I hate losing a woman to a sexist pedant. It's as if we're all barely keeping our heads above the heavy depths of the patriarchy as it is. So, when one of us mistakes one of these suckers and his self-serving goals as love or passion that has anything to do with her, it's a true loss. Another woman down.

I know they're not always easy to see, these guys. The more nefarious ones demonstrate a well-documented shift in character once they've gotten what they thought they wanted. But others are transparent—the less diabolical and more uncontrollably self-serving ones. The ones that'll cry up at your window at midnight begging you to take back his sorry-ass—and then with the next breath demand that you owe him what he's never committed to giving you.

So, when despite your best warnings, she still thinks she can engage him as a person who is capable of empathy—that is, really seeing and valuing her as another, equal person—there is nothing you can do.

One of the things I find most difficult to do is to catch and stop myself from blaming and being frustrated with her. I can see her vulnerability, and I share it with her. She's not lovable if someone is angry at her. She's not desirable unless someone is in pursuit. In every dynamic, she's diminutive, apologetic, deferential—watch her hand her power over to you. Yes, even to you, her woman friend. She knows no relationship that is easy—who knows why. Some might guess that her fundamental relationships were always confused, abusive, and a perpetual struggle, and so she does not feel in love or loved until she can share that convoluted state again. But I'm not sure I buy that proposition wholly. All I know is, I've been there and now I'm not there in that same way, but I can see how this view of herself and relationships colors her judgment and prevents her from becoming.

Still there is nothing to be done.

And this says nothing of the folds concealing his real self and possibility, which is what is really culpable here and which almost never is challenged in any culture I can think of. He gets to be lost and out of control while still holding all the power. A psycho with a loaded gun. It often seems so much easier to catch glimpses of who a woman really is beneath some ego construction. But these guys, these guys so deluded with ownership and the collection of totems, the layers of unknowing are too many and the chances of peeling them all away to get to something genuine is too small given this short lifetime. I want to shout at her, "Don't bother even trying. Move on! Fight for yourself!"

Most of us never become who we can be. The drive for self-preservation is too strong, even if that state that seems to need protecting is warped somehow. We can't see it because it looks normal, the way things have always been and are. It's difficult to explain to someone that the unknown holds infinitely more possibility than the struggle of the known. In countless ways I watch myself surrender to old struggles, some older than memories of myself and only knowable by their omnipresence in the early memories that do exist; I am ponderously unable to set myself free.

So I get it. … But I hate it.

And there is nothing to be done, you have to let her go. And that means really letting her go, watching her sink away into his depths. She may surface sometime, but most of the time we never see them again.