationship in a way that was never going to hold. 

---

So why do we refuse to see it?

Psychologist Samantha Joel and her colleague Geoff MacDonald spent years studying how people make decisions about their romantic relationships, and what they uncovered was evidence that upends the story we tell ourselves about love and discernment. In a landmark review published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, they identified what they called a “progression bias,” a deep, consistent tendency to make decisions that move relationships forward rather than end them. Getting in is easy; staying in is easier still.

That pull toward continuation, the authors argued, was not just due to cultural influence, but may also be the result of how humans are hardwired to pair-bond. In other words, a person staying in an unhappy marriage is not simply in denial or a hopeless romantic, but operating exactly as their biological system was designed to perform. 

And so, we may, at least for a while, swim with the current to avoid uprooting the system, or simply because we want to give it a go. But doing so requires a transformation, often a reduction, of the self. Gillian Flynn called this the “Cool Girl” in her novel Gone Girl: a woman who becomes so frictionless, so perfectly aligned, that the question of compatibility never has to be raised. “They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be,” says Flynn’s protagonist, Amy Dunne. “They’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”

Amy’s monologue is typically read as a screed about identity, about the exhausting labor of becoming palatable to men. But it is also a precise description of what that built-in tendency toward staying looks like; the active work of making yourself easier to stay with, so that nobody has to stop and ask whether they should.

I started to do this in an effort to get my husband to stay. I could not even begin to wrap my mind around remaking my life after being with him for 16 years, so it felt easier to remake who I was. I tried so hard to reinvent myself within my marriage, nearing 40, with a 6-year-old daughter, and without the man I had called my best friend. 

But, in the end, he was done anyway. No level of being a “Cool Girl” would have convinced him. He had already seen enough, and, I know now, I would have never have been able to continue making myself smaller in the name of making our marriage work or avoiding the pain of untethering myself from him. 

Management can feel like love. It is also, I’ve come to understand, a way of never quite showing up to the relationship you’re actually in.

---

The particular endurance of holding out for a person to morph into who you want them to be can happen to anyone. But it happens to women with a specific frequency and intensity, because the system is designed to produce exactly that result. In Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, Rose Hackman documents the degree to which women are socialized from childhood to manage the emotional infrastructure of their relationships. Women are taught that tending to and anticipating others’ emotions is what love looks like. And when this conditioning meets the Jane Eyre fantasy, the result is a woman who reads her partner’s behavior not as information but as potential: she sees it as not “this is who he is,” but “he is still becoming,” and she casts herself as essential to that arrival.

It’s a framework assembled over a lifetime of stories about what love is supposed to do. We’ve seen it in romantic comedies, where the emotionally unavailable man is cracked open by the right woman. We’ve read it in fairy tales, where the beast is transformed not by effort but by being truly seen, as if love, applied with sufficient clarity, is enough to reveal the man that was always there. The entire narrative architecture of heterosexual romance positions a woman’s love as inherently redemptive, a force capable of making men more legible, more tender, more present in their own lives. We absorb this so early, and so thoroughly, that it stops feeling like a story and starts feeling like an instinct. 

---

What Amanda’s Summer House words reveal is not a failure of vision. After all, she saw her husband clearly enough to articulate, in one line of a reality-television confessional, the essential shape of a decade-long incompatibility. I wanted him to stop going out and partying. He found a career where he goes out late and parties. That is not the sentence of a woman who was fooled, but a sentence of a woman whose understanding finally exceeds her hope.

For years, Amanda knew exactly what she was looking at—hell, she could watch the play-by-play on television—and stood by Kyle anyway. But while she had the unique experience of doing it in front of a camera, the vigil itself is universal: waiting for someone to finally arrive at the version of themselves you’ve been holding out for.

I think about my own marriage in similar terms, the moments that look, in retrospect, like information I declined to receive. The real work was the interpretive labor I performed: the explanations I generated, the ways I positioned my ex-husband’s behavior as something that would eventually change. It was exhausting in the way that only invisible work is exhausting: You can’t account for it, you can’t point to it, and no one, including you, quite believes you’ve been doing it.

Kyle was not hiding who he was. He was, every season, in high definition, being exactly himself. Amanda saw it, her friends saw it, and millions of viewers saw it. (That they have since separated, and that Amanda has confirmed a relationship with castmate West Wilson is, for our purposes here, someone else’s essay entirely. #TeamCiara). And still the architecture of their relationship—the shared history, the cultural script about love and patience, the sheer accumulated weight of having decided this was the person—made it almost impossible for them to admit it. 

Here is what I know now: a person can love someone genuinely and still be loving a version of them that doesn’t exist. For the longest time—sometimes even still—I would rack my brain trying to figure out what in my marriage had been real and what had been pretend, or whether that distinction even held. 

I don’t think the answer is to stop believing in people. That would be its own kind of impoverishment: a world in which we only love who someone is right now, with no room for growth or becoming, or the ordinary work of two people changing alongside each other over time. Real love requires some faith in potential. But there’s a subtle distinction between faith in who someone is reaching toward and making a substitution for who they’ve shown you they truly are. And it’s the substitution that is the problem.

We are taught to mistake potential for compatibility by Jane Eyre, by the Cool Girl, by every narrative that positions love as a transformative force rather than a clear-eyed act of recognition. Unlearning this requires a kind of attention that so many love stories rarely model: the willingness to let a person be who they are and to make a decision based on what they actually show you.

Amanda’s words are so devastating precisely because they require no interpretation, no squinting at the evidence. The tragedy is not that she finally recognizes what’s in front of her, but that the stories she’s absorbed, the labor she’s been trained to perform, the very grammar of romantic love gave her every reason to keep hoping for something else.

---

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness. And if you’ve liked what you’ve read and want to help us keep bringing stories your way, please consider a small donation.