I'm sorry, but I think we are missing the point. Women will feel pressure from every direction, always, whether we are single or in a relationship.
Here is my personal take: I am a 30-year-old woman from a small town in Sweden who has yet to find my person. I have done the opposite of settling down so far. I chose a life in a big city, to chase the dream career I now have, and I receive immense support from my friends and family for that. But that is as an individual. As a woman, however, I am constantly told something else. I am told through my rent for my one-room apartment that there should be someone paying it with me. I am told the same thing if I want to buy an apartment or a house. I am told by politicians that the fertility crisis needs to be solved by any means necessary. I am told by TV commercials that if I show a recent positive pregnancy test, I can get 50 percent off. I am told, as New Year’s approaches, to worry that couples will not invite me as just me. I am told through my Instagram feed that the only milestones worth celebrating are buying a house, getting pregnant, and/or getting married.
Had I settled down earlier, had I found someone to love and partner up with... my personal take would be different, but still I would be told that I live my life wrong. The pressure we feel is deeply individual.
We should not add even more pressure on each other about how to live or not live as women. There will always be someone who believes you are doing life wrong.
I like your conclusion! Being self-directed and ignoring the haters is surely a better path to happiness than letting others live your life. Social media inundates us with the opinions of others and makes it that much harder to hear our own thoughts.
Great post. I agree. Even in my generation (young millennial) we were constantly told that we had time or to wait. It was looked down upon not to be single in your early 20’s
Agree re Gen X. It was absolutely forbidden in my female friend groups to feel that we were unhappy being single into our 30s. When people coupled up, the women pretended to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into relationships. We all pretended to be Carrie Bradshaw, and we were all miserable.
This is a wonderfully written article, Freya's wisdom far surpasses her age.
As another Gen Xer I also saw this in my friend group. Don't get married, don't have kids, have a career, find yourself first, all of it can wait! I have so many friends who never had a real relationship other than with their pets, never had kids or real responsibility for anyone...other than their pets, and are now too set in this cycle to incorporate anyone meaningful into their lives. Turns out modeling yourself after Sex in the City, or Eat, Prey, Love was just a path to a selfish and lonely existence.
I won't lie, I can't relate to this article at all. I'm currently 26 and have felt consistent pressure since I was a teenager to be in a relationship. I should note that I have consistently resisted that pressure (I would rather make my own choices), but I have always felt it. In high school, being in a relationship was considered a status symbol amongst the girls, and one's "worth" was defined by the men who were pursuing them or the men they had dated. It was a strange social hierarchy/currency amongst those who were considered "popular." Beyond that, I felt family pressure too. There's definitely an attitude of "don't wait too long to have kids or you'll regret it. You should probably hurry up and find the right person soon." Body clock anxiety is definitely real. And your point about parents was interesting...the only parents I've witnessed encouraging their kids not to commit are boy moms with an unhealthy attachment to their sons. I can't say any of my female friends have felt pressure to be single either. More like a pressure to have it all together -- the career, the salary, the body, the life, the right man, and the kids all at the right time with a Pinterest-worthy home. Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it has to do with geography -- who knows! Given the way the tide is changing, and I think given my own personal growth, I don't feel the pressure to commit now. Or stay committed to the wrong person. But I also don't feel the pressure to be single. The pressure to engage in hook up culture and low commitment interactions with the opposite sex? Sure. But not to be single. For me personally, hook up culture doesn't interest me -- I just feel empowered to find my person when the time is right. I'm excited for when they come into my life. But for now, I'm just enjoying showing up for myself and my community. I'm enjoying being single and healing my relationship with myself. I think I'll end up having more to offer someone else :) Interesting to hear your perspective.
Edit: I recently ended a long term relationship and it took a lot of courage. I absolutely see the value in relationships, but I think sometimes women need to learn how to choose themselves too. I think that can look different to everybody at different times in their life. Maybe for someone who struggles with commitment, committing to the guy who treats them right IS choosing themselves. But, regardless, I think women face the problem of never doing it “right.” That’s why all you can do is decide what’s right for you.
