Women Are Not Rehabilitation Centers for Broken Men

It’s Not Our Job to Fix Them

Hip-hop star and self-proclaimed “underground rapper” Mac Miller died of a suspected drug overdose on September 7th, 2018. Upon news of his death, I hadn’t listened to his music since his 2011 album “Blue Slide Park,” my high school boyfriend blasting it as we drove around during our lunch break, eating Bojangles and feeling like the world was at our fingertips. Even though I wasn’t the biggest Mac Miller fan, this celebrity death hit closer to home because of those memories. However, that grief quickly morphed to anger as fans and news outlets alike directed blame of his death on his ex-girlfriend, actress and singer Ariana Grande.

I’d first like to start with how illogical and bizzare this idea is, especially in relation to substance abuse. For anyone who needs to hear this, you cannot make someone else get sober. You cannot heal someone else’s addiction. You just can’t. There is no way you can force someone to stop using drugs or stop drinking. Addiction is a disease that requires professional treatment and counseling to overcome. You cannot do the recovery work for someone else. You can support and encourage them to seek treatment. You can provide resources to aid them on their journey to sobriety. You can give them gentle nudges in the right direction. But it is impossible to force someone to get sober. It’s just not going to happen that way. Addiction is a disease that no partner or friend, regardless of gender, can control. That responsibility is on the person who is struggling. They are the only person who has control over their actions and whether or not they use drugs and alcohol. They have to get sober for themselves.

This seems pretty self-explanatory to me. However, I know there are plenty of people in the world who would still put the responsibility of a man’s recovery on his female partner. Even if we could solve this problem for men, expecting us to is unfair and negligent of our wants and needs in a relationship. This reasoning is toxic towards women because it implies that a man’s self-destructive tendencies could somehow be blamed on us. As Grande stated, women don’t exist to babysit the men in their lives and shouldn’t be expected to, especially if the relationship is damaging to our physical or mental health. In the Twitter response cited above, Grande admits she didn’t share “how hard or scary it was” to be with Miller while he struggled with addiction, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it was hard and it was scary. This is reason enough for any woman to leave a relationship, regardless of how that decision would affect her partner.

Saying that a woman should stay in that kind of relationship in order to “fix” her male partner minimizes the woman’s agency and self-worth, reinforcing the attitude of men’s entitlement that contaminates almost every aspect of our culture. We cannot absorb our partner’s pain and we cannot fix their problems for them, nor should we have to. In the realm of Ariana Grande and Mac Miller’s dynamic, it is unfair and illogical to blame her for his overdosing. I’ve heard the argument that she broke his heart, driving him to use drugs and act recklessly. Grande may have broken his heart, but she is not to blame for the behavior that manifested in response to that. In the same way that you can’t force someone to get sober, you can’t force someone to abuse drugs. That responsibility is on Miller alone. Later in the conversation with VICE, Van Pelt explained,

Blaming a woman for her partner’s self-harm isn’t just unfair; it’s symptomatic of our culture’s biggest problems with misogyny and patriarchy.

Blaming a woman for a man’s struggle (in this case, blaming Ariana Grande for Mac Miller’s drug use) places an unrealistic responsibility on us to manage a problem that is completely out of our control. After Miller’s overdose, many fans claim that Grande should have stayed with him and helped him through his problems. This is an idea that I’ve seen perpetuated over and over again; upon making the decision to leave my abusive, alcoholic boyfriend a few years ago, a friend asked me, “Aren’t you worried if you leave him, he’ll spiral out of control?” This framework positions women in relationships solely to be cheerleaders for their partner’s recovery, disregarding their wants and needs and ignoring the toll such a role would exact on them. Expecting a woman to stay in a toxic relationship for the man’s health is an unfair burden that can cause her to lose herself in the process (I’m speaking from experience here). At some point, we have to draw boundaries for ourselves and stop ignoring our own needs for the sake of our partners.

This echoes my same thoughts about the conversation regarding expecting women to stay in tumultuous relationships to fix their partner’s issues: that is not our responsibility. It is not possible for us to solve those problems for men. Even if we tried to, it would require us to ignore ourselves and our needs. We as a culture need to shift the blame and responsibility away from women and back onto the men who are making these self-destructive choices. Women are not rehabilitation centers for broken men and it’s time our society accepted that.

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