Champagne Confessions

At my core, I am, and always have been, a woman of instinct. Drawn not to stability, but to the beautiful disarray of men who feel like projects, puzzles, or storms I might survive if I’m dressed well enough. I used to mistake a man’s brokenness for depth. A crack in his voice? Intriguing. Emotional unavailability? A challenge. I thought if I could love him hard enough, right enough, maybe he’d become the version of himself that I imagined.

But here’s the quiet truth beneath that fantasy: loving a fixer-upper was never about him. It was about control. About keeping the focus on his damage so I never had to confront my own. If I was busy sanding down his rough edges, I didn’t have to look at the emotional rot beneath my own polished surface. And I was always polished, new outfit, fresh gloss, heart on standby. I made dysfunction look divine.

We tell ourselves that love should be easy, but the truth is we often choose men who keep it complicated because ease feels like exposure. A man who shows up, intact and emotionally available, asks us to show up too. No masks. No rescue plan. Just presence. And presence, for a woman who’s spent years performing composure, is terrifying.

So we flinch. We call it “boring.” We say he’s too nice. We run back to chaos because chaos lets us hide.

But here’s the question that kept me up one night: What if the real fixer-upper has always been me?

Not in a self-loathing way. In an honest, sobering way. What if the part of me that keeps choosing mess is just scared to stand still long enough to be fully seen?

And why do men get to be the metric of transformation at all? Since when did our worth hinge on whether they call, choose, or commit? Somewhere along the way, the narrative became: you are worthy if he says so.

No.

We are worthy because we exist. Because we love deeply, dream loudly, and rebuild ourselves in silence no one ever claps for.

So no, I’m no longer waiting to be chosen by a man too fractured to see my value. I’ve stopped confusing emotional starvation with romance. And I’ve stopped mistaking the adrenaline of anxiety for passion.

To the women who know what it is to build a life around a man’s potential: you are not alone. But we deserve more than to play God with someone else’s healing.

Here’s my toast: to the quiet dignity of leaving the project unfinished. To loving the woman I am, not the fantasy I tried to become in someone else’s demolition zone. Because, darling, the only fixer-upper worth renovating… is the one staring back in the mirror.