In Plato’s Symposium, the character Aristophanes tells us the story of humans who were originally two-faced, four-armed, and four-legged beings who were split and now spend their lives searching for their other half. I learned about this tale some time ago in a Philosophy class where I sat cross-legged in the seat closest to the window at the back of the row. My professor, I recall, played a video to explain it further. I was instantly drawn to the story, to the imagery that splayed across the screen of the humans who were barbaric with their double limbs. There was something hideously charming about it that stayed with me after that moment, so props to that professor.

While I have such deep admiration for this story and even love the romantic, idyllic element, it was the catalyst for that idea that as humans we’re missing something and that something can be quite literally found in another person. An idea that was picked up and adopted into our society, pushed to the masses that yes, if you just find that one romantic partner, you will be complete.

A question began to haunt me: what in us makes us feel as if we are missing something? Why do we feel incomplete as we are?

It’s so common that it’s ordinary, in my opinion, for us to feel as if we are searching for something, a certain part of life; it’s something intangible but there, a silent nuisance that comes and goes. It comes up when we don’t expect it: in the freezer section of the grocery store, on the drive home from the gym, on days where it rains so hard you can’t leave home, and on days where you pray for some clouds to cover the sun. It may not be a huge gauge for us; it doesn’t have to be an element that is inexplicably obvious, which almost makes it all the more confusing and painful—this feeling of wanting more: more understanding, more of a grasp on life—ultimately more peace.

This all, for a long time, was sold to us as a soulmate, a missing piece of yourself that can be found in another, filling those gaps with light.

Yet most of us know where the problem lies in relying on another person to complete you, so what if your soulmate is not found in another person but rather in ourselves? What if that desire to understand, to fill that missing part of ourselves comes not from another but from what we learn, how we expand over life as our perception changes, as we lose ourself and eventually find ourselves again? What if a soulmate is someone we meet within who we have yet to become? We were never missing a piece, something that is placed outside of ourselves, making us desperate in this world to find, but rather placed at the very center of us, waiting patiently to be discovered.

Now I know I’m sounding a bit woo, woo. Stay with me.

There are many definitions of soulmates and perhaps they don’t have to compete with one another; they can work alongside one another. I do believe you can love someone with your entire being, build a life with them, they can be your person, but not a person to fix you or make you whole. That in itself is a gift, and makes the relationship stronger. There is no onerous circumstance placed upon the relationship. You can have platonic soulmates—individuals who are meant to have a place in your life and you in theirs, a person who recognizes all of you without much explanation needed.

​Lastly, you can have a soulmate in yourself, the only person in the world that is there with you for your entire life.

I once wrote a poem of meeting an older version of myself, someone I meet later in life, the other half of my soul, not found in another but instead who I became, someone that I am currently becoming.

I run down the river, under branches, through mud, my feet screaming in pain until the water ends. I step into the air, free of trees, to find an inky sky bursting with stars and she stands at the edge of the water. I see that her hair is no longer ash or umber but white. She grins when she sees me. There is dirt on my face and I’m tired, but she holds out a hand, and I wrap it in mine, her green eyes are large as she takes me in. I am proud, she whispers. I made it, I say. But she shakes her head. I am proud because you stayed. And oh, the stories she will tell before her hand tightens, the piece of me missing returning once more, she, the other piece of my soul, not found in another but here, at the end, when all has been learned. We become one.

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I was in bed with a giant weighted blanket settled on top of me, and my dog curled up by my feet as I scrolled Pinterest looking for makeup inspiration. Scroll: AI girl with eyeliner. Scroll: AI girl with bold red lip. Scroll: **me squinting at the picture** AI-enhanced girl? I couldn’t figure out if she was real or not; regardless, the more I scrolled, the more a sinking feeling came over me: none of these girls were actually human.

I fear I was quite bad at determining artificial images until a series of events took place. Recently, I was at the florist, showing a picture of a bouquet I wanted. He looked up at me and grimaced, “That’s AI.” I took the phone back, damn really? I showed my hairdresser a hairstyle I saw on Pinterest, explaining, “Something like this, but it’s AI; I’m not sure what’s going on.” She simply nodded her head like she understood. I’m not sure when, but it had become nearly impossible to find a girl with a half-up-half-down look that was not only cute but also real.

