Thank you guys.

So much for watching.

I'll see you guys next week.

Bye.

No, Unfortunately, it's a little bit more to this video, although honestly, buying a vibrator is not a bad step.

For the majority of my life, I have been single, and I took it upon myself every Valentine's Day to feel extra bad about myself and also let everybody else know publicly have bad.

I felt about being single.

I was like, Oh, baby, they says humor.

This is comedy.

Today.

I want to sit down and do something a little bit different and hopefully a little bit more useful and kind of dissect.

Like all the pressures that woman feels to be in a relationship that I have felt for so long and also talk about, like my personal journey from somebody who derived a lot of self worth from male attention and from being in a relationship to now genuinely being happy, being single, Well, maybe not like happy.

I definitely to see if they're this, but like, what I mean is that I have come to enjoy being single.

It's definitely the first time in my life where, like I would honestly rather be single but in a relationship with the vast majority of people and not like happy all the time, obviously.

But I don't blame my unhappiness or any UN fulfillment in my life on not being in a relationship, if that makes sense.

Also sorry for the wack color correction and youtuber apology video background for this video.

I filmed this on like three hours of sleep.

I've been sleeping on the floor for like, two weeks.

I haven't gotten my whole setup going in New York yet.

I am living in chaos, but I'm trying to do my job and I like this video.

I think I have a lot of useful things to say.

So enjoy.

Before I really jump into this video, though, I did want to say there's definitely a double standard between men and women with how we talk about relationships and being single.

There is both a long word pressure on women to be in relationships and to get into a long term relationship earlier in their life and this kind of surface level feminist pressure to be independent and strong and In order to do that, you have to be single where I feel like guys can be in relationships their whole life and there never criticized for being emotionally dependent on women or not being a strong independent man.

I didn't want to make this video.

And like a pseudo feminist way, that's like You have to be single in order to be a strong, independent woman type of way.

I want to make it in like a Here is me trying to like self actualized, be comfortable with myself and not feel so much pressure to be in a relationship type of way.

I think at the end of the day, our society really does put so much pressure to be in a relationship as kind of your default state.

And I just want people to feel comfortable being single, because I think it's such an important like skill to have and such an important time of development in your life.

So first I wanted to talk about kind of my history and how my mentality has shifted over the years.

First, when I was in high school, I was very much a quote unquote career woman and all I wanted to do was focus on my studies.

No boys, no distractions, no shoulders.

Actually went on a couple dates in high school, But I never let it turn into a relationship because I felt so uncomfortable being called somebody's girlfriend.

I felt like it would make me.

He would like somehow domesticate me and make me less of a career woman.

Then when I finally got to college, I really entered a boy crazy stage of my life.

Honestly, a lot of it was because for the first time, I felt like I didn't have a whole lot of sense of self or like a promising future.

Honestly, I felt so insecure about my skills, my intelligence, my future that I really just wanted a boy to, like, cling on to you and to kind of give me a yeah, a sense of self because I just felt like a nobody floating around college.

Our Parentsgeneration was kind of the generation that met their significant others in college or in their early twenties.

So in my head, college was the time that I, like, met my husband and I was like game time ladies, I have two and 1/2 years in college to find a man, lock him down, and this is like my only window of opportunity.

So I was relieved, gung ho, about relationships created.

I had a lot of fun tinder dates.

I had a couple of relationships, which overall, I think we're in that positive.

But I definitely didn't feel completely comfortable being single.

And every time that I was single, I was just thinking of it as like a little gap before my next relationship.

And that brings me to the summer of 2018.

It's so weird to say 2018 like it was in the past.

I feel like it's still fucking 2018.

That was the summer before I graduated college, and for a couple months I lived by myself.

For the first time in my life, I was working on my YouTube channel, and I think for the first time since I left high school, I felt like myself.

It's not like I was a fully like, self actualized person, and I've still so far from that.

But I think that was the first time that mindset that I have right now kind of clicked the best way I can describe.

My mindset shift was I used to think my life was of wrong calm where my end goal was to get married to some dreaming and and then my movie ended.

But now I think of my life is like a sitcom with 10 seasons, and I'm just at the beginning of Season two.

I have so much time in my life before I figure out who the fuck I am.

I have so much growing to dio I'm gonna have all of these different jobs living all of these different cities, and it's kind of like along for the ride with myself, and I feel like that's a good place to be so Anyways, I feel like it's easier said than done to shift your mindset, but I thought it would be helpful in this video to dissect some of the misconceptions that I had in my previous mindset, where I felt guilty for being single and I felt like I needed a guy in my life.

So the first influence, which I kind of mentioned before, is wrong calms and coming of age fields.

Now I still to this day love be a good cheesy wrong come and I know that they are sometimes horribly written and they have really problematic ideals.

But I will enjoy it anyway.

Thanks, but I don't think I realized until recently how much effect the wrong comes.

I watched when I was younger, had on my view of myself and relationships recently.

Thank the Lord that have been worth female directors.

Greta Gerwig.

Here's just a quick round of applause for Greta Gerwig being Greta Gerwig and also searching groaning Oh, praise the Lord.

What a power couple.

But when I was growing up, the only context where I saw a woman be a protagonist was in a wrong comet was in a romantic setting.

Anywhere else.

She was the sidekick.

She was love interest.

So again, a romantic setting which probably more than I'd like to admit, definitely influenced me to feel like the way that I had control over my life or like, kind of my life narrative was to hunt down a man or to be the love interest.

And that's like not what being a woman or getting like a human being is about, you know, Another thing was coming of age films, which is one of the few genres that actually features like young people and the traditional coming of age narrative is him getting the girl or having sex.

And especially in college, I really internalized that message to mean that growing up and becoming an adult meant getting a boyfriend, which is not.

