Why would a man be there?

If you're unfamiliar, "Why would a man be there?" originates from a TikTok video where a young woman talks about vacationing with her besties every year and then proclaims the phrase over and over. And it now pops up over videos of women (or even pets!) encountering men in their spaces and immediately naming the discomfort of that intrusion.

It's humorous now, of course. But I find myself saying it all the time. 

Not because I dislike men, or because I'm bitter about relationships. But because when I look around at the life I've built, I find myself asking the question with surprising sincerity:

Why would I want a man to be here? 

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I've started and stopped writing this blog more times than I can count. Not because I don't know what I think, but because I do.

There is something oddly vulnerable about admitting that I am deeply happy on my own.

For most of my life, romantic partnership felt like an assumed destination. Not necessarily because anyone explicitly told me so, but because it was woven into the background of everything. You grow up watching movies with love stories. Young girls are socialized around fairytales of prince charmings. The trajectory of life always includes husbands and babies. Chatter about dating is integral to the way we grow up. You absorb the idea that partnership is the thing toward which everyone is moving.

And for a long time, I assumed I was moving there too.

I dated a lot in my twenties. Enough to collect stories. Enough to have forgotten names but remembered the wounds. Enough to convince myself I was participating in the search everyone else seemed invested in.

But if I'm being honest, I don't think I was ever searching very hard.

Part of that was undoubtedly shaped by my experiences. Like many women, I accumulated enough disappointing interactions with men to become increasingly skeptical of the whole enterprise. I’ve definitely joked that I was giving up on men entirely. The joke landed because there was truth in it. Some fueled by experience, even more by too much true crime. 

What surprised me was that somewhere along the way, "giving up" stopped feeling dramatic.

And it mostly felt... fine?

The more I reflected on my own life, the more I noticed a disconnect between what I was “supposed” to want and what I ACTUALLY wanted. Friends would talk excitedly about moving in together, planning weddings, building lives around another person. My reaction was rarely envy.

More often, it was confusion.

Not because there was anything wrong with what they wanted. It simply wasn't something I found myself longing for.

Or at least, not enough to organize my life around it.

As many of my friends and loved ones began identifying as LGBTQIA+, I also found myself opening up to the possibility that love, if it found me, might not look the way I had once imagined. I stopped caring very much about what package it came in. If I did find a partner, I wanted connection, companionship, humor, kindness, and mutual respect. The rest felt negotiable.

Yet even after broadening my understanding of what partnership could be, something remained true: I was remarkably content on my own.

What surprised me most was what I discovered in its place. Solitude. Not loneliness. Solitude.

The kind that feels settling rather than empty. 

The kind that lets you spend an entire Saturday sewing, reading, writing, wandering through a bookstore, getting coffee with a friend, rearranging furniture for no discernible reason, or disappearing down an internet rabbit hole about some obscure topic that has captured your attention that week.

The kind that allows your life to belong entirely to you.

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time untangling expectations I inherited from other people. Expectations about work. Expectations about family. Expectations about success. It turns out romance belongs on that list too.

For much of my life, I assumed partnership would be the missing piece. Not because I felt incomplete, but because that's the story we're handed. We are taught to imagine our lives as puzzles, waiting for the right person to show up carrying the final piece.

But somewhere in my thirties, I realized I wasn't holding an unfinished puzzle (except if you count my hobby of jigsaws).

My life already felt whole.

Not perfect. Not easy. Not free from grief, loneliness, or uncertainty. But whole.

The friendships I've cultivated. The chosen family I've built. The hobbies I've accumulated. The books curated and arranged by color on my shelves. The cats who routinely challenge my need for order. The writing that helps me make sense of the world. The quiet routines that shape my days.

These things form a life that feels deeply, authentically mine.

A partner could certainly become part of that picture someday. But they would not be the piece that completes it.

And before anyone worries that I've become entirely anti-romance, let me assure you that I remain deeply committed to the concept. I simply prefer to experience it through the pages of wildly unrealistic romance novels.

There, impossibly handsome men say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. Emotional baggage gets resolved in approximately three hundred pages. Communication issues are wrapped up before the epilogue. No one leaves dishes in the sink. No one needs to be reminded to schedule a dentist appointment.

It's a beautiful system.

The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that what I admire in partnership and what I desire for myself are not always the same thing.

I love witnessing healthy, loving relationships in the lives of people I care about. I celebrate their weddings. I cheer for their happiness. I cry at the sentimental speeches.

I simply don't experience those moments as evidence that something is missing from my own life.

Maybe that's what surprised me most.

I kept waiting for panic to set in.

For the biological clock. For the loneliness. For the sudden urge to browse dating apps and convince myself that a man holding a fish in his profile picture might be my soulmate.

Instead, I bought more books.

I learned to sew.

I adopted cats.

I built a life.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't waiting for anything at all.

I was already here.