There is a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from discovering that being a good woman does not necessarily make you a loved woman.

For years, you have followed the instructions. You have been considerate, accommodating, patient and emotionally available. You have learnt to communicate rather than argue, to compromise rather than insist, and to understand that relationships require work. You have been the good daughter, the responsible student, the dependable friend and, eventually, the girlfriend who understands that her partner is going through a difficult season.

You have done everything you were taught a good woman should do.

Then, one day, the relationship ends. He moves on. Sometimes, he marries someone else. And suddenly, you find yourself asking questions you would rather not admit to having.

What does he see in her? What does she have that I don't? After everything I did for this man, how could he choose someone else?

Most women have had these thoughts. Most have been the woman who declares, "He will never find someone like me", as though the universe operates a romantic compensation scheme in which men eventually receive invoices for the women they failed to appreciate.

But there is something worth interrogating beneath these declarations. Why do we find it so difficult to accept that someone can choose another person without that decision becoming a judgement on our worth?

Perhaps it is because many of us have been raised to understand love through the language of merit.

Be good and good things will happen to you. Work hard, and you will succeed. Treat people well, and they will treat you well in return. And, perhaps most importantly for women, conduct yourself in a manner that makes you worthy of being chosen. The problem is that love has no meritocracy. You cannot accumulate enough good behaviour to guarantee somebody's affection. And for women who have spent their lives being rewarded for being good, this might be one of the hardest things to accept.

The socialisation of the good woman

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir examines how womanhood is socially constructed, rather than simply determined by biology. Her famous argument that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, invites us to examine the expectations through which societies produce and regulate femininity.

One of the earliest expectations many girls encounter is that of goodness. We celebrate the girl who does not give her parents trouble, the one who helps around the house without being asked, the one who knows how to behave around adults and the one who is mature beyond her years. We praise girls for being responsible, accommodating and considerate. We teach them to anticipate other people's needs and, often, to suppress their own.

There is nothing inherently wrong with raising considerate children. The problem emerges when goodness becomes synonymous with compliance, particularly for girls.

A girl learns that being agreeable attracts approval. Being accommodating earns praise. Being difficult invites correction. She grows into a woman who is exceptionally good at managing other people's emotions but sometimes struggles to recognise her own needs as equally important.

Then she enters the world of romantic relationships carrying this conditioning. She becomes the girlfriend who understands why he cannot commit yet. The woman who recognises his potential and is willing to wait for it to materialise. The partner who makes allowances for his emotional unavailability because she knows he has had a difficult childhood. She tells herself that love requires patience, that men need room to grow and that a good woman does not abandon someone simply because things are difficult.

Sometimes, she is right. Relationships do require patience, generosity and an understanding that human beings are imperfect. But when does patience become self-abandonment? When does understanding become an excuse for tolerating behaviour that consistently hurts you?

In All About Love, bell hooks challenges the tendency to understand love merely as a feeling. She presents love as a practice involving care, respect, knowledge, responsibility and commitment. This distinction matters because it shifts our attention from how intensely someone claims to feel about us to how they actually conduct themselves in a relationship.

It also raises an uncomfortable question: if we understand love as something that must be practised, why have so many women been taught that their primary responsibility is to become increasingly lovable?

We spend so much time learning how to accommodate love that we sometimes forget to ask whether the love being offered is worth accommodating.

The romantic economy of being chosen

The conversation becomes particularly interesting when we consider how women measure themselves against other women.

There is something revealing about the question, "What does he see in her?"

It suggests that we have unconsciously appointed ourselves judges of men's romantic decisions. We assess the new girlfriend's appearance, age, achievements, personality and social standing, trying to establish whether she represents an upgrade or a downgrade.

If she is less accomplished, we wonder what he could possibly want with her. If she is more conventionally attractive, we wonder whether we were ever attractive enough. If she appears happier, we wonder what we failed to give him.

Either way, we have allowed his preference to become a measurement of our value.

Eva Illouz, in Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, examines how modern romantic relationships are shaped by social inequalities, gender expectations, uncertainty and the power dynamics of romantic choice. Her work is useful here because it challenges the assumption that romantic outcomes are simply individual matters of personal preference. The conditions under which people choose, evaluate and reject partners are also shaped by broader social arrangements.

Women do not enter romantic relationships in a social vacuum. They enter them carrying expectations about beauty, femininity, marriageability, age, financial security and their perceived desirability. And when a man chooses another woman, it can activate all these anxieties at once. But perhaps the more important question is why we need his decision to make sense before we can move on. Why must the woman he chooses be less intelligent, less attractive or less accomplished for us to feel better about ourselves? Why can't we accept that someone can prefer a person who is different from us without that preference constituting an insult?

Another woman's desirability does not diminish yours. Her relationship does not invalidate your previous one. And a man's decision to build a life with someone else does not establish that she has qualities you lack. Sometimes, we are simply not the people someone wants to be with. That is a painful reality, but it is not a personal indictment.

When marriage becomes a reward for good behaviour

This brings me to the increasingly popular conversations about preparing women for marriage.

There is an entire ecosystem of advice dedicated to teaching women how to become wives. Last week we touched on Kenyan gospel artist Mercy Masika’s masterclass on ‘Becoming a wife’. We are told how to attract husbands, how to maintain relationships, how to be submissive, how to communicate, how to cook, how to dress, how to become more feminine and how to make ourselves suitable for marriage.

