Let’s be honest about what’s making so many people uncomfortable about this Justin Fairfax situation. It’s not just the violence. It’s the recognition.
Underneath all the commentary, all the social media posts and think pieces, all the pivoting to “mental health” and “stress” and “unraveling,” there is a quieter, more unsettling truth moving through the conversation: A lot of men can see themselves in him.
No, not in the murder. But in his collapse. And that is the part nobody wants to name, like the slow collapse of reciprocity inside relationships, the transfer of labor onto women, and the expectation that they will continue to carry it indefinitely. We need to ask why so many men feel an uneasy familiarity with the conditions that preceded Fairfax’s violence, even if they would never cross that line themselves. That is a much more uncomfortable question than “what was wrong with him,” because it suggests this his behavior is not an anomaly, but a script under pressure.
But instead, we get a different story. We get the résumé. The degrees. The rise and fall of a politician. We get language that softens the edges. “He was struggling.” “He was under pressure.” “He lost everything.”
But when you actually look at what was reported, what was documented, you get a very different picture of what the Richmond Times-Dispatch calls Justin Fairfax’s “profound retreat” from his family.
You get a man accused in court of not contributing financially to household bills or child-related expenses. A man described as isolating himself from his wife and teenage children. Drinking heavily. A man whose wife, a successful dentist, was holding the household together while also pursuing legal separation. A man who was ultimately ordered by a judge to leave the home weeks before he destroyed his family.
This was not just an “unraveling.” It was a pattern that far too many women have endured. I have personally witnessed this dynamic among Black women friends who are still married and those who finally divorced. The bills stop getting paid. The effort disappears. The partnership becomes one-sided. The financial, emotional, and logistical labor of daily life shifts almost entirely onto one person while the other recedes, avoids, or collapses inward. The man is not just struggling, he is also expecting to be carried. Expecting the system inside the home to compensate for his withdrawal. Expecting the woman to absorb the financial and emotional load indefinitely.
He moves into a basement, an office, a spare bedroom, some corner of the house where withdrawal can masquerade as presence. He stops cleaning. Stops showing up. Hygiene slips. Responsibility evaporates but the expectations don’t. The household should still run. The meals should still be made and the children should still be cared for. Access to her body is still assumed. Sex is still expected. And when she is exhausted, resentful, or simply done, that refusal is treated like betrayal.
That is the part people keep skipping over. The collapse is not just internal. It is relational. It is behavioral. It is a slow transfer of labor from one person to another, paired with a stubborn insistence that nothing has changed. And for the woman carrying it, it becomes unsustainable. Not because she is “too independent” or “too influenced by feminism,” but because she is living the math of it every day.
Sir!
I am doing everything.
You ain’t doin’ nothin’.
And this shit cannot continue.
So when she says “enough,” it is not all of a sudden. It is the final line after a long period of imbalance. But for him, that moment lands differently because now the illusion is gone. He is no longer the provider, no longer the authority, no longer even anchored in the role he assumed was his as a man. And instead of sitting with that exposure, too often the response is anger directed not at his behavior that created the imbalance, but at the woman who refused to keep absorbing it.
That moment when she finally says “enough,” is where everything starts to get real. Because for him, it is not just a breakup. It is an exposure that he is no longer “the man of the house.” No longer the provider. No longer the authority. No longer reliable. No longer trusted. No longer seen as the steady center his family can depend on.
His footing as a father shifts too, not just in custody or presence, but in how he is perceived, how he is relied upon, how he is measured by his own children. He is no longer even physically located in the space that once signaled his role. And on top of all of that, he is no longer sexually desired. He ain’t somebody she wants, reaches for, or feels drawn to. The entitlement to her body, to her intimacy and responsiveness . . . gone. Not negotiated. Gone. Because desire does not survive imbalance, neglect, and resentment.
And if his sense of self is built on provision, authority, reliability, sexual access, and paternal identity then what he experiences is not just loss feels like emasculation and erasure. It feels like being stripped, piece by piece, of every marker he was taught made him a man.
It feels like walking into a room you used to command and realizing nobody is lookin’ to you anymore. It’s like speaking and hearing your own irrelevance echo back. Like watching the woman you once assumed would endure anything for you move through her life without needing you at all, and knowing, deep down, that you trained her to do exactly that by forcing her to carry everything alone.
It feels like humiliation. Not the quiet, reflective kind that leads to some kind of growth, but the kind that fucking burns. The kind that makes a man feel exposed, seen, measured, and found lacking. It feels like losing control of the narrative you told yourself about who you are. Your mask has slipped and you ain’t got nowhere to hide.
And for men who have built their entire identity on being needed, obeyed, deferred to, that kind of exposure destabilizes. Because now there ain’t no buffer. No paycheck to point to. No authority to lean on. No intimacy to claim as proof of worth. No child looking at you as the unquestioned center.
Just the raw truth.
And that truth is loud is loud as hell. Ain’t it, sir?