I love how clearly you name the cultural pressure, but what I keep returning to in my own life and in the women I work with is that so much of this isn’t about dating or marriage at all. It’s about what our nervous systems learned to fear. Some of us fear being alone, others fear being held. Some of us were raised to collapse inside commitment, others to disappear inside “freedom.”
What I see today is less a pressure to be single or coupled, and more a pressure to perform a certain version of “strength.” The independent woman who never needs anybody. The endlessly self-actualising woman who must fix every wound before she’s allowed to love. Both are costumes. Both are exhausting.
Real intimacy is not the enemy; premature obligation isn’t either. What actually destroys us is living out of alignment with our own timing; choosing from fear instead of from the body. Commitment can be liberation, solitude can be liberation. It all depends on whether the choice is emerging from self-trust or self-protection.
For me, the work isn’t to argue one pressure over the other. It’s to come back to the truth that we find ourselves through connection and through solitude — and that neither has to be sacrificed if we’re anchored in who we are.
“We thought the answer to the failed marriages and broken families and mess we made over the past few decades was less commitment when it was clearly *more*.”
wow. this really made me think. thank you for sharing
I’ve been working with women for over a decade in childbirth. I don’t have children of my own. I’m not old but I’m not young anymore. I see how mothers are treated less than and I also see women who are childless (but very much wanted a child but for various reasons couldn’t have one) and both groups of women are displaced and made to be an outsider. What I feel in your writing is how there is a conscious attempt to erase womanhood. There is no space for women to take up because our culture has diminished it. Somehow we have turned women into little men and it’s confusing and left many to feel ambivalent about dating, having children, etc etc. I write about this ad nauseum on my substack called motherlands in case anyone wants to continue more honest conversation.
Often us older folks are fighting the battles of yesterday when society has moved on. In the 1980s there was far more teen pregnancy than now, and worse job prospects for women, so cautioning a girl to avoid getting attached (= getting pregnant) too early was sound advice. All of these things have changed but the advice has not.
Also it is unfortunate in hindsight that we let our collective revulsion of 1950s gender norms make it politically incorrect to acknowledge a simple truth: That relationships and children are far more important to women (and men!) than career is, over the course of a lifetime. Feminism was supposed to be about choice, but women often judge one another very harshly on those choices. As a young person you need to decide what you value most and never give other people a say in that.
As a Gen X-er my experience was that the seeds of this importance as women to prioritize independence over partnership were sown even when I was a young woman in the 80's, at least in my circles. What seems to have happened is a full-on rooting, growth and blossoming of this ideation, and I agree that the consequence can be community-breaking, rather than community-making. Ultimately the thing that I worry about is the pressure in any direction!
Your writing is a breath of fresh air in what has often been stale space, Freya! Thank you.
Human nature tends to swing to extremes. Women used to be told to go to college to get their Mrs., rather than an education. Not marrying by your mid-20s was a problem. We have now gone to the opposite extreme where everything but marriage is important. Meanwhile, women seem lonelier and angrier.
There is no "real you" buried deep inside, waiting for you to self-actualize so that it can emerge. That's a lie. You are already you, right now. You will change over time as you enter new relationships and have new experiences, but it will always be you doing it. You don't need to wait to discover your "true self" before you marry; you are your true self now.
Also, you can't "keep your options open" indefinitely by refusing to commit, because options tend to expire over time. Refusing to commit may feel like keeping your freedom in the short term, but it commits you to a certain kind of life, too.
Men have historically benefited more (and still do) from marriage/ relationships, so it makes sense that they often favor them more. Because of that, I don’t think it is a completely fair comparison. As for marrying in your twenties, it really depends on the context. In my experience, it is perfectly normal to marry from around age 25 onward. Earlier than that, people often advise waiting, usually for good reasons. I think commitment is very different from marriage, and you can be in a committed relationship without rushing to change your legal status, which can be complicated to undo later.
