I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder.

Organizing my life around some idyllic future husband has always felt wrong to me.

By Jasmine Browley

Sept. 27, 2024

“You don’t want to get married?” Roy said.

I always bristled at this question. “No,” I said with a sheepish smile and modest shrug. I have learned to make people, namely men, feel comfortable with my steely answer through humble body language. “It’s too much of a burden to want that when I also want to live a really big life.”

Roy’s brow wrinkled as he played with the lukewarm French fries on his plate. This sunny diner reminded me of my favorite southern aunt’s kitchen. Maybe that’s why I felt so at home sitting here with him. Or maybe it was just him.

“I think I get what you’re saying,” he said in his Texas drawl. A long beat passed. This was one of the many things I liked about him — his flirty relationship with measured silences. Finally, he said, “I want to get married one day. You want to know why? I know my big life will be bigger with her.”

I met Roy at a bar crawl in Dallas on Juneteenth 2022, one of the best times and places to be Black, young and proud. Fresh off my flight from Chicago, I was warm, drunk and happy as I followed my girlfriends through a throng of partygoers. When I felt a tug at my denim shorts’ back belt loop, I turned around to see Roy standing there, all tall, dark and smiley.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Yuh — I think you can,” he replied.

We wound up dancing, joking and touching long enough for my friends to have to come find me in the crowd to share that they were moving to the next bar. Before following them out, Roy and I exchanged numbers. I never expected to hear from him again, just like with most flirtatious touch points I’d had with men over the years. I couldn’t have cared less.

At 32, I had long given myself permission to reach self-actualization with or without ever finding everlasting romantic love. I had familial love. Friend love. Unlike some of my girlfriends, whose ultimate joy hinged on their nameless, faceless future husband and children, I often panicked at the thought of tethering myself to such things.

“There’s so much more to life!” I would think to myself as my friends talked about their dream dress or the ideal diamond cut for the ring they would proudly wear for the rest of their lives. How they would be the matriarch in their modern-day version of the Huxtables — the epitome of the Black and excellent nuclear family structure.

All of that just made me nauseated to think about.

I would like to think my disconnect from domesticity stemmed from a string of teenage and 20-something heartaches at the hand of relationships and situationships gone wrong, but it started way before that. In second grade I noticed how serious the girls would get around their crushes. And how they would essentially change their little burgeoning personalities to suit what they thought would get the boys’ attention.

Even then, at 6, I thought, “Ew.”

I read that many adolescent girls are inundated during their formative years with images that shape their expectations of love, which informs most of their biggest decisions in life — and that most of the yearnings they would later have to be a wife were just the manifestation of early conditioning from the Disney fairy tale movies they watched growing up.

That’s exactly why I didn’t let myself expect too much from Roy that first night we met. Yeah, the flirting felt delicious, and he showed the classic signs that he liked me just as much. But so what? I had no vision of what was next and was fine with leaving him where I met him.

I hadn’t dated in nearly a year at that point, and it was wonderful, which was a bit weird. So I took to the internet to investigate, and I found the TikTokified term for what I had been feeling for most of my life — I had officially “decentered men.”

It’s a movement that holds space for women to put themselves first rather than focusing everything, whether they realize it or not, on men’s opinions and influence. After falling down the TikTok rabbit hole, I realized that one of the things I found I loved most about the phenomenon was that the movement wasn’t about rejecting your femininity. It also wasn’t about hating, intentionally repelling or removing men either. Men simply took too much energy to care about — for me, anyway — and this was about women not putting men at the center of their lives.

It’s not a new concept at all. At least four waves of feminism involved some form of women centering themselves over men in their lives, even cis-het women. Finally! I felt like I wasn’t alone in my disinterest with the concept of landing and keeping a man to be the validation of my existence as a woman.

And yet, my heart still leaped when Roy texted two days later. And my face hurt from all the smiling I did when we went on our perfect first date the next evening. My stomach ached from the deep belly laughs his well-timed jokes pulled from me.

We wound up spending the entire night together, bonding in a way I hadn’t with a guy since before I recognized the type of damage men could do if I wasn’t vigilant with my heart. God, who was I becoming.

Over the next several months, anytime I was in Dallas for work or to visit friends, Roy was a priority. When I was there, I was his.

The irony though, is that I would go a long time not talking to him at all. No texts. No calls. Nothing. It was a great way to affirm to myself that I came first. To not get too lost in the flowery poetic nature of it all. My life was still mine. My feet were still on the ground. There would be no family planning, no delusion, no fantasizing or floaty daydreaming about what a home would feel like if the two of us created one together.

Nope, I’d think. Men aren’t my focus. Roy isn’t my focus.

And that worked well until I made plans to see him during a trip to Dallas for my best friend’s birthday. I texted him an itinerary, planned a dinner, bought expensive outfits, coifed, waxed and primed myself in anticipation for the time we would spend together.

Upon touching down, I sent him a simple text: “Do you still have time for me? Just arrived in your city.”

“Absolutely,” he replied.

I texted him the location of the restaurant I had painstakingly chosen for us to have dinner that night. No response. I sent another text a few hours later to make sure the time I chose worked for him.

The hours ticked by. Nothing.

The next day, his radio silence alarmed me, so I reached out again to make sure he was OK.

“Sorry, I got caught up in some things,” he wrote. “Can’t wait to see you today.”

Totally fine, I told him. A do-over could happen that day at brunch, or that night at the lounge my friends and I planned to go to.

He agreed.

I shared all the meetup details. Cautiously giddy again, I imagined how the night would go — if people would remark on how good Roy’s and my version of Black love looked when we walked into the venue hand in hand.

But he never showed up.

The next day as I sat on the plane ride home, I had time to ponder just how much more space Roy took up in my life than I realized, and how his absence reinforced that. As much as I wanted to believe that my dream career, healthy friendships and self-indulgent hobbies took up all the real estate in my heart, there was still enough wiggle room for something else to get in.

Love? Eh.

Eventually, as I deplaned in Chicago, Roy texted a short, vague apology for his unresponsiveness. There was noticeably no further explanation for what caused it. At that point, it didn’t matter to me. I needed to hurry up and get home to steam the sexy dress I planned to wear for the dinner reservation happening in a few hours.

I had a hot date — with myself.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5603708&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310864#48145775)

I’m happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5603708&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310864#48145830)