the flinch: what she sees when you don’t hold your frame | musing no. 18

she felt it. so did i.

she called it a flinch.

said i couldn’t hold steady when it got heavy.

but she never understood what she was standing in.

because it wasn’t a flinch.

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it was me shielding her from the chaos of everything i was carrying—

the corporate warfare, the legal threats, the betrayals, the exhaustion.

she had no idea what I was shouldering.

because i never let it touch her.

i protected her from all of it.

because she felt like safety to me.

and when a man like me finally finds that?

a place where he can breathe.

where he can exhale and not be needed.

where he can just be held and understood…

he will do *anything* to protect it.

even bleed for it.

even lie to himself about the red flags.

but then came the weekend that flipped it all.

the yelling in the hotel room.

the gossip about her ex knocking up two different women.

the phone call with her friend, laughing about karma—

as if she hadn’t lived through the pain of being gossiped about herself.

i saw a side of her I hadn’t seen before.

the woman who told me she wasn’t carrying a torch… was.

the woman who once said she empathized with what i’d survived… didn’t.

the woman who told me she didn’t want drama… *was the drama.*

and I froze.

not because I didn’t care.

because I cared so damn much I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

the place I thought was refuge—

it was shifting beneath me.

built on sand.

so I asked for space.

to process.

to not say something I’d regret.

she took it as rejection.

told me i couldn’t handle her bad weekend.

told me i flinched.

but here’s what she’ll never understand:

the strongest men will sometimes step back when something sacred starts to crack.

not because they’re weak—

but because they need to figure out if what they felt was *real*,

or just something they needed to believe in.

i didn’t flinch because i was fragile.

i flinched because i was finally seeing her clearly—

and i didn’t want it to be true.

even after everything, part of me still hoped we could talk.

that we could meet in the middle, take responsibility, and fight for what we had.

because what we had felt rare.

and I don’t quit on rare.

but I learned something that weekend.

not all women want to be seen.

not all women want to be called out on their contradictions.

and some women would rather burn a good man than admit they ever hurt him.

so here’s what i know now:

i didn’t flinch.

i stepped back

because the person i would’ve gone to war for

was the one lighting the match.

— author

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