There’s a subtle cultural rotation happening right now, and if you’re paying attention, you can feel it. Vogue’s Chanté Joseph recently asked, “Is it embarrassing to have a boyfriend now?” not because romance is suddenly shameful, but because centering your life around a partner feels increasingly optional and honestly, outdated. Still familiar, still comfortable, but more like a cardigan you only reach for out of habit, not desire.
Tate McRae’s Nobody’s Girl from her recently released deluxe version of her album So Close to What taps into that shift without preaching it. Not in a loud, manifesto way, but in a quiet flex — a girl who figured out her life works better when it belongs to her. No moralizing. No bitterness. “So hot, so smart, so witty,” she sings, a wink at anyone who ever assumed you couldn’t love yourself first. At twenty-two, she’s running her own orbit: career, friends, love, heartbreak, glitter, planes, heartbreak again and still, nobody owns her.
Being nobody’s girl isn’t a declaration against love. It’s the very modern awareness that your days, your routines, your moods, even your sadness, exist for you first. Independence is no longer a consolation prize or a waiting room until something “real” arrives. It’s the real thing. A priority, a status symbol, and increasingly, a shared cultural expectation. Relationships have shifted from essential plot points to optional supporting characters.
And that becomes even clearer in moments that feel less triumphant. Horseshoe, another song on McRae’s album, isn’t about heartbreak so much as the quiet truth that even when your life looks “lucky” from the outside, you’re still the one who has to carry whatever hurts. I’ve felt that tension — wiping tears between commitments, holding it together because everyone assumes you’re fine. Those moments don’t contradict being nobody’s girl; they define it. They sharpen the realization that your inner world is yours to shape, manage and make space for.
I think that’s what makes this era feel different. We’re no longer asking whether we “need” a relationship but whether a relationship can coexist with an intact sense of self. There’s no villain here, no anti-romance rhetoric. Just a generation quietly redefining what it means to choose yourself.
There’s a particular feeling in your early twenties when this realization hits. The walk home alone at night feels almost electric, like the city is giving you space to be entirely yourself. You scroll through old pictures, not longing for anyone to notice, but marveling at who you were, who you’re becoming. You text a friend a crisis update at 2 a.m., laugh at the melodrama, and then close your phone knowing the story still feels whole, even without a romantic audience. You’re fully present with your own life, and the satisfaction of that is magnetic.
This isn’t ascetic. It’s not celibacy-coded. It’s not even lonely. It’s just…tender. Selfhood as a soft place to land.
Being nobody’s girl, right now, feels less like a gap and more like a glow, the glow of owning your life in full: the heartbreaks on planes, the cities you cried in, the photos in your favourite shade of blue, the doors that closed and the ones that opened.
And maybe the real flex, the one Tate never quite says but stitches into every chorus, is that loving your life more than the idea of being someone’s feels like the most grown, most grounded, most quietly radical thing a girl can do.
Not because you don’t want love.
But because, finally, you want yourself more.