The Problem Was Never the Bad Boy: Patriarchy, Partnership, and the Case for a Village

You’ve probably heard the rant. A woman ends up pregnant by a “bad boy,” considers abortion, and suddenly it’s all her fault. “She should’ve picked better,” say the men who crown themselves the good guys. But this narrative? It’s tired. It’s rigged. And it’s wrong.

The Myth of the “Bad Choice”

So many men blame women for choosing so-called “bad boys.” But what’s really going on here?

In a society where single motherhood is punished and support is scarce, the issue isn’t who a woman is attracted to—it’s the structure that makes her bear all the risk. Even if she ends up with a so-called good guy, she’s still vulnerable—because when all the responsibility for child-rearing, financial stability, and emotional labor falls on just two people (often mostly on one), both are at risk. That’s not romance. That’s social negligence.

The “Good Guy” Illusion

These “good guys” love to paint themselves as the moral alternative—but too often, their idea of goodness is just a transaction: niceness in exchange for compliance. Many are well-versed in the pseudoscience of female desire, repeating scripts from dating gurus and Reddit threads rather than relating to women as full, complex people.

Their version of goodness is performance, not partnership—and it’s not based on what women truly want, but what they’ve been told they should want.

The Used-Up Woman Trope

Then comes the next layer of the myth: that women spend their 20s chasing bad boys and come crawling back, “used up,” when their so-called value declines. This language reveals everything—about their worldview, about how they reduce women to marketable assets, and about the bruised egos they nurse like a grievance.

And what does it say about their marriages, if they think a woman who chooses them has only done so because she’s out of options?

Patriarchy Isn’t Built for Us

Maybe the issue isn’t women’s choices. Maybe the issue is patriarchy. It’s a bad fit—for us, for society, and for relationships that aren’t rooted in fear and control.

If we lived in a world that prioritized communal care, authentic attraction, and mutual support, maybe the whole “bad boy vs. good guy” dichotomy would dissolve into something softer, freer, and far more honest.

Toward a Village

I’m not against marriage. I see mine as a small village, not an ownership situation. My husband is my best friend. He’s also intelligent, self-aware, and has a lot more to be proud of than his position in some imagined household hierarchy. That’s the kind of partnership I want: grounded, shared, and interdependent—not because we have to stay, but because we choose to.

But I also think we need more than individual partnerships.

I think young women—and young men, too—should consider building intentional communities, as a supplement or even substitute for the traditional nuclear family. Not everyone wants a spouse. Not everyone needs one. But everyone deserves support, belonging, and a way not to face life alone.

And these communities don’t have to be utopian experiments on distant communes. They can take shape wherever people are willing to build something different. In apartment buildings in the city—where the infrastructure already exists. On suburban streets, where fences could be replaced with walking paths. Even near where I live, there’s an old grist mill that’s been transformed into a kind of planned neighborhood. It’s not quite an intentional community, but the bones are there: shared land, a sense of place, neighbors close enough to matter.

When my mom lived in the suburbs, she and her neighbors knocked down their fences and built walking paths through their gardens. They shared pools, saunas, jacuzzis—and weekends together. It was simple, but radical. A different kind of freedom.

Our leaders, so bent on preserving patriarchy, will never provide a real safety net for single mothers. They want more children—but not independence. They want compliance. Because as below, so above: the domestic hierarchy mimics the one that keeps them in power.

I don’t think we’ll see a wave of new births until we see real community support. But we don’t have to wait for permission—we can start building it ourselves, from the ground up. And we are. There are more intentional communities forming now than ever before. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a return to something deeply human.