Why Do Women Leave Good Men?

Answer: You’re asking the wrong question

There’s something you all don’t know about me. It might surprise you. I have an embarrassing vice. I love reality television. One of my favorite shows is Sister Wives.

I started watching it when it debuted in 2010 because — and this won’t surprise you — I am fascinated by the creative ways people find to build and cultivate romantic, sexual relationships. Sure, polygamy based on fundamentalist Mormon ideology can be problematic, but we all should have the right to choose our own paths — and the Brown family, with its strong female leadership, seemed like it was a thriving, egalitarian household.

Fourteen years later, many viewers are sad though perhaps not particularly surprised as we witness patriarch Kody (I’ll use first names here, since they all have the same surname) transition into monogamy with Wife #4, Robyn. We, after all, spent these years alongside them, observing that he was truly in love with her, whereas his feelings about his other three wives seemed more the product of religious aspiration and duty.

While I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of this since, reality show or not, we can never know the truth of other people’s lives, there’s something Kody continually talks about that I feel is important to address — something that experience has shown me is a common belief among men.

During a recent “tell-all interview,” Kody told journalist Sukanya Krishnan the he believed Wife #3, Christine, has deliberately attempted to undermine Kody’s reputation post-divorce — and for one very specific reason.

“Here’s the thing. For David’s sake, David Woolley’s [Christine’s new husband] sake, Christine has to destroy my character or David doesn’t feel like he can marry her, ’cause she left a good man. I’m not a bad guy. Christine and I were just not in a good marriage.”

This is a belief I’ve heard him express many times. He has never met Woolley so it’s impossible for him to know whether or not Woolley believes Kody is a good man or to know that Woolley wouldn’t have been interested in Christine if he had believed she had left a good man.

But he did admit it’s a problem for him — that he “vetted Robyn hard” before marrying her. “I had to know that she didn’t leave a good man before I was going to …take a chance with that,” he said.

I hear this from men often. They feel they are good men. They feel they “do everything right.” So why won’t their wives have sex with them? Why did their wives want a divorce?

What kind of woman would lose interest in or walk away from a good man?

Let’s talk about it.

I’ve always prided myself on being a good person, but since I turned 40, I realized there’s no such thing. I can strive to behave as ethically as possible, put myself last, and always have a smile on my face, and there will still be people lining up outside my door waiting to tell me what an immoral, selfish asshole I am. A bad person.

It’s all subjective. Like “attractive,” “sexy,” “nice,” and “fun.” None of these things are objective realities. Even in a culture that has very specific definitions and criteria for words like these, there will still be countless people who don’t agree.

There’s no such thing as a good person. There’s no such thing as a good man.

I find it interesting that men, in particular, seem to hold on to this label of goodness more fervently than anyone. I never hear women lamenting about why they aren’t being recognized for being a good wife or a good woman. I doubt any woman in the history of the patriarchy has ever once wept in frustration, “What kind of man would leave a good wife?”

Men leave good women all the time (often in pretty heinous ways) and no one has much to say about it.

But if a man believes himself to be good, that often comes with the expectation that the woman in his life ought to stick around and do her wifely duties.

I’d like to point out that, being a subjective qualifier, when we say we are good, we mean by our own standards. So a man might think himself good…but that doesn’t make it so. His wife might have a different perspective.

A second, and perhaps more important point: The cultural meaning we have given to the word “good” doesn’t come with expectations. If you look closely, you’ll notice that “good man” is synonymous with “nice guy.” And as we’ve talked about before, the self-proclaimed nice guys are never nice. They are performing a transactional dance in order to get what they want from a woman.

Men who define themselves as beleaguered “good men” are performing the same dance. Participating in the household chores, navigating conflict, respecting a wife’s nos, and being patient and kind to one’s spouse should not be performed with expectation. If you’re going through the motions of what our culture has defined as a dutiful and good husband in order to gain access to sex whenever you want, or to guilt your wife into staying in a marriage that is no longer fulfilling for her, there’s nothing good about that.

Don’t get into a lather about this. It’s not entirely your fault. Relationships between men and women throughout the history of the patriarchy have primarily been transactional. If a man did his duty (which was a pretty low bar, I’d like to remind you), his wife was his. Literally his property.

And wow, has that mindset sunk in.

How do we move past this so we can start building relationships that feel a little more fulfilling than this tit-for-tat nonsense? Let’s take a look at Kody Brown again.

He’s made it clear that he assumes Christine’s new husband wouldn’t have wanted her had he believed she left a good man. And he made it clear that he would not have wanted Robyn if she had left a good man.