I do agree that there is enormous pressure on girls and women to be hyper productive, perfectly optimized capitalist machines who are never bored, never “rotting” in bed, never lazy, unattractive, or feeling bad. That is why we are constantly being fed meditation, journaling, celery smoothies and similar practices. It is not necessarily because these activities are bad, but because they have become another way to signal to the world that we are working on ourselves and every failure is only our own. It is as if even our leisure time has to be justified as self improvement, as a perfect housewife, mother, girlboss. What I meant is that for a massive part of history, women basically had one option: get married, have kids, and then that was it. Now, for the first time women can actually slow down, look around, and figure out what they want to do. And honestly, I could not be happier about it.
I married when I was 22 years old in 1997, when Emma Watson was seven years old. Even then, I was harangued about being too young and missing out on life.
Even though that marriage ended in divorce, I am really glad I got married when I did. I would have missed out on so many life experiences and perspectives if I had been going it alone. The most important of those perspectives is the importance of other people, of community. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for young adults today, being taught that they alone are responsible for all their own fulfillment.
I understand where you come from, but saying that you would have missed out on many life experiences and perspectives if you had been doing it "alone" makes the life of a single woman sound like we live in a vacuum. Sure, I am currently alone, but I am never lonely. I am so utterly loved, and through all of my relationships I keep is how I have get to experience life and plenty of perspectives. THAT to me is community.
I should clarify that in my particular case, I moved from a big anonymous city with my then-husband to a small town with a much richer sense of community. I do not think that I personally would have learned to appreciate small communities if I had not married young, and followed my husband to a small town. This is not to say that no one would.
I am very happy for you that you get a similar value out of friendships you have. I hope that they will continue to be such a rich source of happiness and fulfillment for you as they are now.
I note, though, that people (young and old, but especially young adults) face increasing pressure to cancel relationships in times of trouble, both with romantic partners and with family members and friends. The difficulty of cutting off contact with a spouse is one of the arguments used against getting married--but what if they're terrible, and you need to leave?!?--and especially against getting married young. But it's also the strength of marriage that it's hard to leave, because at some point I will be the terrible one, but with commitment my terribleness does not mean I am abandoned. What Freya is pointing to here is the importance of commitment in developing one's self, and noting that that sort of commitment on the part of young adults is actively discouraged in Western culture at present.
I hope for you that your relationships entail that kind of commitment, that means you don't abandon your people when they're terrible, and they don't abandon you when you are. And certainly modern marriage isn't a guarantee that one won't be abandoned; it wasn't for me. But even if it's a promise that can be broken, at least marriage is a promise of commitment, and that's a very valuable thing.
Thank you for clarifying. I’m genuinely glad you found the kind of community that shaped you, especially since it sounds similar to where I grew up. And thank you for the kind wishes. I know that my own rich social life has been possible largely because I had a strong emotional safety net early on, and I’m very aware that not everyone gets that from the start.
I hear what you’re saying, and I hear Freya’s point too. I’ve done my time on Tinder, so I definitely understand concerns about how disposable relationships can feel today. I agree that we all need to take more social responsibility in how we treat each other, but for me that’s something women and men need to shoulder together. What I sometimes struggle with in these conversations is how easily the responsibility and sometimes "blame" drifts back onto women, without acknowledging how few generations actually had true autonomy to choose to begin with. This freedom to choose more, choose better, or choose differently over time.
I fully respect the value you found in marriage and the community it opened for you. But I also think it’s important to recognize that women finally have the ability to decide the shape of their own lives, whether that’s within marriage, or outside of it.
The pendulum always swings to the far opposite side from where it started. There’s been a stereotype of men not wanting to settle down, so when they do it seems applause worthy. The same for women who traditionally / stereotypically sought to settle down as quickly as possible now being applauded for embracing independence.
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t celebrate either extreme because it promotes extreme pressure.
I'm sorry, but I think we are missing the point. Women will feel pressure from every direction, always, whether we are single or in a relationship.