Incidents similar to these, of course, happened over the past year or so since artificial intelligence has been implemented into our daily lives, but all of these occurred within one month. I chalked it up to overthinking, that my algorithm was off for whatever reason, until my phone flashed with a text from my best friend, “Why is all of the haircut inspo on Pinterest AI?”

Pinterest, a place that has always had unimaginable (and unreasonable) beauty standards, has been flooded with fake images, so much so that even after scrolling for minutes, I rarely saw real people. With each swipe, I saw another one of these “models” (generous word; could we perhaps come up with something else).

They were all:

• Thin

• Had impossibly smooth skin

• Small nose

• High Cheekbones

• Perfect Makeup

• Long thick hair

• Same smize that somehow also made them look dead inside

Of course, most of the inspiration on Pinterest has always followed Western idealized beauty; a recent online trend exemplifying just how deep it goes: “Is the Pinterest outfit cute or are they just thin?”

The app is notorious for beautiful images of women who have everything we should want, pushing those same rules that have been stamped into every girl since they turned 12. The ones that only seem to move further and further away with time. I could list them, but in truth, every woman already knows them. These are the things that women are taught not only make them desirable but also make them accepted and lovable. How young was I when I realized that how we look, how we present to the world, is correlated to how we are treated?

One could, of course, argue that nothing women have been taught to admire has ever been truly human. Occasionally, I will see an old modeling photo of myself and realize that some of them are not even close to looking like me; instead, they are altered, manipulated, or photoshopped versions of me, even when I was only fourteen. We must acknowledge that, while these AI people are terrifying, we have long looked up to the impossible. We knew the models we loved not only had professional photographers, makeup artists, hairstylists, and more, but also professional editors, yet we still wanted to look like them. I would be lying to you right now if I said I didn’t still want to look like them, because I do. I would be lying if I said I never spent time hunched over my phone editing a photo of myself, only to show it to my friends to make sure I didn’t edit too much. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend time staring at photos before I post them, wondering why the right side of my jaw was so very different from the left side, wondering if I tucked my hip too much or not enough (my hips have been my insecurity since I was 14).

As a teenager, I didn’t have AI, but I did have Instagram, and I can still remember the post I would look at day and night: a woman, but the photo was cropped so all you saw was her tanned, toned six-pack stomach and hot pink shorts. My desire to look like the person in this picture became so strong that I put myself on a diet (one of many) so strict that, on most days, I would eat only two pieces of turkey bacon. I don’t recall how long this went on for or even how much weight I lost, though I do remember my father grabbing my arm, pointing to his phone, where he showed a picture that was similar to the one I was engrossed by, but the girl was different in his; this one wore yellow shorts. “If you want to look like this girl, you have to eat,” he urged me.

There are moments when I think we have made progress from this, yet there are moments when I realize with brutal clarity that we may be worse off. Recently, I was in a fitting room when the young woman next to me stepped out in front of the shared mirror. She was on the verge of tears as she tried on dresses. Her mother, the attendants, all told her she looked beautiful, and she did; she looked absolutely gorgeous, but the only thing she saw were the imperfections of her body, and she said so. My heart broke for her, for all young girls.

So what does this mean? Do we keep chasing what has always been almost impossible, but now is certainly so? What does this mean for women? For the girls who follow us? The ones that follow them? Could we remember that these things aren’t even human, or will they be marketed, tweaked to be even more so? Will the goalpost for women, which is always moving, be even worse? Could we change the narrative?

A part of me wonders and hopes that this new technology will have the reverse effect. That, in seeing more AI-enhanced and flat-out just AI people, it will reveal just how far gone we all are. That this is not, in fact, beauty at all, but rather a carefully crafted image. Maybe this shift in thinking will bring the whole dam down, a type of blessing in disguise. That it will no longer be society or others defining what beauty looks like, but instead ourselves. That, to me, is the ultimate freedom.

It may be a matter of protecting ourselves as well. My friend, a great detective, found a way to shut off weight-loss ads on Google and AI-generated images on Pinterest. Though we have both realized that it is not a full fix, things often leak through regardless, but at a slower pace.