There’s a lot of problems all around with this. For one thing, viewers have been watching him walk away from his marriage to Meri (Wife #1) for nearly a decade now, while occasionally discussing what she might do to save their marriage. And like a good wife/good woman would do, Meri has followed through with these requests and demonstrated a level of loyalty that many fans have felt was downright self-destructive.

This season, we watched him finally (finally) tell her to her face that he was done. It was over. He had been done for years.

If goodness is owed someone’s continued participation in a marriage, then why didn’t he have to pay up on that and remain her husband?

Secondly, in that same episode, he passionately reminded Robyn that they had made a “sacred covenant” that if either of them fell out of love with the other, they would be honest about it and end the marriage. Is he implying that one would only fall out of love with someone who was “bad” and therefore, was justified in leaving? Because that’s the only explanation as to how he can rationalize both this insistence and his belief that you can’t and shouldn’t leave a good spouse.

Or perhaps it’s that a woman shouldn’t be able to disrupt her husband’s life unless he believes he deserves it by way of very bad behavior? And anything less makes her actions unjustifiable?

The truth is, life is unpredictable and inconvenient. And these are two things the patriarchy works hard to protect men from experiencing.

Heterosexual relationships and marriages weren’t created with love in mind. They were financial contracts designed to protect men’s name, give them social clout (which leads to financial opportunity), and assure the legitimacy of their lineage. And meanwhile, they could also engage in sex with any other partner they liked and never have to pay for or acknowledge the children that came from these unions. The entire system was made for their benefit, ease, and pleasure.

As a culture, I believe we are moving beyond the systems of oppression that have only served a handful of people for the past few thousand years. Maybe it’s simply that enough of the marginalized are done being exploited. Or maybe we are growing into a collective evolution because more and more of us — even those at the top of the hierarchy — are understanding that these institutions are ultimately serving no one.

Yet it’s true that those who benefit the most will usually be the last ones to recognize the problems. There are still many men like Kody who passionately believe in the “nice guy” and “good man” mythology. Men who believe that they can avoid life’s unpredictability and inconveniences by simply “following the formula” are likely going to find that this equation no longer works.

There’s no more buffering, cushioning, and protecting the male experience. Men are being faced with the fact that women fall out of love, just like they do, and women have the right to leave a relationship for that reason, just like men do. They are being faced with the inevitability of things going sideways in the one area they were promised stability and ease: their marriages.

I mean no offense by this. Cultural conditioning has done a real number on all of us. But this is an area that I see causing many men an immense amount of suffering — and all because they want the guarantee that inputting A will get them an output of B. The effort of the “good man” has to be worth it — it has to come with the promised payoff.

Meanwhile, women have been living in the same world, never having experienced the privilege of goodness coming with a payoff. There’s not a woman in this world who thinks keeping her husband’s clothes clean, stomach full, and balls empty will guarantee her his love, his appreciation, or his commitment. And indeed, all of us know that it’s entirely possible that he’ll leave that good wife for a 20-year-old if given the opportunity.

Life is tough. It doesn’t matter if you are actually good (whatever that means) or not. The challenges we face are indiscriminate. Life doesn’t care if we’ve done all the things we were supposed to do.

And marriage is not an insurance policy to protect us from those challenges and pay out for damages when they come.

Many men like Kody still believe it is. And in that case, it’s particularly fascinating to observe Kody’s insistence that Christine left a good man. All the Sister Wives viewers know that Christine didn’t leave him — he left her. He emotionally withdrew from her for months, if not years, right in front of our eyes, then told her in Season 17 that he wanted to end their sexual relationship.

From his perspective, yes, it would have been a lot easier on him had she done what he wanted: stayed on as his platonic wife and continued their lives together. No problems for him. No inconvenience.

It can’t be denied, however, that his unilateral decision to end the emotional and sexual aspects of their marriage turned Christine’s life upside-down.

Should she have stayed and endured because he was willing to continue to perform some self-defined act of duty toward her for the rest of their lives — one that would have cost him little and cost her everything? Should she have given up her desire for a loving, intimate relationship because he believes he is a good man that a wife should not leave — even when he has already left her?

Or are we finally going to acknowledge the transactional expectations that come with heterosexual relationships and start deconstructing these destructive paradigms? If so, let’s start right here by shattering the myth of the good man.

Y.L. Wolfe is a gender-curious, solosexual, perimenopausal, childless crone-in-training, exploring these experiences through writing, photography, and art. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com. If you love her writing, leave her a tip over at Ko-fi.

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