Some of this advice addresses legitimate relationship skills. Marriage is a significant commitment, and people should be prepared to approach it with emotional maturity, accountability and an understanding of partnership. But I am increasingly interested in the assumptions beneath these conversations.

Why is the preparation so frequently directed at women? Why are women repeatedly positioned as the people who must acquire additional skills, adjust their personalities and refine their behaviour to become marriageable?

At what point does preparing for marriage become an elaborate exercise in seeking male approval?

The concern is not that women want to get married. There is nothing inherently wrong with desiring companionship, partnership and family life. Nor should we dismiss women who choose to invest in becoming better partners. The concern is that marriage is sometimes presented as the ultimate validation of good womanhood. The good girl grows into a good woman, who becomes a good girlfriend, who eventually becomes a good wife. And somewhere along this journey, she is led to believe that if she gets the formula right, the reward will be a husband.

But what happens to the woman who does everything right and never marries?

What happens to the woman who marries and discovers that being a wife does not automatically make her cherished, respected or emotionally fulfilled? And what happens to the woman whose marriage ends?

If marriage is the reward for successfully performing womanhood, what are we telling women who do not receive it? Maybe we need to reconsider the premise altogether. Marriage is not a certificate of good behaviour. It is not evidence that a woman has finally become sufficiently desirable. It is a relationship between two people, both of whom should be equally responsible for its health and survival.

In her novel Changes: A Love Story, Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo explores the contradictions of marriage, love, female autonomy and the expectations placed on women. Through the experiences of her protagonist, Esi, Aidoo complicates the idea that marriage necessarily delivers the fulfillment women are taught to expect from it.

The novel is particularly useful because it refuses to treat marriage as a universal happy ending. It asks us to consider what women surrender, negotiate and sometimes reclaim within the institution. Perhaps that is a conversation missing from some of our marriage-preparation discourse. We spend considerable time asking women what they must do to become wives, but not nearly enough asking what kind of marriage they are preparing to enter.

The goalposts of desirability keep moving

There is another problem with making female desirability a lifelong project: the requirements are often contradictory.

Be independent, but do not intimidate him. Be ambitious, but know when to step back. Be financially stable, but allow him to lead. Be sexually confident, but maintain your respectability. Be nurturing, but do not mother a grown man. Be submissive, but never lose yourself.

Women are handed an increasingly complicated set of instructions, with the promise that somewhere at the end of them lies a fulfilling relationship. And when the relationship does not materialise, the natural temptation is to return to the instruction manual.

“Perhaps I was too independent. Perhaps I was too outspoken. Perhaps I should have been more patient. Perhaps I should have given him more time. Perhaps I was too demanding.”

The possibility that the relationship simply wasn't right becomes secondary to the suspicion that we failed to perform femininity correctly. This is how external validation becomes a trap because we begin outsourcing our sense of worth to the people whose approval we are trying to secure.

The irony is that even when women achieve what society tells them should make them desirable, the goalposts shift. There is always another quality to acquire, another behaviour to correct, another version of femininity to embody.

And so the work of becoming a woman worthy of love never ends.

You can be a good woman and still be somebody's wrong person

I don't think the answer is to stop being good. We should continue to cultivate kindness, generosity, emotional intelligence and accountability. We should learn how to communicate better, recognise our shortcomings and take responsibility for the ways we hurt people. But we must, however, stop treating these qualities as deposits into an account from which we expect to withdraw romantic commitment.

Be kind because kindness is a virtue, not because it guarantees you a husband. Be supportive because you believe in partnership, not because you are investing in someone's future potential. Be a good partner because you want to participate in a healthy relationship, not because you are trying to establish that you deserve to be chosen. And we should absolutely extend the same generosity to other women.

The woman he married after you is not necessarily your replacement, your superior or your competition. She is another human being with her own story, desires and contradictions. You do not have to diminish her to recover your dignity. Most importantly, we need to separate being deserving of love from being entitled to a particular person's love. 

Nobody owes us romantic affection. But nobody's refusal to love us gets to determine whether we are worthy of it. There is a difference between being accountable for how we show up in relationships and assuming responsibility for whether somebody chooses us.

The greatest disservice we do to women is convincing them that love is something they can earn through sufficiently good behaviour. It keeps them perpetually occupied with self-improvement while distracting them from the more important question of whether the relationships they are pursuing are actually good for them.

I am beginning to think that some of us do not need another masterclass on how to become wives. We need a more honest conversation about why we have come to believe that being chosen is the ultimate evidence that we have become good women.

Because what if the work is not to become so exceptional that nobody could possibly reject us? What if the work is to accept that rejection, however painful, not diminish our humanity?

You can be intelligent, beautiful, accomplished, generous and loving and still not be the person someone wants to spend their life with. You can be a good woman and still be somebody's wrong person.

And maybe, for women who have spent their entire lives trying to get things right, there is something profoundly liberating about finally understanding that love was never an examination you needed to pass.

You were deserving of it long before anyone chose you.

Tracy Ochieng is a staff writer for Books in Africa. tracy.ochieng@ekitabu.com.

‍