I do know that, for me, the most beautiful things I have seen in other women are the things that make them unbelievably raw and human, something I am attempting to extend to myself.

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“We would most likely have to do a hysterectomy, so we would remove the uterus.”

I heard the words but they sounded a bit far away. My body felt numb, like if you threw a bucket of cold water over me I most likely would not have felt it. Still my eyes prickled and I, to my horror, began to cry in front of the doctor.

They had found a tumor, which at this time, they believed to be cancerous. I wrote for Popsugar about this experience:

I sat in a bath that evening, watching numbly as water trickled up over my thighs, dipping over my stomach before receding. I stared hard attempting to see where the tumor was, but everything looked as it always had. All my life, I had been unsure about kids, falling into the 50/50 range. When I sat there, watching the water, I felt like crying, not because I wanted them, but because I wanted the choice.

Fortunately, after a second opinion, another surgeon determined it was a benign fibroid, and I was able to undergo surgery, albeit an invasive one, to have it removed while keeping my uterus. I was grateful to have the choice back, to know that if I ever wanted to have kids, I could, and that one day I would be sure. I was only twenty-one, after all. Yet now I’m in my late twenties and still as confused as I was back then.

I fear having children, and I also fear not having them. If I do end up with regret, which one is worse? Which is the kind I can live with, and which is the kind I can’t?

Could I bring a child into this world of violence and chaos? Could I take the risk of them inheriting every disease, cancer, or mental health diagnosis that runs through my family line? Could I have one when I still remember moments of curling in on myself, sobbing, thinking, I would never bring a child into this world. Why would anyone do that? Why would I willingly bring someone else into this place?

Could I also watch others have kids? The growing up, the shifting, the love that seems so powerful that I know, no matter how many times I read about it, I would never truly understand. Could I live without guiding someone through this world, someone who is part of me?

This choice looms over me, something I tend to shove to the back of my mind until I hear a relative or a friend of a friend from my hometown (it is often people in the suburbs who tend to ask this question, after all) say, “What will you do if you have kids?”

I have heard this refrain many times, for various reasons. Some ask because I prefer living in Manhattan, others because I like to travel, and some when I comment on my aversion to most bodily fluids. When and not if, like a guarantee.

I am envious of the women who seem to have that intrinsic knowing, that calling to be a mother—a group I have never been a part of and how do I explain that pain to people? The ones who simply ask, “What will you do if you have kids?” or “When will you have kids?” as if it’s so simple, as if I am part of that elusive club instead of watching it from behind glass, wondering if maybe someone like me isn’t meant to be a mother. Perhaps that is not something that is sad, but simply a fact.

People ask this question so flippantly, as if being a parent is easy or just another checkpoint you have to hit as an adult. As if parents do not grow, shift, mold, and break off parts of themselves in order to put another person first.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be better suited to being a father. Someone who has a child but does not carry it. Maybe I simply don’t want the absurd expectations pressed upon women the moment they become pregnant.

I am also envious of the people who know they don’t want kids. That they can say with utter certainty that they won’t regret it, and that even if they did they could live with it. Their future painted out before them, bright with possibilities, bright with the ability to imagine a future ahead where mine just seems dark & unsure.

I am swimming in neutrality, and while I always resented the older women in my past who would lean across the table, pat my hand, and say, “Don’t worry, you’ll change your mind when you’re older. You’ll want them,” now I wish I had their certainty, because I am older and still not convinced.

I often think back to that bathtub, to that fear of choice I wanted to lose, the one I am still afraid of losing. Recently, I was at my doctor’s office when I asked,“Could I have kids?” shifting my eyes down toward my gown. While no one ever said I would have issues after my surgery, I still wasn’t sure. The answer was yes, but only through a C-section.

“What would I have to do to freeze my eggs?” I continued, thinking of those girls who would pop up on my For You Page every once in a while, talking about freezing theirs. I remember watching those videos a few years ago and reassuring myself that I still had time, threw it to the back of my mind for another day, but now here I was. Damn, I thought while sitting in that office, I should go back and look up some of those videos.