Here is my personal take: I am a 30-year-old woman from a small town in Sweden who has yet to find my person. I have done the opposite of settling down so far. I chose a life in a big city, to chase the dream career I now have, and I receive immense support from my friends and family for that. But that is as an individual. As a woman, however, I am constantly told something else. I am told through my rent for my one-room apartment that there should be someone paying it with me. I am told the same thing if I want to buy an apartment or a house. I am told by politicians that the fertility crisis needs to be solved by any means necessary. I am told by TV commercials that if I show a recent positive pregnancy test, I can get 50 percent off. I am told, as New Year’s approaches, to worry that couples will not invite me as just me. I am told through my Instagram feed that the only milestones worth celebrating are buying a house, getting pregnant, and/or getting married.
Had I settled down earlier, had I found someone to love and partner up with... my personal take would be different, but still I would be told that I live my life wrong. The pressure we feel is deeply individual.
We should not add even more pressure on each other about how to live or not live as women. There will always be someone who believes you are doing life wrong.
I like your conclusion! Being self-directed and ignoring the haters is surely a better path to happiness than letting others live your life. Social media inundates us with the opinions of others and makes it that much harder to hear our own thoughts.
Great post. I agree. Even in my generation (young millennial) we were constantly told that we had time or to wait. It was looked down upon not to be single in your early 20’s
It was already happening with Gen X.
Agree re Gen X. It was absolutely forbidden in my female friend groups to feel that we were unhappy being single into our 30s. When people coupled up, the women pretended to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into relationships. We all pretended to be Carrie Bradshaw, and we were all miserable.
This is a wonderfully written article, Freya's wisdom far surpasses her age.
As another Gen Xer I also saw this in my friend group. Don't get married, don't have kids, have a career, find yourself first, all of it can wait! I have so many friends who never had a real relationship other than with their pets, never had kids or real responsibility for anyone...other than their pets, and are now too set in this cycle to incorporate anyone meaningful into their lives. Turns out modeling yourself after Sex in the City, or Eat, Prey, Love was just a path to a selfish and lonely existence.
I won't lie, I can't relate to this article at all. I'm currently 26 and have felt consistent pressure since I was a teenager to be in a relationship. I should note that I have consistently resisted that pressure (I would rather make my own choices), but I have always felt it. In high school, being in a relationship was considered a status symbol amongst the girls, and one's "worth" was defined by the men who were pursuing them or the men they had dated. It was a strange social hierarchy/currency amongst those who were considered "popular." Beyond that, I felt family pressure too. There's definitely an attitude of "don't wait too long to have kids or you'll regret it. You should probably hurry up and find the right person soon." Body clock anxiety is definitely real. And your point about parents was interesting...the only parents I've witnessed encouraging their kids not to commit are boy moms with an unhealthy attachment to their sons. I can't say any of my female friends have felt pressure to be single either. More like a pressure to have it all together -- the career, the salary, the body, the life, the right man, and the kids all at the right time with a Pinterest-worthy home. Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it has to do with geography -- who knows! Given the way the tide is changing, and I think given my own personal growth, I don't feel the pressure to commit now. Or stay committed to the wrong person. But I also don't feel the pressure to be single. The pressure to engage in hook up culture and low commitment interactions with the opposite sex? Sure. But not to be single. For me personally, hook up culture doesn't interest me -- I just feel empowered to find my person when the time is right. I'm excited for when they come into my life. But for now, I'm just enjoying showing up for myself and my community. I'm enjoying being single and healing my relationship with myself. I think I'll end up having more to offer someone else :) Interesting to hear your perspective.
Edit: I recently ended a long term relationship and it took a lot of courage. I absolutely see the value in relationships, but I think sometimes women need to learn how to choose themselves too. I think that can look different to everybody at different times in their life. Maybe for someone who struggles with commitment, committing to the guy who treats them right IS choosing themselves. But, regardless, I think women face the problem of never doing it “right.” That’s why all you can do is decide what’s right for you.
I love how clearly you name the cultural pressure, but what I keep returning to in my own life and in the women I work with is that so much of this isn’t about dating or marriage at all. It’s about what our nervous systems learned to fear. Some of us fear being alone, others fear being held. Some of us were raised to collapse inside commitment, others to disappear inside “freedom.”
