Wanting A Boyfriend Is Fine Actually
And you don't have to choose being single to love being single.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
I don’t want to spend too much time on the practical pleasures of never having a man in your house, we’re all aware of how nice it is to never clean someone’s beard hair out of the sink. It’s 2025, and social media’s spotlight has, dare I say it, held romantic relationships accountable in very exciting ways. We know what men are doing, or rather not doing, we know the downsides to partnership and marriage that are born almost exclusively out of men’s behavior and choices. There are countless things we’ll never have to deal with or divorce from if we never get married, and if they help us feel better about living life without romantic partnership I see nothing wrong with that. I caution us against making it the entire reason we’re okay though. At some point we might actually fall in love, and the last thing I want is single women feeling like we failed because we like a boy.
It is delightful making all of the decisions, all of the time, without having to convince anyone else to agree. I take great joy in never compromising with anyone about anything, because I’m the only one here. The idea of in-laws isn’t particularly appealing to me, and the simple comfort of existing peacefully alone in my house is…fucking great. On a different note, I don’t like the idea of opening up my world to the possibilities of financial, emotional, psychological, and even physical abuse that can occur within romantic domestic partnerships. But I don’t have to list out everything I love about my singlehood because we never make married women list what they love about marriage to prove to someone else that they’re happy. You can just trust me.
The wisdom of still being single in my forties gives me a kind of arrogance that I don’t think I deserve. I’m pretty confident that by now I’ll be able to spot and reject a man who’s charming and lying just to get someone to clean and run his household for him so that he can spend his time gambling away our joint bank account and sleeping with strangers whenever he finds the time and space because men actually do that. I like to think I’ll be able to clock him and run the other direction, but what do I know? I fancy myself someone with a keen sense of discernment and the ability to detect bullshit, but all that really means is that men have been lying to me since I was 13.
What I know for sure is that women aren’t stupid. Calling out men for their shitty behavior, their aversion to therapy, and their ridiculous sociopolitical regression isn’t the act of a stupid gender, and we’re also a gender that’s no longer willing to participate in the bare minimum just so we can say we have a partner. But I want to make something else abundantly clear: Wanting love doesn’t make you stupid, either. It doesn’t make you lame or uncool, you’re not off-trend. And even if you were who the fuck cares? I’m tired of naturally occurring human emotion and authentic desire being minimized for social media consumption if they’re not going viral this month, or shunned entirely in favor of looking like a “badass.” Women are perfectly capable of wanting men without being viewed by society as not strong enough. There is a basic human component to wanting connection and we’re allowed to feel it, no matter how callously men have been treating our desire, if not since the dawn of time than certainly since the dawn of Tinder.