After explaining everything, she slipped me the card of a nurse who would look into my insurance because, after all, my choice still relies on the healthcare system. I decided that in the fall I would look into it, somehow make it work, and give myself that choice for a few more years, until I am pulled one way or another, hopefully finding clarity along the way.

And yes, if I freeze my eggs, I will absolutely be naming them like Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada 2.

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“You will never rely on a man for money,” my mother reiterated this to me many times throughout my childhood. This specific time, her dark tortoiseshell sunglasses were pushed up on her head, her thick dark hair falling around her face. We were in the car (she tends to give her greatest lectures there). I was around eighteen, about to go to college, which I’m sure is what set her off to tell me this again. It wasn’t something I hated hearing, just something I expected

Versions of this consisted of but were not limited to:

Over my dead body will my daughters ever rely on a man for money.

A partner could get up and leave you any day, but what you build for yourself, your career? That can never leave you.

I will never forget what my mother taught me and I will teach you that you will never rely on someone else for money.

Over the past few years, there has been a glamorization online about finding a rich man to “take care” of you. It most likely started with trad wives and has slowly but surely seeped its ways into dating advice I’ve seen spewed all over social media.

First, I want to say that I do not think it’s inherently anti-feminist if you want someone of a certain class or wealth, the issue lies when one fully gives up autonomy and relies solely on this person. Often with this advice online, I tend to press my nose to the screen, wanting to yell, but you should have a safety net! A prenup! A job! Something!

I have an extreme fear of having a man, a partner, hold something as necessary as money over my head. I cannot imagine being trapped in a relationship, let alone a marriage, with someone who had that ability. Most likely because in my time being single in New York, I had felt it a few times. The men who looked at me when I did not cooperate, did not say what they liked, did not give them what they wanted, did not let an argument go. At times, I saw it at the tip of their tongue, ready to use as a weapon. Some I didn’t just see, but heard it. I learned that what was once a gift, could easily turn into leverage in the wrong hands. People can weaponize anything–from the cost of dinner to rent, to the things you need to survive.

I think of my mother when I see these videos online (rarely do I try to explain social media trends to her, let her live in retired bliss). The reason she drilled it into my sister and me from such a young age is because of things she has seen, the marriages she saw fall apart, the women who were left out to dry.

Or the women she watched suffer, wither away in unhappy marriages they couldn’t leave, her mother among them. I wonder what my grandmother, a woman who merely wanted the financial freedom to leave a man, would think of this epidemic of women wanting to solely rely on one.

She would most likely tell them that instead of watching videos about where to find a rich man, there are countries to visit, hobbies to try, languages to learn. The world is filled with a lot of pain, but the most beautiful part is the trying of it, is the making of ourselves. She would tell us that men are not the center of life, but simply a part of it; that the greatest thing you could do as a woman is to build a life that is wholly yours, something that if you want to, you can one day combine with another.

Every woman I know has felt like she was running out of time. I believe it’s our shared curse as women. It started for me around eighteen and followed me well into my twenties.

For most of my life, I had the awful habit of setting an imaginary age. It was a deadline by which I was supposed to have achieved everything in my career. If I didn’t, I would be a failure.

I would lay in bed at night, staring at my ceiling, and think: At least I’m not THAT age yet; I still have time. I wasn’t sure where this invisible weight came from, but I knew it was there, pressing on me—suffocating—as I tried desperately to outrun it.

I remember being twenty-two, curling in on myself on the bathroom floor of my parents’ basement as I cried. My thoughts hurled themselves down on me.

I had not done nearly enough with my life yet.

I thought I was going to do X, Y, and Z by now, and I had done none of it.

(Insert name here) was doing so much more than me, and we were the same age.

Comparison was not the correct route; I knew that. Still, I couldn’t help scrolling, watching people live their dreams through the screen in my hand. My fear gnawed at me from the inside out: I would never catch up, I would be trapped in a job I hated forever, and I would be in the same position when I reached my thirties, forties, and so on.