What I see today is less a pressure to be single or coupled, and more a pressure to perform a certain version of “strength.” The independent woman who never needs anybody. The endlessly self-actualising woman who must fix every wound before she’s allowed to love. Both are costumes. Both are exhausting.
Real intimacy is not the enemy; premature obligation isn’t either. What actually destroys us is living out of alignment with our own timing; choosing from fear instead of from the body. Commitment can be liberation, solitude can be liberation. It all depends on whether the choice is emerging from self-trust or self-protection.
For me, the work isn’t to argue one pressure over the other. It’s to come back to the truth that we find ourselves through connection and through solitude — and that neither has to be sacrificed if we’re anchored in who we are.
Yes!! 👏
“We thought the answer to the failed marriages and broken families and mess we made over the past few decades was less commitment when it was clearly *more*.”
wow. this really made me think. thank you for sharing
I’ve been working with women for over a decade in childbirth. I don’t have children of my own. I’m not old but I’m not young anymore. I see how mothers are treated less than and I also see women who are childless (but very much wanted a child but for various reasons couldn’t have one) and both groups of women are displaced and made to be an outsider. What I feel in your writing is how there is a conscious attempt to erase womanhood. There is no space for women to take up because our culture has diminished it. Somehow we have turned women into little men and it’s confusing and left many to feel ambivalent about dating, having children, etc etc. I write about this ad nauseum on my substack called motherlands in case anyone wants to continue more honest conversation.
Fyi- on another substack an author was bemoaning that the world treats the boys as “defective girls”.
Amazing, as always, Freya. I wrote about opting out of love just this week: https://open.substack.com/pub/evanmarckatz/p/the-article-that-all-the-major-publications?r=5xgs2&utm_medium=ios
Often us older folks are fighting the battles of yesterday when society has moved on. In the 1980s there was far more teen pregnancy than now, and worse job prospects for women, so cautioning a girl to avoid getting attached (= getting pregnant) too early was sound advice. All of these things have changed but the advice has not.
Also it is unfortunate in hindsight that we let our collective revulsion of 1950s gender norms make it politically incorrect to acknowledge a simple truth: That relationships and children are far more important to women (and men!) than career is, over the course of a lifetime. Feminism was supposed to be about choice, but women often judge one another very harshly on those choices. As a young person you need to decide what you value most and never give other people a say in that.
There was no collective revulsion. It was an elite propaganda project imposed on us.
As a Gen X-er my experience was that the seeds of this importance as women to prioritize independence over partnership were sown even when I was a young woman in the 80's, at least in my circles. What seems to have happened is a full-on rooting, growth and blossoming of this ideation, and I agree that the consequence can be community-breaking, rather than community-making. Ultimately the thing that I worry about is the pressure in any direction!
Your writing is a breath of fresh air in what has often been stale space, Freya! Thank you.
Human nature tends to swing to extremes. Women used to be told to go to college to get their Mrs., rather than an education. Not marrying by your mid-20s was a problem. We have now gone to the opposite extreme where everything but marriage is important. Meanwhile, women seem lonelier and angrier.
Elite women were told that.
When you describe striving to be unattached, I thought you were reading part of Brave New World!
I 100% relate to this. My friends and I talk about this all the time and I feel like a lot of people are going through this sentiment.
There is no "real you" buried deep inside, waiting for you to self-actualize so that it can emerge. That's a lie. You are already you, right now. You will change over time as you enter new relationships and have new experiences, but it will always be you doing it. You don't need to wait to discover your "true self" before you marry; you are your true self now.
Also, you can't "keep your options open" indefinitely by refusing to commit, because options tend to expire over time. Refusing to commit may feel like keeping your freedom in the short term, but it commits you to a certain kind of life, too.
Men have historically benefited more (and still do) from marriage/ relationships, so it makes sense that they often favor them more. Because of that, I don’t think it is a completely fair comparison. As for marrying in your twenties, it really depends on the context. In my experience, it is perfectly normal to marry from around age 25 onward. Earlier than that, people often advise waiting, usually for good reasons. I think commitment is very different from marriage, and you can be in a committed relationship without rushing to change your legal status, which can be complicated to undo later.
