The "Choose Yourself" Epidemic

There is something almost funny about the way the internet has turned ending a relationship into a public service announcement. With the release of “Stop the Wedding!” by Ashe, social media has been flooded with variations of the same question: What would make you stop the wedding? The answers range from the almost ridiculous to the painfully serious. Some people say, “If they don't talk to your family,” while others point to much more serious warning signs, such as cheating, manipulation, disrespect, or simply being made to feel as though they are not good enough. What begins as a conversation about relationship “red flags” quickly becomes something much larger. People are not only talking about bad partners. They are talking about the moment they decided that being in love was no longer a good enough reason to abandon themselves.

Perhaps that is why the conversation feels less like a trend and more like an epidemic: the choose-yourself epidemic. It is everywhere. People are questioning relationships they once assumed they were supposed to preserve. They are walking away from engagements, marriages, situationships, and relationships that may look perfect from the outside but feel completely wrong from the inside. Women, in particular, are having a very public conversation about what happens when the traditional timeline no longer feels like the only possible life. But this isn't entirely new. In many ways, choosing yourself is one of the oldest battles women have fought.

Today, telling someone to leave an unhealthy relationship can sound obvious. “Just leave.” “Choose yourself.” “You deserve better.” But historically, leaving was not always a simple choice. For much of American history, marriage was deeply connected to a woman's legal and economic survival. Under the doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity could effectively become incorporated into her husband's. Married women faced significant restrictions surrounding property, wages, contracts, education, employment, divorce, and custody. Marriage was not simply a private romantic relationship; it was an institution that could determine a woman's financial security and place in society.

That makes the modern ability to leave a relationship much more significant. A woman being able to say, “This relationship is not right for me,” exists within a legal and social system that previous generations spent decades fighting to change. The women's rights movement of the nineteenth century was not simply about voting. At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, activists challenged the legal and social structures that placed women in subordinate positions within marriage. The Declaration of Sentiments addressed issues including property rights, education, employment, divorce, and women's lack of political representation. The movement was ultimately questioning something fundamental: why should another person have authority over the direction of your life?

Economic independence became an important part of that struggle. Married Women's Property Acts, beginning in the nineteenth century, gradually gave married women greater rights over property and earnings. These reforms did not create equality overnight, but they helped establish the idea that a woman's financial life did not have to belong entirely to her husband. Economic independence matters because choice without resources can be an illusion. A person may technically be free to leave a relationship, but if leaving means losing their home, financial stability, children, or ability to support themselves, the decision becomes much more complicated.

This history makes today's “choose yourself” language more interesting. The ability to choose yourself did not suddenly appear because of social media. It was built through generations of women fighting for the ability to control their own lives. The woman who can leave a marriage, maintain her own income, own property, pursue an education, or build a career is benefiting from battles that began long before the language of “boundaries” and “red flags” became popular online.

Perhaps the most complicated part of this modern conversation is our mothers. There is a growing number of women talking openly about reaching their thirties and forties and realizing that the traditional timeline—marriage, children, a house, and a family—does not necessarily have to be their timeline. Some are unmarried. Some do not have children. Some travel. Some learn languages. Some return to school. Some build careers or businesses. Others simply discover what it feels like to have the freedom to decide what they want their lives to look like.

There is something particularly emotional about watching women discover these possibilities while thinking about the women who raised them. Some of our mothers never got to do those things. Maybe she wanted to travel but could not. Maybe she wanted to go to college but married young. Maybe she wanted a career but became a full-time mother. Maybe she stayed in a relationship because leaving would have meant financial instability. Maybe she simply never considered that another life was available to her. That does not mean her life was meaningless, and it does not mean marriage or motherhood was a mistake. It means she was making decisions within the world available to her.

The world available to her daughter can be different. A daughter can learn a language her mother never had the opportunity to learn. She can travel somewhere her mother could not afford to go. She can build a career her mother was discouraged from pursuing. She can live alone without automatically being considered incomplete. She can choose marriage, children, both, or neither. That does not have to be a rejection of the previous generation. Sometimes it is an acknowledgment of what previous generations sacrificed.

The internet has also created an entirely new vocabulary for relationships. “Red flag,” “bare minimum,” “emotional availability,” “weaponized incompetence,” “love bombing,” and “boundaries” have become part of everyday conversation. Some of these terms are used so frequently that they can feel like internet clichés, but underneath the terminology is a meaningful change in how people understand relationships. A relationship is no longer automatically considered successful simply because it lasts. Longevity is not necessarily evidence of health. A wedding is not proof that two people belong together. A shared mortgage is not proof of compatibility. And staying is not inherently more admirable than leaving.