I thought, perhaps naively, now that I’m in my late twenties, that women younger than I would not feel this pressure or perhaps that they’d feel the weight but know they weren’t alone in it. Yet, at a party not too long ago, while speaking with a younger woman, I felt it: the confusion, the fear, and the doubt that every woman feels in her early twenties. I promised her it would get better, that she had so much time, and that she would not be stuck forever. I gave her the reassurance I so desperately needed to hear six years ago.

I vehemently believe that part of life is relearning—it is getting lost and finding your way back. This has been and will always be a frustratingly beautiful part of being human. The truth of it all is that your twenties are supposed to be messy. You are supposed to wander for a while before finding your way back to yourself. You are supposed to make the wrong choices about relationships, career, and where you live. I think these are not only common but necessary for this part of your life.

What I needed in my early twenties, more than anything, was to know I wasn’t alone. I needed to understand that women do not expire at thirty, forty, fifty, or any age. I needed to recognize that the pressure I felt wasn’t a personal failing, but a symptom of a patriarchal society. Often, it is women who feel the brunt of time; we are told we must have the relationship, the career, and the children by an arbitrary deadline. From a societal lens, we are taught that our “value” diminishes as we age—a ridiculous sentiment, yet one etched into our very being by the world we were raised in.

At a panel recently, a female filmmaker spoke about this exact brand of ageism. She said, “We need to talk about ageism more. We speak of it, yes, but it is so prevalent. If I show too much grey in my hair, I am past my prime. There was an age where I was too young, then a ‘sweet spot’ where I was old enough to be taken seriously but still ‘hot’ enough to be marketable. It’s ridiculous.”

In my early twenties, I needed to know what I know now: my dreams do not lose value if they don’t manifest by a certain age. I can’t go back and change that, though if I could, I would sit on the floor next to my younger self while she cried. I would tell her that she is not stuck forever. I would make her listen when I told her she has so much time, that she does not expire at a certain age, and that it is just a lie the world has told her.

I would, if I could, lift that horrible, crushing, invisible weight off of her—off of every woman—and throw it away. I would tell her that in a few years, she will look back and think, God, I was so young; I had so much time. I still have so much time

I always pictured my ex with a girl who wore linen—white linen pants, specifically. She would know how to sail, would have been born and raised in a city, come from old money, maybe be blonde. She would wear minimal but expensive gold jewelry that looked as if it was painted onto her chest. She would be successful, a lawyer, probably.

For a long time, I envied a girl like this. I desperately wanted to be like her; especially when he would critique my style, my choices, my hopefulness that, to him, read as a childish naivety.

How many times did I not only suppress who I was, but also my thoughts, opinions, and feelings? My teenage self would have been shocked at what I turned into in my early 20’s; a person who let fear of losing a relationship win over the respect for myself and for who I was. It’s so utterly embarrassing to write out, though not terribly uncommon, known as the act of self-silencing.

As reported in a Time article, “In the late 1980s, Harvard-trained psychologist Dana Jack identified a recurring theme among female patients suffering from depression: a tendency to self-silence, defined as ‘the propensity to engage in compulsive caretaking, pleasing the other, and inhibition of self-expression in relationships.’”

After my relationship ended, I would often wonder if I was loved for who I was, or if I was loved for how well I fit into what they wanted. Regardless, what I realized with startling clarity is that my friends have never tried to change me. In fact, they were the ones who showed me what love looks like.

They chose me when I did not choose myself, when I could barely drag myself out of bed, and cried on the floor for days. They chose me when I was too loud, too excited, and while they always held me accountable, they never undermined or belittled me.

Looking back it was evident that quite a few of my romantic relationships had an underlying anxiety. I was never at ease. I was walking on eggshells and instead of seeing this for exactly what it was—this person was not a match—I dubbed it as “butterflies,” the kind society tries to tell us are romantic.

My idea of love was two-pronged: what the media portrayed and what I experienced in my life. The former looked like a fantasy to me, albeit a lucrative one for the entertainment industry, the latter, in a romantic sense, showed me that love had to be earned.

