Self-Obsessed Women Always Win. Always.

On ambition, self-possession, and why love should be invited into a life—not become the entire floor plan.

29th September 2026,

My parents did not let me date until I had something going for myself.

Not until college. Not until some arbitrary birthday arrived and legally transformed me into a woman capable of making questionable romantic decisions. Their metric was stranger, and, in retrospect, considerably more useful.

I had to have earned something.

Money. Recognition. Independence. An accomplishment with my own name attached to it. Something—anything—that proved I had begun constructing a life before I started reorganizing it around somebody else.

Romance, apparently, required prerequisites.

At the time, I thought this was deeply inconvenient.

Now I think they may have altered the trajectory of my life.

I grew up in an education-first household. Achievement wasn’t treated as an extracurricular activity you squeezed in between the more exciting parts of being young. It was the architecture. Everything else had to learn how to live inside it.

My parents never taught me that men were unimportant. They taught me something far more useful:

I was important before one arrived.

There is a difference.

I love love. I am embarrassingly susceptible to its entire premise. I believe in romance, devotion, partnership, the delicious insanity of finding one particular human being disproportionately fascinating. I don’t subscribe to the modern performance of pretending relationships are beneath ambitious women. Wanting to be loved has never struck me as intellectually incompatible with wanting an extraordinary life.

But love and centrality are not synonyms.

And my parents made absolutely certain I understood that.

No boyfriend, friendship, relationship, crush, social circle, or other temporary government was allowed to become the capital city of my existence.

I had to remain my own jurisdiction.

Perhaps that’s what I mean when I say self-obsessed women always win.

Not narcissistic women.

Not women incapable of compromise.

Not the exhausting species of person who believes self-love means treating everyone else as supporting cast.

I mean women who are sufficiently preoccupied with the construction of their own lives that they cannot permanently abandon themselves to participate in somebody else’s.

Women with plans.

Women with interests.

Women who know what they are reading next.

Women who have somewhere to be on Thursday that has absolutely nothing to do with whether a man texts them back.

There is a particular power in having a life that continues in someone’s absence.

My parents cultivated that in me almost accidentally.

When I wanted to fly planes, they let me fly planes.

When I wanted to ride horses, they let me ride horses.

When I wanted to make art, they let me become an artist.

I was encouraged to try things with almost unreasonable confidence. There was never much discussion about whether something was conventionally feminine, practical enough, impressive enough, or likely to become useful later.

I wanted to know something?

Learn it.

I wanted to try something?

Try it.

Growing up, my parents told me I could do everything.

So, naturally, I attempted everything I could get my hands on.

They gave my curiosity an extremely long leash.

But there was one thing they were remarkably strict about:

I was not allowed to become distracted from myself.

And I think there is a psychological consequence to raising a girl that way.

The world spends an extraordinary amount of time teaching women to become desirable. How to be chosen. How to maintain interest. How to decode ambiguity. How to become beautiful enough, agreeable enough, mysterious enough, available enough—but not too available, because apparently even accessibility requires choreography.

Very little of that interested my parents.

Their concern was whether I could stand on my own two feet before somebody came along offering me a pair to lean on.

Because dependence has a way of dressing itself up as romance when you’re young.

So does sacrifice.

I know this because I have made spectacularly romantic decisions myself.

I gave up Ivy League opportunities to move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a man.

There is a sentence.

The relationship ended a long time ago.

And strangely, I don’t regret it.

Regret is too simple a word for decisions that genuinely changed you. I made the choice with the information, emotions, and priorities I had at the time. It took me somewhere. It cost me things. It gave me others. And eventually, like many decisions made in the name of love, it became less about the person I made it for and more about the person I became after making it.

But it taught me something my parents had apparently been trying to teach me for years:

never make another person the sole proprietor of your future.

Love can influence the floor plan.

It should not own the building.

Which brings me, unfortunately, to the fucking trad wife epidemic.

I understand the seduction.

The sourdough. The linen dresses. The beautiful kitchen. The babies with suspiciously clean faces. A husband somewhere beyond the camera apparently earning enough money that nobody has to discuss health insurance.

Visually? Excellent campaign.

Existentially? I have questions.

To be clear, I have absolutely no quarrel with a woman who genuinely wants to stay home, raise children, cook dinner, maintain a household, or structure her marriage traditionally. Domestic labor is labor. Raising children is consequential work. Feminism that gives women every option except the ones it finds insufficiently sophisticated isn’t much of a feminism at all.

What unsettles me is the aesthetic rehabilitation of female dependence as female fulfillment.

