We’re Told To Decenter Men, Then Judged for Being Single.

Suhaila Atef
3 days ago
3 min read

People tell you to make your 20s about yourself. Build a career, travel, invest in friendships, heal, and learn who you are outside of relationships. But ever since I stopped dating and stopped making my life about love, it seems like this is the only thing people want to talk about.

"Decenter love," they say, but continue to make everything about it.

Yet there’s something fascinating about what happens when someone actually follows that advice. The same culture that praises independence often views the person who genuinely lives by it as though something is missing. Suddenly, their entire life is questioned.

We criticize people for making love the center of their lives, but we also shame them for the romantic absence in theirs. We celebrate self-sufficiency but continue to measure success through partnership.

The contradiction is that you're expected to be independent while still being romantically desirable. You can choose to ignore the desire, but somehow you still have to let everyone know you're choosing to ignore it.

The result is that love has not truly been decentered. It has simply changed shape. Even conversations about moving beyond romance remain obsessed with romance. Even the language of independence often revolves around relationships: recovering from them, avoiding them, attracting better ones, or preparing for them.

For something we claim shouldn't be at the center of our lives, we continue to give it an extraordinary amount of cultural space. This reveals something interesting. Independence is admired when it's temporary—the strong, empowering phase you're socially expected to go through until your perfect relationship arrives.

A person who spends years chasing relationships is told they need to learn how to be alone. A person who becomes comfortable alone is asked why they haven't found someone yet. One lifestyle is considered excessive until it's replaced by another. There is always an invisible deadline hanging over the conversation.

People love talking about relationships in social settings. Sit in a café, a bar, or at a dinner table long enough, and eventually someone will ask whether you have a plus one. If you don't, they'll ask whether you'll be bringing someone next time.

And if the answer is still no, you'll spend the evening listening to everyone else's relationship stories: the conflicts, the breakups, the reconciliations, the situationships. You're expected to learn from their mistakes, laugh at their stories, sympathize with their heartbreak, and somehow still be convinced that getting into a relationship is the natural next step.

After a while, a strange sense of irrelevance begins to settle in. Not because your life lacks meaning, but because so much of the conversation revolves around a world you are not currently participating in.

You can have a career, five-year plans, countless hobbies, and a social life that rivals a celebrity's, yet still be perceived as somehow incomplete because you don't have anyone to share those things with. Ironically, those same people will criticize others for making a relationship their entire identity.

At some point, you find yourself wondering: What the fuck exactly am I supposed to do?

Focus on yourself, they say, build a life you're proud of, become independent, but don't fall behind everyone else. The dilemma never really disappears.

As long as you're alone, be complete on your own but somehow leave just enough evidence of being incomplete so you don't scare people away.

Decenter love, and people applaud your decision. Do it for long enough, and suddenly everyone starts wondering what happened or what's wrong with you.

Maybe it was never about decentering love, rather about about hiding your obsession with it. So yes, focus on yourself, just make sure you have someone to prove it to. Otherwise, apparently, it doesn't count.