Medium Article Review Bonus (TikTok Edition)

Today’s excerpt is as follows:

“Since we’re asking good questions, here’s one: since the man and a woman are both human, and presumably the man is older, because God forbid she’s older than him, does the woman get the same courtesy of getting a complete partner? It seems not, she has to raise a fully grown man that she didn’t give birth to and bear his children, and raise them alone. Which doesn’t make sense, since the man is older, logic would have the man more emotionally intelligent, and better prepared for a relationship or marriage to lead the young bride, but no she has to mature for him in the harshest way possible, because again God forbid he does the work; as if that isn’t enough, that part of a woman’s evolution is repressed so she doesn’t outshine a man’s slow adaptation to this so called union.”

The Illusion of Leadership and the Architecture of Exhaustion

What begins as a simple, almost naïve question—“Does the woman get the same courtesy of a complete partner?”—unravels to reveal the foundational contradiction at the heart of the romantic system we have dissected. This inquiry is not about individual failure but about systemic design. It exposes the core mechanism of Systemic Romance: a structure that legitimizes itself through the myth of male headship while functionally demanding the perpetual apprenticeship of women.

The assumption that the man, being older, should be “more emotionally intelligent, and better prepared… to lead the young bride,” is the premise sold by the patriarchal script. It is the promise of the Provider, the Head, the Priest of the Home—archetypes forged in the twin furnaces of colonial Christianity and hardened customary law. Yet, as the excerpt precisely identifies, the lived reality is its inverse. The promised leader is, all too often, an emotional dependent. The purported guide requires guidance. The woman thus finds herself in a brutal double bind: she is told to submit to a leadership that is absent, while being forced to assume the Manager’s comprehensive, unsalaried labor of nurturing, teaching, and stabilizing a fully grown adult. She must, as stated, “raise a fully grown man she didn’t give birth to.”

This is the ultimate expression of the gendered labor divide. His labor—if performed—is sporadic, task-oriented, and publicly valorised (the “good provider”). Hers is continuous, holistic, and invisibilized as “natural” wifely duty. It encompasses the hermeneutic labor of decoding his moods and needs, and the emotional labor of maintaining relational harmony, all while her own evolution is “repressed so she doesn’t outshine a man’s slow adaptation.” Her brilliance becomes a threat to the hierarchy; her maturity, a challenge to his presumed authority. This repression is not accidental but essential to maintain what Mercy Amba Oduyoye and the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians identify as the “holy of holies” of male ecclesiastical and domestic control.

The historical roots of this contradiction lie in the dismantling of the Syncretic Mosaic. Pre-colonial systems like those of the Akan or Lobedu, while not utopian, often featured checks, balances, and respected spheres of female authority—be it in matrilineal lineage or ritual power. Colonial patriarchy, through law and doctrine, systematically dismantled these, replacing them with a rigid, Victorian model of the male-headed, nuclear household. The “older, wiser man” is a colonial-propagated ideal, but the double patriarchy it created—where Black men were handed dominion over the domestic sphere as a consolation for their political and economic subjugation—meant this “headship” was often a hollow title, stripped of its traditional communal responsibilities and moral covenants. The man inherits the title of leader without necessarily inheriting the mature character of one, while the woman inherits the burden of maintenance without the authority of command.

Therefore, the question of the “complete partner” rejects the bait-and-switch of the romantic script. It demands a move from the “Manager vs. Teammate” dynamic to a partnership of co-owners. It insists that emotional intelligence and relational preparedness are not feminine traits, but human competencies, and that chronological age is a poor substitute for emotional maturity.

To conclude Part One of this exploration into Power Dynamics: Romantic Power is to arrive at this clarifying juncture: the oppression is not merely in being subordinated to a leader. It is in being condemned to the exhausting, thankless, and ghostly work of building the very platform upon which another’s illusory leadership stands. The path forward, which we will continue to chart, requires nothing less than the audacious refusal to be both the architect and the audience of one’s own subjugation. It calls for the courage to demand not a leader to follow, but a complete partner with whom to build—and to recognize that such a demand is the first and most necessary step in dismantling the romantic crucible itself.