It sits in the room with you. It follows you from the couch to the mirror. It shows up in the silence when nobody is asking you for anything, needing anything, waiting on anything. It forces a question you were never taught how to answer: who are you when you are no longer being served, centered, or carried?
Because now there’s no performance left and no role to hide behind. No script to recite. Just a man staring at the gap between who he believes himself to be and what he has actually built. And for some, that gap is unbearable. Not because it can’t be closed, but because closing it would require humility, accountability, and a complete reconstruction of self.
And by reconstruction, I don’t mean some surface-level adjustment. I mean going all the way back to boyhood to the earliest lessons about what it means to be a man. The messages about dominance, silence, control. The conditioning that taught him his worth lives in what he provides, what he commands, what he can access.
It means unlearning the idea that love is something you are owed rather than something you sustain. It means confronting the ways vulnerability was shamed out of him and replaced with ego. It means building a self that is not anchored in being served, but in being responsible, reciprocal, and emotionally present. That kind of work is slow, uncomfortable, and deeply destabilizing because it asks a man to dismantle the very identity he has spent his whole damn life protecting.
So instead of doing that work, these kind of men reach for something else. Anger. Blame. Control. Anything that restores, even temporarily, the feeling of being powerful again. Anything that drowns out the truth long enough to avoid sitting with it. But the truth doesn’t move.
It just waits.
And instead of sitting in that truth, rebuilding from it, too many of these men lash out at the woman who refused to keep the illusion alive. Because it’s easier to be angry at her than to confront the fact that what they lost wasn’t taken . . . it collapsed.
This is the psychological center of what’s missing from the conversations surrounding what Justin Fairfax did. Men are not just reacting to women. They are reacting to the collapse of a SCRIPT they were raised to believe was real. The script said: be the breadwinner, be the head of the household, be the one whose value is tied to provision and control. But that script never came with instructions for what to do when those things disappear. It did not teach men how to reconstruct identity without income, without status, without authority anchored in material contribution. And that is where vulnerability turns into entitlement.
That confrontation is destabilizing. It can feel like humiliation, rejection, even annihilation of identity. And in a culture that does not equip men to process that kind of rupture, to sit with it, recalibrate, and rebuild, what can emerge instead is blame, resentment, rage. And in its most extreme form, violence. Not because the woman changed something arbitrarily, but because she exposed something that was already broken.
This is where the broader system has to be named. Because none of this exists outside of the economic conditions shaping these relationships. Capitalism sold Black men a version of masculinity tied to provision and control while simultaneously eroding the very conditions required to sustain that role. Jobs became unstable. Wages stagnated. Entire pathways to economic security narrowed or disappeared. The promise remained, but the material foundation weakened.
At the same time, Black women adapted. Not out of ideology, but out of necessity. They worked. They stabilized households. They built lives that did not depend on a single provider because that model was no longer reliable. And once women are doing that, once they are carrying the weight of survival on their own, the old exchange collapses. The idea that one person provides and the other endures no longer holds when both are working, but only one is carrying the full burden.
That shift is being misnamed as feminism, defiance. as women becoming “too independent” and even “masculine.” But what it actually is is adaptation. It is a response to material reality. Feminism did not create the conditions where a woman has to work, pay bills, raise children, and manage a household while also being expected to perform emotional and domestic labor for a partner who is not contributing. Feminism named that imbalance and gave women permission to stop tolerating that shit. And that refusal is what is being felt as disruption and even betrayal.
Because once women stop agreeing to carry that asymmetry, it exposes how many relationships were never built on mutuality in the first place. They were built on expectation and entitlement. On a script that required one person to give more than they received in order to maintain the illusion of stability.
Not every man will become violent, but many were never prepared for a world in which staying in a relationship requires more than occupying the role of “man of the house.” And until that is confronted, the conversation will keep circling the wrong explanations. It will keep centering the man’s distress while minimizing the woman’s reality. It will keep turning structural failure into individual tragedy without naming the system underneath it.
Because naming it would require a level of honesty that is uncomfortable. It would require admitting that capitalism built a model of masculinity it could not sustain, handed it to Black men as a promise, and left Black women to absorb the fallout when that promise collapsed. It would require acknowledging that what we are witnessing is not just interpersonal conflict, but the intimate consequences of a system failure playing out inside people’s homes.
And until that truth is discussed honestly, we will keep missing the most important part of this moment. Not just what Justin Fairfax did. But why so many men understand the conditions that led up to it, and why that recognition should be taken far more seriously than it is.
And before the “not all men” crowd rushes in, let’s be clear: if this doesn’t describe you, then it’s not about you. This piece is not an invitation for folks to try on shoes that do not fit.
If your first instinct is to derail, defend, or demand “nuance” instead of sitting with what’s being named, then something in here hit a nerve. Because this piece is not accusing every man, it’s exposing a pattern. And the question isn’t whether you would ever go as far Justin Fairfax. The question is whether you recognize the script, the expectations, the entitlement, and what you’ve done to unlearn it. If your only contribution is to distance yourself instead of interrogating that, then you’re not challenging the problem. You’re protecting the conditions that allow it to keep happening.
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