The suggestion that opting out of your own financial, intellectual, or professional agency is somehow a return to femininity. That ambition made women miserable. That independence hardened us. That perhaps the cure for modern womanhood is to retreat into a beautifully lit kitchen and make bread while someone else possesses the economic leverage.

I would be catastrophically unsuited to that arrangement.

I could perhaps manage the bread.

The existential surrender would be more difficult.

Because I don’t want my security to be another person’s personality trait.

I don’t want access to my own life contingent upon someone continuing to love me correctly.

And I certainly don’t want dependence repackaged as softness simply because the apron is expensive.

There is a difference between choosing domesticity from a position of agency and constructing an identity around the absence of it.

One is a life choice.

The other can become a liability with very good lighting.

And perhaps I’m particularly allergic to the fantasy because my parents spent my entire childhood building the opposite instinct into me.

They did not raise me to become indispensable to a man.

They raised me to become indispensable to myself.

I think women are sometimes given two equally tedious options.

Become the woman who disappears into a relationship.

Or become so aggressively independent that needing another human being is treated as a character defect.

I reject both.

I want interdependence without self-erasure.

I want a life large enough to contain extraordinary love without requiring me to evict myself to make room for it.

And that requires a certain amount of self-obsession.

The good kind.

The kind that asks: What am I building? What am I learning? What am I becoming? What interests me when nobody is watching? What would I still want if there were nobody around to be impressed by it?

Those questions are not selfish.

They’re structural.

Because relationships change.

People leave.

Sometimes you leave.

Careers pivot. Cities stop fitting. Friendships expire without anybody necessarily becoming a villain. The person you once imagined beside you in every future photograph can eventually become someone whose birthday you have to think twice to remember.

And when that happens, there had better still be a you underneath all that we.

This is why I don’t think self-obsession and love are opposites.

I think healthy self-obsession makes better love possible.

When another person is not responsible for giving your life its entire meaning, you can actually love them rather than employ them.

They don’t have to be your ambition, entertainment, identity, emotional regulation, social life, purpose, financial infrastructure, and proof that you’re desirable all at once.

What an exhausting job description.

They can simply be someone you love.

And you can remain someone you love too.

Perhaps that is the real luxury of having a life of your own: love becomes elective rather than anesthetic. You don’t need another person to rescue you from the unbearable vacancy of yourself.

You choose them because your life is already inhabited and somehow you’d still like to make room.

That is a completely different kind of romance.

And it is probably why, despite everything, I remain such a believer in love.

I don’t think loving yourself more means loving other people less.

I think it changes the grammar.

I need you to make my life worth living becomes I have built a life worth living, and I would love to share some of it with you.

Much sexier sentence.

My parents understood something about this before I did.

They weren’t trying to raise a daughter who never needed anybody.

They were raising a daughter who would never need somebody at the expense of herself.

So they made me earn things.

They made education non-negotiable.

They indulged every curiosity except the temptation to make another person my entire personality.

And somewhere between flying planes, riding horses, making art, moving countries, falling in love, making terrible decisions, making excellent ones, and discovering that the distinction between the two sometimes takes years to become apparent, I developed a rather inconvenient belief:

I am responsible for making my own life interesting.

No man can do that for me.

No relationship can do that for me.

And, more importantly, no ending can take it entirely away from me.

That’s why self-obsessed women win.

Not because they always get the man.

Not because they always get the job.

Not because every decision works out beautifully and the universe rewards women with good boundaries and expensive hobbies.

They win because whatever happens, they remain in possession of themselves.

And perhaps that’s the only kind of winning over which we have any jurisdiction.

There is an old Cher story I have always loved. Her mother once suggested that she should settle down and marry a rich man.

Cher’s response was perfect:

“Mom, I am a rich man.”

I think my parents raised me to understand the sentiment long before I ever heard the line.

Love the man.

Marry him, if you want.

Stay home with your children, if that is the life that genuinely fulfills you.

Move cities for him if, after serious consideration and perhaps one mildly alarming spreadsheet, that’s the life you genuinely choose.

But have a name outside his contacts.

Have money with your name on it.

Have work—or something—that exercises your mind.

Have friendships he did not introduce you to.

Have opinions he didn’t give you.

Have competencies nobody can divorce you out of.

Have places you want to see whether he comes or not.

Have a life that would grieve his absence without collapsing into it.

Be deeply in love.

Be embarrassingly romantic.

But remain a little obsessed with the woman who has to live with every decision after everybody else has gone home.

Because the great love of your life should never require the disappearance of the life that was yours to begin with.

And that makes me wonder—maybe the women who “win” at love aren’t the ones who finally get chosen, but the ones who never stopped choosing themselves while they waited to see who else was worth choosing.