For previous generations, endurance was often treated as a virtue, particularly for women. The good wife was patient. The good mother sacrificed. The good woman kept the family together. She forgave, endured, and stayed. But what happens when endurance becomes self-erasure? At what point does keeping a relationship together require losing yourself? The choose-yourself mentality challenges that question. It does not mean every relationship should end or that marriage is outdated. It means that a relationship should be part of your life rather than the price you pay for having one.

There is also something strange about how much cultural importance we place on weddings. The dress, the venue, the flowers, the rings, the photographs, the families, the money, and months or even years of preparation can make a single day feel like the culmination of someone's entire life. Because so much has been invested into the wedding, calling it off can feel like destroying an entire future. But the wedding is not the future. It is one day. The marriage is what comes afterward: the ordinary Tuesday nights, the arguments, the illnesses, the career changes, the financial problems, the children if there are children, the aging parents, the unexpected tragedies, and the people both partners eventually become.

Sometimes the person standing at the altar realizes that the future they are agreeing to is not actually the future they want. That realization can come at twenty-two. It can come at thirty-five. It can come at fifty. There is no expiration date on realizing that something is not right. The money already spent does not make a relationship healthy. The invitations already mailed do not make someone obligated to stay. The excitement of their family does not make a person responsible for sacrificing their future. And the years already invested do not mean someone has to invest the rest of their life.

Choosing yourself also does not mean choosing loneliness. A person can want love deeply and still refuse to accept a relationship that diminishes them. A woman can want children and still refuse to have them with the wrong person. Someone can want marriage and still call off an engagement. Someone can love their partner and recognize that love alone is not enough. Someone can be single and incredibly happy, while someone else can be married and fiercely independent. These things are not contradictions. The real shift is that partnership is increasingly being treated as a choice rather than an obligation.

Although much of this conversation has focused on women, the choose-yourself mentality is not exclusively female. Men are also being encouraged to think about emotional health, compatibility, boundaries, and the difference between genuinely wanting a relationship and simply being afraid of being alone. The larger cultural shift is about refusing to measure a person's success solely by whether they found someone. For decades, adulthood was presented almost like a checklist: get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, retire. But people are beginning to ask a much more uncomfortable question: What if I do not want that checklist?

What if someone wants to spend their twenties traveling? What if someone wants to build a career? What if someone wants to learn five languages? What if someone wants to live alone? What if someone wants children but does not want marriage? What if someone wants marriage but does not want children? What if someone wants neither? And what if someone simply does not know yet? Perhaps adulthood does not have to be a race toward predetermined milestones. Perhaps it can be a process of discovering what actually makes a person happy.

This is why I do not think “Stop the Wedding!” is necessarily about giving women power. The power was already there. The song simply reminds people to look for it. Women did not suddenly become independent because social media told them to leave bad relationships. Women fought for property rights. They fought for education. They fought for employment. They fought for the right to vote. They fought for legal recognition. They fought for control over their own money. They fought for the ability to leave.

The women who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 were already asking questions that sound surprisingly familiar today: Who controls my life? Who makes decisions for me? What happens when the law assumes someone else should have authority over my future? More than 175 years later, the questions have changed, but not completely. Who am I outside of my relationship? What do I actually want? What would my life look like if I stopped living according to someone else's expectations? And perhaps the most frightening question of all: What if I choose myself?

Maybe that is the real epidemic. Not women leaving men. Not people rejecting marriage. Not an entire generation becoming afraid of commitment. It is people discovering that they are allowed to have a life that does not revolve around being chosen by someone else. The woman who travels alone, the woman who learns another language, the woman who goes back to school at forty, the woman who decides she does not want children, the woman who decides she does, the woman who gets married, the woman who does not, the woman who calls off the wedding, and the woman who stays are all making choices.

And perhaps the greatest tribute we can give the women who came before us is not to repeat their lives exactly. Maybe it is to use the choices they fought so hard to create. Stop the wedding if you need to. Stay if you want to. Leave if you have to. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Start over. Learn something new. Travel somewhere you have never been. Build the career you were told was unrealistic. Become a mother. Do not become a mother. Get married. Do not get married. There is no single correct version of a woman's life, and there never was.

The “choose yourself” epidemic is not about women suddenly discovering that they do not need anyone. It is about discovering that they never needed to lose themselves to have someone.