Ladies, you know when a man is being inconsistent, when he’s not invested, when he’s doing his own thing. You know what else? He knows too. It’s not your job or a wise allocation of your time to try to convince a man to treat you how he’s already determined he’s not going to treat you. It’s on you to determine what you will accept.

You peep bullshit? Save your voice and spare everyone involved the long text paragraph. Just block his number and go.

Most of the time, silence is the loudest kind of noise.

There’s a saying that all dogs come back home. That’s a fact. Whether it’s been weeks, months, or years, you somehow always find the men of your past trying to claw their way back into your life, dying to give you an explanation they didn’t care to provide you with when you actually gave a damn.

As a human being, I make a habit of not internalizing men’s thoughts or feelings about me. By that, I mean that whatever they choose to do is not my problem. When men leave my life, I don’t waste any time wondering why, whether they’ll return, or what I could’ve done differently, none of that shit, because nine times out of 10, their issue has nothing to do with me. There’s no point wasting my energy trying to figure out why they act the way they do or why they feel the way they feel, because chances are, they don’t even know. And even when they do know what their issue is, it still doesn’t matter. Just because someone doesn’t like you or something about you doesn’t mean there’s anything objectively or actually wrong with you. That’s just not the man for you.

Think about all the times a man has criticized you, told you he didn’t like something about you, didn’t think you were the one, thought he liked some other girl better, or just flat-out didn’t care about you, only to come back around in the future with nothing to offer but regret. Imagine if you fell apart every time you let a man make you feel some type of way and he can’t even do you the courtesy of keeping the same energy because they really have no idea what they’re doing. What a waste of grief and despair.

I’ve already found myself on the opposite end of these regretful conversations with men countless times, just wondering why they think I care about this now and being grateful that I hadn’t bothered to care in the first place.

All of my romantic relationships end in one of two ways: Either the man leaves me or I leave him.

Either way, I’m not losing any sleep because if he leaves me, he doesn’t want to be with me and I’m not a person that’s able to miss a dead situation or a person that has made me feel unwanted. And if I leave him, I either don’t like him, don’t like the way he treats me, or don’t think it’s going anywhere. Either way, unmissable. The relationship is dead and my mind is closed to it.

Yet, despite my mind being completely closed to it, that’s a reality that never seems to cross the minds of men. They can’t grasp it. When men decide to reappear after the relationship has ended, providing you with an array of excuses about the mistakes they realize they’ve made, how they’ve grown, and how they miss you, it so rarely concerns you. Most of the time they don’t even bother to ask you how you feel about them, whether you’re romantically involved, or where you’re currently at in your life—nothing.

I’ve found that when they’re professing their alleged feelings for you, it’s usually less about you as a person and more to do with how you made them feel, what you did for them, or how you benefited them. Which, in fairness, makes sense. It makes sense that they miss you when you’ve been good to them. But somehow, in the course of planning their little comeback moment, they never stop to think that maybe, just maybe, you don’t miss them, because… wait for it… they weren’t good to you. They operate under this belief system that because they’re sorry or they want you back, you’re just supposed to go with it.

During these conversations, I mostly just listen and try to figure out a compassionate way to thank them for sharing and validate their feelings while rejecting them in a way that doesn’t come off as cold as “Oh… I stopped thinking about you and this relationship a while back, we’re good.” This effort is rarely appreciated. If you’re lucky enough to even convince them you don’t reciprocate their feelings, the lecture you and tell you you’re wrong not to forgive them or give them another chance because not taking someone back somehow means you don’t forgive them or you’re still angry. As though it’s not possible to simply be over it, to have moved on.

Now that I’ve spent hours of my life that I can never get back rewarding men’s indecisiveness, inconsistency, shortsightedness, and inability to get their shit together in a timely fashion, I realize we have to stop entertaining this. Just let them live with their choices. You don’t owe them the conversation. You don’t owe them another chance. You don’t even owe them an “I’ll think about it.” It’s not your fault they didn’t do right by you when they had the opportunity. It’s not your fault they waited until you became strangers to appreciate any of your qualities. It’s not your fault they didn’t decide to value you until they started dating women who lack what you have. It’s okay to just be over it.

Cut them off and mean it.