I’m thousands of miles from home, standing in the Albertina Museum, the largest museum for modern art in Central Europe. I’m young, in a beautiful dress. I danced with strangers last night, then jumped into the Danube. I’m living out a goddamn Billy Joel song.
And yet – I’m thinking about my ex-boyfriends. How terribly embarrassing!
The exhibit I am standing in is one with abstract and colorful sports paintings — there is a geometric depiction of a baseball scene and one of a man rowing. I’m hit with this wave of nostalgia. I want to send them pictures. I want to say, this made me think of you — even an ocean away surrounded by a feast of novelty and culture, I still think about you. And then I get incredibly frustrated with myself. Let it go. Be here now. Be “in your woman,” as my dear friend and I always remind each other.
Why am I thinking about a man!?!
Be detached. Be empowered. Your life is so much bigger than a man.
And it is.
But my life is not bigger than love.
Love is the very fabric of everything I am. And trying to suppress it, remove its memories, trying to edit it down into something cooler and more controlled, it starts to feel like resisting being fully human.
Where does this instinct come from? This immediate self-criticism for caring?
Because this reaction doesn’t actually feel like me. I am, at my core, a radically open communicator. I’m a love letter writer. A call-and-talk-it-all-out-er. An “I saw this and thought of you” buyer. A text-first-er. I believe healthy relationships are built on honesty, on saying the thing instead of expecting someone to read your mind, on avoiding resentment or misunderstanding by laying it all out there.
And yet, somewhere along the way, I learned that this version of myself, the one who feels deeply and expresses it freely, is something to be corrected.
That caring too much is embarrassing. That wanting is weak. That the more powerful version of me would simply…not.
This is the language of a certain kind of modern feminism. Indifference as desirability. Nonchalance as power. It’s everywhere, TikTok advice, Instagram captions, dating podcasts. The “empowered” woman is unbothered. Detached. Not preoccupied with something as trivial as romance.
This logic isn’t new. It echoes the message of Sherry Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches, the 2002 guide that still circulates today, an international bestseller, translated into over 30 languages, with millions of copies sold. The book encourages women to be confident, assertive, and independent- to avoid over-giving, to stop sacrificing their needs, to set boundaries.
My friend treats this book like her bible. It lives on her bedside table, dog-eared, annotated, revisited before nights out like a ritual. And I understand why. It has important messages and identifies a real problem (the tendency among women, to accommodate at the expense of their own well-being) but I believe the solution has been flattened and aestheticized. What’s being sold as empowerment, emotional distance, strategic indifference, I argue is often just a rebranded form of self-suppression. It doesn’t dismantle gender dynamics; it adapts to them. It’s still male-centered. The goal is still to be desired, just through a different tactic.
This emotionally distanced strategy for dating and love meant to free women of emotional over-investment creates a new kind of labor: monitoring your responses, timing replies, carefully calibrating how much you reveal so you never appear too invested. Indifference becomes something you perform, not necessarily something you feel. There’s a difference between having boundaries and performing disinterest. If empowerment requires you to constantly edit your natural reactions, is it actually freedom?
Trending ideas like the Let Them Theory or the Law of Detachment hold value, but that value gets diluted when detachment becomes something we perform. When we call it detachment but really, we’re curating. Really we’re risking losing directness, vulnerability, genuine desire.
So much, I think, is lost in modern love, in a culture shaped by technology and the gamification of feelings. Shame has been built around caring, around something that is, at its core, one of the most human things we can do. And my god what’s worth doing if not fiercely and clumsily and authentically? To be passionate, to be fully consumed and undone by the things you feel is such a deeply meaningful part of womanhood and of life.
Men might like “bitches,” but that’s not a life philosophy I’m particularly interested in adopting. Men like ego boosts. Men like convenience. Men like not being challenged. Men “like” a lot of things. That doesn’t make those things worth becoming. And I believe the men you actually want in your life will like your honest, full self.
Back in that museum in Vienna, I could have forced myself to move on. To swallow the impulse, to prove to myself that I had mastered detachment. That I was above it.
But standing there, surrounded by art – the most embodied form of care, obsession, overthinking, a refusal to be nonchalant – I thought maybe the goal isn’t to let go so quickly, but to get comfortable with the things I once loved still living on within me.
My love isn’t something I need to erase to move forward. It’s cumulative. Expansive. A growing, unwieldy thing, sometimes inconvenient, often overwhelming, that connects who I was to who I am becoming. And soaking up new splendor, falling in love with new people, places, things, it isn’t mutually exclusive with honoring the past.
Standing in that gallery, I realized my goal would never be to care less. It’s to care fully, without turning that care into something to be ashamed of.
Maybe real power isn’t in appearing unaffected, but in being unafraid to feel at all. Maybe the most radical thing isn’t acting like you don’t care. Maybe it’s refusing to pretend you don’t.