The Women Who Are So Easy to Be Around

The very system that asks women to abandon themselves is often the same system that rewards them for doing it beautifully

The Women Who Are So Easy to Be Around

I had an interesting conversation on the patio yesterday.

A gentleman I know had recommended a woman to help me deep-clean my apartment. She was wonderful. Pleasant, capable, hardworking, and extraordinarily helpful.

She later offered to drive my grandson and me to the train station in Charlottesville for half of what Uber or Lyft would have charged. Her car was ten years old, but beautifully maintained and spotless inside.

She is forty-one years old.

She has three children of her own, a partner with two children, a large home, a swimming pool, and a household that depends heavily upon her. She created this life after her husband had an affair and left her.

She rebuilt, kept going, took care of what needed to be taken care of — as women so often do.

While I was telling my gentleman friend how much I appreciated her, he said, “Isn’t she wonderful? Isn’t she delightful? She is just so easygoing and easy to be around.”

I looked at him.

“You mean as opposed to a woman who questions everything?”

He got very quiet.

“Well, yes,” he finally said.

And there it was — the bargain.

Women are praised for being easy to be around.

We are praised for being agreeable, pleasant, accommodating, helpful, sweet, undemanding, and willing to do whatever must be done.

We are praised for making life easier for everyone else.

The world calls this goodness.

Sometimes it is goodness, sometimes generosity, sometimes love.

But sometimes a woman is considered easy to be around because she has learned not to require very much from anyone, because she has been trained to place her own needs last, because she has become remarkably skilled at disappearing without leaving the room.

I had lunch with this woman one day, and I began asking her questions about herself.

Not about her children, her partner, or the house, the errands, the bills, and the hundred other things she manages — her.

What did she want, what would she enjoy doing, what did she imagine for her own life?

She could not answer.

She looked at me and said, “I’ve been working since I was fourteen. I’ve never had time to ask myself that question.”

That sentence broke my heart.

She had never had time to ask what she wanted.

And now she lives in a world where people regularly tell her how wonderful she is because she takes such good care of everyone else.

The very system that asks women to abandon themselves is often the same system that rewards them for doing it beautifully. It gives them praise, belonging, the label of a good woman, the word delightful, the phrase easy to be around.

And because many women were not given much value simply for being alive, they learn to gather value by being useful. They become indispensable — carrying the family, solving the problems, remembering the appointments, cleaning the house, driving the children, helping the parents, stretching the money, making sure everyone else is all right.

And one day, often much later, the obligations begin to loosen. The children grow up, the job ends, the house gets quiet.

And the woman looks around and realizes she has no idea who she is when no one needs anything.

Then people wonder why she is angry, why she feels restless, why she suddenly begins questioning the life everyone else thought was perfectly lovely.

She is not ungrateful, and she is not selfish — she is discovering the cost of having spent decades being praised for giving herself away.

While we waited at the train station, I noticed a striking contrast.

The woman who drove us was wearing denim cutoffs and a sleeveless shirt, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She was doing her best to hold a large life together financially.

Then another woman arrived in a new BMW SUV. She stepped out wearing a long black dress, beautiful jewelry, polished shoes, styled hair, and painted toenails. She looked successful, composed, and entirely at home in her own presence.

I do not know that clothing, money, or a new car can tell us whether a woman is happy. They cannot.

But the contrast stayed with me.

One woman seemed to have built her life around being needed; the other seemed to understand that her life belonged to her.

Neither image tells the entire truth.

Still, I could not stop thinking about how differently women are permitted to occupy the world.

Some women are taught to take up space; others are taught to make themselves useful within it.

So what do we do when we recognize a younger woman who has never been given the room to ask what she wants?

We cannot take over her life, manage her decisions, or hand her a tidy solution and call the job finished. That would only be another form of telling her what to do.

But those of us who are older can sit down beside her. We can pour the coffee and ask a few questions.

What do you enjoy, what do you miss, what did you love before everyone needed you, what would you do if your life did not have to make sense to anybody else?

Then we can listen — not correct, not coach, not rescue. Just listen.

I invited this woman to come sit with me for coffee every now and then so we can talk about stuff.

Nothing formal, no program, no grand plan for her life — just a place where, for an hour, no one needs anything from her, a place where the conversation can be about who she is, not only what she does for everyone else.

I do not know whether that will change anything. That is not mine to decide.

But I want her to know the question exists.

What do you want?

And I want her to know she is allowed to take as long as she needs to answer it.

Look around you.

Is there a woman in your life who is always helping, always carrying, always making things easier for everyone else?

Invite her for coffee.

Do not arrive with advice. Do not try to fix her life.

Ask her what she wants.

Then give her enough quiet to discover that she may not know yet.

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.