If He Keeps You Confused, Stop Calling It Chemistry!
There is a seductive mistake we can make in relationships. Judging love by intensity rather than evidence.
The butterflies. The late-night messages. The extraordinary apology after an equally extraordinary disappearance. Yet perhaps the more revealing question is simpler “does this relationship give you clarity, reciprocity and emotional safety, or does it keep you permanently interpreting somebody else's behaviour?”
Confusion Can Feel Like Connection
Our brains are particularly responsive to uncertainty and reward. When affection, attention or reassurance arrives inconsistently, anticipation can make the next positive interaction feel disproportionately significant. That can help explain why someone may become increasingly preoccupied with a relationship that is actually giving them less.
Healthy attachment looks considerably less dramatic. Research into relationships consistently highlights responsiveness. Feeling that a partner understands, values and cares about you. Consistency may not produce the adrenaline of uncertainty, but it creates something much more important, trust.
The question therefore becomes less “How strongly do I feel about him?” and more “What does his repeated behaviour tell me about this relationship?”
When Being the Strong Woman Becomes the Trap
Culture complicates that question. A woman may have watched generations before her hold families together regardless of the personal cost. She may have absorbed messages that loyalty means staying, strength means coping and a “good woman” does not abandon a partner when life becomes difficult.
For some Black and women of colour there can be an additional expectation to understand the racial, economic and social pressures experienced by Black and men of colour. Compassion is important. But compassion without boundaries can slowly become self-abandonment.
Imagine the woman who repeatedly pays the bills when he does not, absorbs his emotional inconsistency, excuses disrespect because he is “going through something,” protects his reputation from family and friends and continues providing emotional, practical or even professional support while receiving very little herself. She may believe she is demonstrating commitment. In reality, she may be maintaining a relationship that would struggle to exist without her labour.
That cultural dimension is supported by Black scholarship. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé's influential Superwoman Schema research identified expectations around strength, emotional suppression, resistance to vulnerability, caregiving and putting others' needs before one's own.
More recent research by Katrina Debnam, Lanice Avery and Kylie Lynch brings this directly into romantic relationships. Their review found three recurring manifestations of the Strong Black Woman schema. Prioritising a partner over oneself, resisting vulnerability and maintaining strong independence within relationships. A subsequent qualitative study found young Black women also navigating expectations to remain strong, conceal emotions and sometimes protect the public image of their relationship.
This does not mean strength, loyalty or independence are problems. Far from it. The danger comes when your capacity to endure becomes someone else's permission not to change.
We can honour the resilience that helped previous generations survive without automatically inheriting the conditions they had to survive.
The Red-Flag Road Map: Stop Listening Only to Words
Start with clarity by paying attention to whether you genuinely know where you stand or spend too much time decoding messages, silences, excuses and disappearing acts. Clarity should be accompanied by consistency. Someone who values the relationship should not only appear when they need reassurance, intimacy, money, support or access to something you provide. Their presence should remain recognisable when there is nothing immediate for them to gain.
Next, examine reciprocity by noticing who initiates conversations, accommodates changing plans, provides financial or emotional support, compromises, solves problems and makes sacrifices. Relationships can appear mutual from the outside while one person quietly supplies most of the infrastructure keeping them alive. This is particularly important for women accustomed to being praised for being capable, dependable and endlessly resourceful, because over-functioning can disguise another person's under-functioning for years.
Accountability provides another important test. An apology should eventually produce different behaviour. When the same disrespect, withdrawal, broken promise or boundary violation continually returns, the apology may simply be restoring the person's access to you rather than repairing what is wrong within the relationship. Pay equal attention to access. Someone wanting your body, home, money, professional contacts, expertise, emotional support or constant availability is not necessarily offering intimacy, commitment or partnership in exchange.
The biggest red flag, therefore, is rarely one imperfect moment. It is the recurring pattern that requires you to lower your standards, silence your instincts, explain away behaviour or continually increase your contribution simply to keep the relationship functioning. That distinction matters because being needed can feel remarkably like being loved when you have spent a lifetime being rewarded for being useful.
Love does not require perfection, but neither should it require a forensic investigation. Healthy relationships leave room for disagreement, mistakes and difficult seasons without leaving one person permanently uncertain about whether they matter.
What relationship behaviour did you once interpret as love that you would recognise as a red flag today? Like, comment and share this with another woman who might need the reminder.
