Are you lucky? Or covering up for others?

It's time to start calling it out.

Apr 08, 2026

My conditioning runs deep that I have to begin with a caveat. I want to iterate that this is absolutely not about men being bad. It’s about women covering up bad behaviour. Because all of us - women and men - quite quickly after learning how to speak, learn just as quickly what not to say. For men, that is often about their feelings or fears. They are socialised not to be vulnerable. Not to admit to making mistakes. Not to ask for help. And women….. well, we’re just not meant to make a fuss, ask for what we want or complain when things aren’t fair. And none of it serves anyone.

I had a client whose husband had told her he’d throw himself out of a 20 story window if she told anyone what he’d done.

He had betrayed her in the worst way for years. When she found out, instead of supporting her through her shock and loss of the life she thought she’d be living, he expected her to keep covering for him, keep his reputation intact, keep his mental anguish to a minimum.

I suggested she let him jump, and go get the support she needed.

I wasn’t quite this blunt obviously, but I knew - we all know - that he was never going to jump. Narcissists never do. Instead, women are expected to carry far more than their own weight.

She’d reached the point where she couldn’t leave the house in case she met someone who asked how her husband was. Truth was he was continuing to live his secret life while expecting her to now hold that secret while her entire life had fallen apart.

Something I do with many clients who are separating or going through divorce is ask them what’s the percentage split of voice in the relationship. Often, especially where the man is ending the marriage, his percentage is higher. And so there and then, from this moment forward, I work with them to change that split to 50/50.

And so, I asked her to decide who where the need-to-know people who would give her some support, who perhaps needed to know the marriage was over but didn’t need to know the reason as yet, and those who didn’t need to know anything for now.

And then she replied to her husband who was working overseas in her now 50% of voice in the relationship, telling him while she understood his concerns, she also needed support during this traumatic time. She would be telling her sister and best friend immediately and they would not share the information with anyone. She gave him two weeks to tell their children. She then said there would be a list of people over the coming days and weeks who would learn the marriage was over, but not why. Yet.

There would be no more covering for his behaviour and she could start focusing on rebuilding her life.

Thing is though, we all need to stop covering for the behaviour of the men in our lives. Because when we do that, we allow them to take accountability for it, and everyone improves, including them!

I’ve had to go against all my social training to do it, and it’s not easy.

I’ll start by saying my ex-husband is generally a very good person who did some challenging things. Lying about his sexuality for one. Leading a double life - often blaming me for feeling unloved - while living that double life and treating me like an unpaid housekeeper. When I found out he was gay, I had a brief moment of relief, thinking at least now, the lying and gaslighting would end. They didn’t. It got worse. He was a wonderful dad, a brilliant friend, a super doctor, a diligent son …. and an awful ex. And that’s ok. It happens. He had a lot to work through. And his good far outweighs the bad. But for many years I kept that last part secret from all but the very close few, including my children.

I tell this story not to bad mouth him in any way, but to demonstrate the difference when we stop protecting bad behaviour. Determined to always aim for a functioning family for my girls, I would allow his bad behaviour to stay in the background so that we could all get on. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was wrong. Wrong for me, anyway. And it transpires, for him too.

A couple of years ago, my eldest was graduating from secondary school and we would all be showing up together as a family, including with his partner. Instead of a bunch of flowers perhaps thanking me for doing the lion’s share of getting her this far, I got a nasty email at 4am. The kind only I saw. And something broke in me. I knew I was expected to absorb that email and then put my game face on and pretend to be one big happy family at the graduation, keeping him and his partner seats, smiling in photos and not holding him to account. I chose not to do that anymore.

I told him that from now on, everything he said and did would be public. (Not Irish Times public but to our children and friends.). He would now have to take full accountability for his own behaviour.

It has changed everything. We have a strong and respectful relationship, and the drama has been expunged like a flame blown out. When we disagree, we do so with respect. We help each other out - I hosted some of his family during his wedding last summer; he spent last weekend building my new garden shed. I invited him and his husband over for Christmas Eve dinner last year.

We are both responsible for the way we behave, and no-one has the upper hand. How his children see him is how he behaves, not how I edit it. (They have always seen my behaviour because they mostly live with me and I’m too exhausted most of the time to watch my fucking p’s and q’s!).

While I covered for him, I gave him no space to change.

I’m in no way comparing my situation to the following but what we have seen over the last few years is a seismic shift away from the tradition of women covering up bad behaviour to exposing it. From #MeToo to Giselle Pelicot who valiantly and heroically said “It is not my shame to carry” when she discovered her husband had been drugging her to let men rape her.

Recently the German actress Collien Fernandes outed her husband after discovering he was the man who had harassed her online for years. And the book du jour doing the rounds of interviews at the moment, including Oprah is Belle Burden’s Strangers - A memoir of marriage. Her husband announced the end of their marriage - and his role in parenting - out of the blue. The book is a deeply honest look at his and her behaviours and it pulls no punches. Never once reading it did I feel she was bad mouthing him. She was simply factual but did not ever try to excuse his behaviour.

What was so interesting was her realisation that she was expected to keep quiet. Not by him per se, but her wider social circle. She writes about the impact of her writing about his actions in a New York Times essay that went viral (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/style/modern-love-married-to-a-stranger.html).

In the book she writes that it was not necessarily his behaviour that upset people, but hers; she had broken the taboo of keeping quiet. She was called a bad mother. She was asked if it was revenge. She stepped away from a lot of her social circle as a result - and I wonder what they think now that publishers saw that essay and gave her a publishing deal. Her memoir is now a phenomenal global bestseller. One of the reasons she did it was because of the legacy of the women in her life having to cover up the poor behaviour of their men. “Enough,” she was saying.

These are extreme cases. But what about the everyday?

When I spoke on the Sile Seoige podcast a year or so ago, we had a conversation around an everyday form of this, a form I see all the time. When she called herself “lucky” because her husband, the father of her children, helped out, I questioned it. She laughed and realised she says it all the time. How often have I heard that!

How often was I told that by my own mum!! “Ah look at him there tidying up the kitchen. Aren’t you lucky?”

But no-one was telling him he was lucky for having a wife who looked after the kids relentlessly, and did the lion’s share of the housework.

No one tells most men that they’re “lucky” their partners take on the (vast, in some cases) majority of the mental, physical and emotional responsibility. We are expected to. They get a medal for meeting us a tenth of the way.

“Ah I’m really lucky,” I hear women say because their partner gives her a bit of help. Like being a father to their own kids. It is so deeply rooted in our psyches not to complain, and not to call out unfair behaviour, not to make a fuss (“too” emotional), that speaking up feels utterly dangerous.

We endure and then we cover up. I see it over and over again with some of the women I coach. From just lazy misogyny to coercive control, from betrayal to aggression, women not just endure, but then take on the role of making it all look ok for everyone else.

But it seems the trend is turning.

Women are calling out bad behaviour.

Women are refusing to man-keep any more.

Women are asking those around them to take responsibility for their own behaviour.

And guess what? The world doesn’t cave in. It just gives space for men to take accountability so that women can focus their energy on their own wellbeing.

When we change, we allow change in others.

Where are you covering up when you might be better calling it out?

Please let me know in the comments below… I love to hear from you.

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