Yet my friends showed me something different. For a long time I was lost, I shed weight constantly. I wasn’t taking care of myself, and truthfully, I did not want to. During this time, a close friend invited me over to her apartment. She pushed fresh pasta dough through her hands and fed it into a machine before ordering me to sit and eat. Once I was back at home, I curled up on the couch and cried while holding the left overs close like a stuffed animal. I realized that while, at this time, I did not have romantic love, I did have some staggeringly kind friends who showed more kindness than partners I had. I made a promise then to never accept a lesser love again.

The care and gentleness my friends offered helped me reevaluate what I wanted out of a romantic partnership. These relationships are different, of course they are, but I wanted someone I was excited to call and tell about my day, I wanted someone who would see the imperfect parts of my being and not wish it was something different, I wanted, more than anything, to be seen and to be accepted for who I was and loved for it. I did not find this in romantic love at first but rather in my friends. That is the purest kind of love I could imagine: to love for the soul I carry, for all my faults, and to want me anyway.

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I was in a mostly empty bar in Europe sipping warm water when my ex sat down next to me.

He pushed his legs out in front of him, and I can vividly remember the way he looked up, how a piece of his brown hair shifted to the side. I remember too when I met his eyes and it felt like something clicked into place in the back of my brain.

I know you.

Of course I didn’t. Of course, he was a finance bro so he very well might not have thought any of this about me—at least at this time. Of course the most I knew was that he sat in front of me once or twice during a history class.

It was a start of something though, we went on to date for four years and for all of it, I thought he was “The One.”

Yes, the elusive one.

The most popular origin story for “The One” goes back to ancient Greece. One of my favorites, even if I don’t necessarily agree. In Plato’s Symposium, the character Aristophanes, tells us the story of humans who were originally two-faced, four-armed, and four-legged beings who were split and now spend their lives searching for their other half. This idea of the other half has spread across cultures and seeped its way into history.

Time passed, and marriage—for all the beauty of this origin story, was an arrangement or transaction rather than something based in romantic love—at least until the 19th century where romantic love became the ideal. What followed was a shift in valuing the emotional connection over the powerful.

It wasn’t until some time later when the word “soulmate” made an appearance; first recorded in 1822 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter he describes it as a necessary spiritual connection for a happy marriage. The combination of romanticism on the rise and a perfect marriage, made the word surge in popularity.

Now we’ve found ourselves in the twenty-first century where we still romanticize the idea of a soulmate, the one, even the twin flame which resulted in quite literally a cult (check out that bad boy on Netflix if you haven’t).

There are a few big questions here for me, the first being what if we find this soul mate, the one, and the relationship doesn’t work out? Were we wrong? Or perhaps the more probable answer, the less romantic, less idealistic, but beautiful in a different more tangible way: the one is just a concept, just an idea.

My other issue lies in the lack of agency. Agency is something I value deeply, most likely because my mother taught me that it was precious, because her mother taught her it was precious. “The One” hands over our agency, it says this is your person—no ifs, ands or buts. This concept can affect all genders, but feels as if it has been especially pushed onto women. The Disney movies and fairy tale books we were raised on—they were all the same concept weren’t they? Find the one. Then we grow up and we realize: wait.

Wait, what if we find the one and it isn’t what we thought it would be? Should we stay? Even if it’s bad? What if it’s not “bad” but we just want more? How many times have people, specifically women, stayed in less than desirable relationships because of this notion?

I certainly did. Once, after a particularly bad fight in my first studio apartment, I was left crying in the bathtub. A concerned friend asked what I was doing, why I would stay and my answer was simple.

“He’s the one. I felt it when I saw him.”

I would repeat this sentiment quite a few times but I would add: what if I never have that feeling again? It scared me, to think I would never love someone again, that they would never love me. It was that fear that kept me there for a long time.

After one of my close friends went through a similar break up, we sat on her bedroom floor. I picked at the frayed ends of her carpet as we mulled over what possibly could have been that feeling we had when we first met our exes. It bothered us so much that we got up, crossed the hallway, went into her mothers room like we were teenagers again to ask what it meant, to give us some type of answer. She looked lost for words.

“Maybe it meant nothing, maybe it was just a feeling or maybe it meant they were supposed to be a part of your life but not the entire one.”

Maybe she was right, and maybe that was okay; more so than that, I was sure that I would be okay.

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