I opened my phone to a screenshot from a little birdie: My ex had hard-launched his new boyfriend on Instagram.
I think they call it a “hard launch” because it’s hard to look at. Which it was, at first.
The post itself was unremarkable; they always are. One day you’re scrolling your feed and you see Johnny with two ice cream cones instead of one. And sure enough, there’s Joey licking the other cone.
What bothered me was not that my ex had found someone else. It was the tiny, involuntary feeling that came with seeing it: He was moving forward. Was I?
At 22, I have been single for most of my life. Aside from a few high school romances and one longer relationship in college, I have spent most of my adult life without a partner in crime.
This has made me something of a singlehood guru among my friends and family. I am the sounding board for relationships for friends who aren’t single, and the breakup coach for the ones who suddenly become so. Somehow, I have become the person people call when their relationships stop working.
Growing up queer in a small town, I never expected to become that person.
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For years, I thought romance would set me free. I imagined that finding someone would make the loneliness of growing up queer disappear, that being loved by another person would somehow confirm that I had finally arrived at the life I was supposed to be living. Then I turned 20.
Shortly afterward, I became single. And somewhere between the breakup and figuring out how to live on my own, I realized that romance was not necessary for freedom. Sometimes, it actually gets in the way of it.
My twentieth birthday was spent with people I had only met that year: my then-boyfriend and his friends. I remember being surrounded by these people, eating in silence, and realizing, almost inexplicably, that I needed to break up with him.
It was not a dramatic birthday revelation. I didn’t storm out of the restaurant into the snow. There was no cinematic fight.
But I remembered my mom saying she wished I wanted to spend my birthday with her. I remembered every year when my best friends got me the most thoughtful gifts I could imagine. And as I looked at the snow falling outside the restaurant through the large mirror on the wall, I just knew.
I was surrounded by people, and I wanted to be alone. That contradiction has stayed with me.
Because I think we have become very good at treating relationships as evidence that our lives are moving forward, when sometimes they are holding us back.
The order of operations is familiar: single, talking, exclusive, relationship, serious relationship. Each stage is supposed to bring us closer to some final destination. If the relationship ends somewhere along the way, we tend to call it a failure. But what if it wasn’t?
What if dating someone for three weeks, having long conversations, going to restaurants, realizing you are incompatible and moving on was not a failed relationship? What if that was the point?
You met someone. You learned something. You had an experience. You figured out a little more about yourself. That doesn’t sound like a failure to me. It sounds like your twenties.
There is a particular freedom to being in your twenties. For many people, these are the years when the scaffolding of childhood begins to disappear.
You might move away from home for the first time, graduate from college, start a career or realize that the career you thought you wanted isn’t actually for you. You begin figuring out what you like: the clothes you wear, the books you read, the music you insist belongs on every playlist.
You also begin looking backward.
For perhaps the first time, you can examine your childhood and upbringing with enough distance to decide what you want to keep and what you want to leave behind.
In that sense, your twenties can feel like a second childhood.
The first time around, everything is new and someone else is usually there to steer you. Then comes adolescence, when all you want is independence. And finally, in your twenties, everything is new and you are the captain of your own soul, with the strange privilege of independence for the first time.
So why are so many of us so eager to give it away? Perhaps part of the answer is that relationships offer something that your twenties often don’t: stability.
Everything else is changing. Friendships shift. Jobs begin and end. You move. You leave people behind. You meet new ones. The future feels both impossibly far away and alarmingly close.
A relationship can feel like an anchor. But sometimes anchors are what keep you from moving.
A friend reminded me of something a few weeks ago that seems obvious only after someone else says it: Casual dating is part of being single.
We don’t have to “go steady,” as they called it in the olden days, to be involved with someone.
I think we should romanticize going on dates again—not just Netflix and chilling. Go somewhere. Talk. Eat dinner. Find out what someone thinks about the world. Discover that you like them. Discover that you don’t.
There is something valuable about allowing a date to simply be a date.
That may be particularly relevant for a generation whose relationship with sex and intimacy looks different from the generations before it. Research from the Kinsey Institute has found that a significant share of Gen Z adults in its studies have never had partnered sex, contributing to a broader conversation about whether young people are becoming less interested in traditional forms of intimacy.
If that is the direction we’re moving in, I don’t necessarily think it is something to fear.
There is something beautiful about choosing someone when there is no obligation to do so—to become devoted to another person simply because you want them in your life and they want you in theirs.
But I don’t think we need to rush toward that in our twenties. I think we should be allowed to figure out what we want first.
That is one of the things I learned from Kimmy, my hairstylist at the salon in Market Square.
Kimmy is single in her forties and has three children. She has long, bohemian bronde hair, sharp eyewear, and an all-black wardrobe. She is fabulous. More importantly, she is completely content with her life on her own.
I told her at my last appointment that I had been thinking about relationships and being single. I don’t know what advice I expected from someone with more than twice my life experience, but what she said was simple.
“Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you will have your entire life,” she told me. “When you break up with someone, or someone leaves, or someone dies, you are left with you.”
Kimmy knows what it means to be left with herself.
She told me that surviving the death of someone close to her showed her that she could get through anything. It gave her a perspective on loss that most people in their twenties simply haven’t had the opportunity to develop.
Age really is just a number; perspective is everything.
At 22, I have experienced heartbreak. I have experienced loneliness. I have experienced the particular kind of grief that comes with realizing that the future you imagined with someone is no longer going to happen.
But there is still so much I haven’t experienced. I haven’t lived long enough to know what I will lose.
And maybe that is why I am so convinced that my twenties should be about figuring things out.
Kimmy still likes meeting people. She still chats with people and goes on dinner dates. She isn’t against relationships, quite the opposite: she is selective about them.
“Once you are good with yourself, then you become very selective of who you let into your life,” she said. “Someone who only adds to your life, not takes away.”
Her life also complicates my argument in a way I appreciate.
Kimmy told me that if she hadn’t gotten married at 21, she wouldn’t have her children, who are her rock.
So no, I don’t think everyone should be single in their twenties.
I don’t think getting married young is inherently wrong. I don’t think being in love makes you less independent. And I certainly don’t think there is anything inherently superior about being alone.
What I do think is that we should stop treating one path as the destination and everything else as a detour. A relationship that ends after two weeks isn’t necessarily a failure. Neither is a relationship that ends after two years.
A date that doesn’t become a relationship still happened. A relationship that doesn’t become a marriage still mattered. And being single isn’t evidence that you are standing still.
Perhaps the problem is that we have confused permanence with progress. I think about that whenever I see another hard launch or engagement announcement pop up on my social media timeline.
For a moment, it is easy to look at someone else’s relationship and imagine that they have figured something out that you haven’t. They have someone. They have plans. They have a person whose hand appears in their photographs.
But I have a life, too.
I have friends who come over and play Jackbox on the television after dinner. I have nights on the back deck where a conversation about absolutely nothing turns into a publishable essay. I have dates. I have books. I have work I care about. I have an increasingly clear sense of who I am becoming.
And maybe that is what I want from my twenties—not to find someone as quickly as possible, but to become someone I know how to live with.
Because eventually, if I do meet someone I want to settle down with, I want to recognize myself when I get there. And for now, I want to be good being on my own