I do agree that there is enormous pressure on girls and women to be hyper productive, perfectly optimized capitalist machines who are never bored, never “rotting” in bed, never lazy, unattractive, or feeling bad. That is why we are constantly being fed meditation, journaling, celery smoothies and similar practices. It is not necessarily because these activities are bad, but because they have become another way to signal to the world that we are working on ourselves and every failure is only our own. It is as if even our leisure time has to be justified as self improvement, as a perfect housewife, mother, girlboss. What I meant is that for a massive part of history, women basically had one option: get married, have kids, and then that was it. Now, for the first time women can actually slow down, look around, and figure out what they want to do. And honestly, I could not be happier about it.
LOL to your opening premise.
I married when I was 22 years old in 1997, when Emma Watson was seven years old. Even then, I was harangued about being too young and missing out on life.
Even though that marriage ended in divorce, I am really glad I got married when I did. I would have missed out on so many life experiences and perspectives if I had been going it alone. The most important of those perspectives is the importance of other people, of community. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for young adults today, being taught that they alone are responsible for all their own fulfillment.
I understand where you come from, but saying that you would have missed out on many life experiences and perspectives if you had been doing it "alone" makes the life of a single woman sound like we live in a vacuum. Sure, I am currently alone, but I am never lonely. I am so utterly loved, and through all of my relationships I keep is how I have get to experience life and plenty of perspectives. THAT to me is community.
I should clarify that in my particular case, I moved from a big anonymous city with my then-husband to a small town with a much richer sense of community. I do not think that I personally would have learned to appreciate small communities if I had not married young, and followed my husband to a small town. This is not to say that no one would.
I am very happy for you that you get a similar value out of friendships you have. I hope that they will continue to be such a rich source of happiness and fulfillment for you as they are now.
I note, though, that people (young and old, but especially young adults) face increasing pressure to cancel relationships in times of trouble, both with romantic partners and with family members and friends. The difficulty of cutting off contact with a spouse is one of the arguments used against getting married--but what if they're terrible, and you need to leave?!?--and especially against getting married young. But it's also the strength of marriage that it's hard to leave, because at some point I will be the terrible one, but with commitment my terribleness does not mean I am abandoned. What Freya is pointing to here is the importance of commitment in developing one's self, and noting that that sort of commitment on the part of young adults is actively discouraged in Western culture at present.
I hope for you that your relationships entail that kind of commitment, that means you don't abandon your people when they're terrible, and they don't abandon you when you are. And certainly modern marriage isn't a guarantee that one won't be abandoned; it wasn't for me. But even if it's a promise that can be broken, at least marriage is a promise of commitment, and that's a very valuable thing.
Thank you for clarifying. I’m genuinely glad you found the kind of community that shaped you, especially since it sounds similar to where I grew up. And thank you for the kind wishes. I know that my own rich social life has been possible largely because I had a strong emotional safety net early on, and I’m very aware that not everyone gets that from the start.
I hear what you’re saying, and I hear Freya’s point too. I’ve done my time on Tinder, so I definitely understand concerns about how disposable relationships can feel today. I agree that we all need to take more social responsibility in how we treat each other, but for me that’s something women and men need to shoulder together. What I sometimes struggle with in these conversations is how easily the responsibility and sometimes "blame" drifts back onto women, without acknowledging how few generations actually had true autonomy to choose to begin with. This freedom to choose more, choose better, or choose differently over time.
I fully respect the value you found in marriage and the community it opened for you. But I also think it’s important to recognize that women finally have the ability to decide the shape of their own lives, whether that’s within marriage, or outside of it.
The pendulum always swings to the far opposite side from where it started. There’s been a stereotype of men not wanting to settle down, so when they do it seems applause worthy. The same for women who traditionally / stereotypically sought to settle down as quickly as possible now being applauded for embracing independence.
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t celebrate either extreme because it promotes extreme pressure.
Do what feels right for you.