Recently I’ve been sharing a lot of content revolving around the idea of  “using men” which sounds provocative and quite like hypergamy, which I once openly denounced (see: why hypergamy usually fails women).

Most women agree with the sentiment, but those who don’t all say the same thing:

What about love? Should you be with a man you don’t love just to use him?”

The short answer is no. The long answer is that you need to reassess your understanding of loving a man, and you also need to understand what it means for a man to love you.

“Love” the emotion is not an exchange of value, because love is always measured by actions. Love is a verb, but most people think of it as a noun to describe how we feel about someone else. We can receive love and do love. The way to know if a man really loves you is that he is doing love. The way you know a woman really loves you if she receives your love and allows it to inspire the feeling of love inside of her—if she is being love with you.

When a woman loves her children, she “does” love and “receives” love. She displays her love that she feels through her actions, such as pouring into her children with words of affirmation, buying them gifts, and validating their emotions.

When a woman loves a man, she has the tendency to do the same thing. She thinks she needs to prove that she loves him by “doing” love, i.e., taking care of him, catering to him, and making his life easier. What she doesn’t understand is that “doing” love is how his mother showed him love, and I’m sure you’ve heard a little something about Maddona-whore. “Doing” love is a masculine expression of love. “Being” or rather “receiving” love is a feminine expression of love. 

This is why even though my focus is protecting myself and “using” men, I know I can still “feel” love for them. Because my love for him is just me receiving his “doing” love with gratitude and appreciation. 

And yes, this mindset has gotten me called things like “gold digger” and “selfish bitch.” And those labels used to trigger me, when I thought I had to prove that I was selfless and didn’t want to take anything a man had to offer.

But now I know. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. 

While I still don’t believe “all men cheat” or that all men are inherently evil, I believe my sense of feeling love needs to exist independently of whether a man affirms his love for me or not. In other words, a man cannot be the main source of love in my life. I am the main source of love in my life. Because of that, I can allow myself to receive love, and the expressions of it, freely and without dependency or guilt.