That's not how we experience coming of age it all, Really.

I think that my coming of age was spending time with myself, which you never see in movies and anything going back home to Maryland and spending time with my friends and feeling like, really loved in a friendship context.

Really, My first relationship, like, was not a coming of age for me at all.

But that's not a story that we really see told in pop culture.

Second of all, something you definitely contributed to my quote unquote boy crazy mentality was, admittedly that I derived a lot of validation from male attention.

That's kind of hard for me to admit, because I really, really want to be like a really great feminist with no internalized misogyny in my entire life.

But oh, honey, do any of us I don't know, growing up in my hometown girls were just not cool.

Honestly, like our site is a real problem with just hating teenage girls.

In general, there was definitely an writing feeling in my high school.

That girl's just, like weren't cool.

They weren't funny.

And if you wanted to have cool friends, you should hang out with the guys.

Well, hash like I'm not like other girls.

No, I genuinely, like, was kind of one of those girls.

Like like I had girlfriends in high school.

But at the end of the day and, uh this, like, cringe e social climbing slash social positioning.

I never would go out of my way to hang out with them so that I could feel cool like I would with guys gross.

But I think a lot of people experienced this to like our society sets up woman to compete with other women for male attention.

We are told this false narrative that male attention is a limited commodity and that we have to hunt it down because in order to feel valuable and in order to even like exist as a visible part of society, you have to be seen by then.

This is like a huge problem in Hollywood and in the modeling industry as well.

Where a woman over three kind of just like disappear.

It kind of just this unsaid cultural thing where it's like, Oh, you're like over 40 like you go and hide in the shadows Now nobody wants to see your wrinkles.

God forbid you offend anybody with your human skin signed up.

But if you guys saw oceans ate, one of the most infuriating things about that movie to me was the fact that they like CD I blurred out.

Sandra Bullock and K plan Jin's wrinkles.

I wouldn't even say wrinkles like they have aged so gracefully.

But even like the phrase Asian gracefully kind of implies that if you age and like a normal fucking way where you have wrinkles and lines on your face that that's even a bad thing or that's ungraceful, there's no escape.

Forget I have seen kind of the sentiment on, like, read it before, do that like, Oh, you better take advantage of all of the attention you get when you're young, 20 something because like it or not hot shit in your entire life, then it puts all this pressure on such a narrow part of your life in order to like, yeah, grasp all this male attention and feel like you exist before you, like, disappear into the shadows, which is just like a horrible way toe have to think about life.

Another aspect of this male attention thing for me was definitely the fact that I gloved up pretty late in my life.

I was just not that cute When I was younger, I felt so invisible and I had all these crushes on guys that would just never, ever like me back.

So when I caught to college and I first was like, Oh, I guess I can like kind of cool guys now I got such satisfaction and like satisfaction is a gross word to use for that.

But I felt so validated.

Even going on tinder and like matching with an attractive guy was like a type of high because I had never experienced that before.

I was like, Holy shaped like if this guy saw me in high school like he literally would not look twice at me.

And now I'm going on a date with this guy and he's attractive and he's paying attention to be like, Oh, one of you.

You think everybody feels validated in a certain way when attractive people pay attention to them, Which is just like biology, baby.

But at this point in my life, Okay, honestly, I think the real fixed of the problem is you date Ah, hot guy who has a really shitty personality.

And then you realize that hot guys, we're not actually all that kind of a shyness of attractive people were.

So I think is everybody grows older, they become more confident in themselves.

They dated more people.

So a little bit of that, I don't say desperation, but kind of internal clamoring to be like, validated by attractive people, wears off a little bit.

Another fear of mine with being single definitely went hand in hand with my fear of aging.

I kind of talked about this before with the male attention thing, but for some reason it really settled in while I was in college that this was like my chance to meet a life partner.

This was literally when I was 18 I was like, I must find a man that I can lock down before my eggs dried out because I'm already getting old, baby, kind of counterintuitively.

As I've grown up, I actually feel like I have more time in my life.

When I was 18 I felt like my youth would be so short.

But now that I'm 21 I'm like, Holy shit, I have nine more years before I'm 30.

Even at 30 I'll still be really young.

So I have so much time Thio figure out myself and to like one day down the line.

If I want to get married, find somebody to do that with Well, that was the least romantic explanation of love I've ever heard.

Do the marriage with me, please, even with friends that I talked to.

Nowadays, the question always comes up.

When do you want to get married?

Because it's such a conundrum.

In this modern day and age where you want to have a successful career, you want to be your own person.

But everybody's magic number is still 30 there, like I want to be married by 30 I wanna have kids by 35 to me it does feel like a really fucking unfair biological trap because men have so much time and they're also told that they're attractive for so much longer.

Like a guy who's 45.

People were still like Azadi Woman who are 45 single.

They're not like Zanni Mommy.

What?

Yeah, let's take that back.

Men feel like they have so much longer to get married.

And I think I definitely does give them an advantage in the dating game because they don't feel the same pressure that a lot of young women do.

Thio lock somebody down.

They feel like they have time.

They feel like they have options and therefore they can shop around.

Maur and women are left with this scarcity mindset of like, I better pick up all the good men before they're gone.

Before they're taken, there aren't gonna be any left.

What I'm slowly realizing as I get older is that, like literally every single year, I feel like a different person.

I look back and myself from a year ago and I'm like, Who the fuck with that?

Why was she so dumb?

Why was she so insecure?

And that's great because that means that I'm growing as a human being.

I have just become a lot more excited about growing older.

I hate that women are told that they almost lose value as they grow older.

It's like what the fuck You gain experience, You gain knowledge.

I'm gonna be smarter, funnier, Better it sex Finally figure out how to style my bangs.

What?

I'm 30 like I'm just gonna objectively be a better person.