The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India

In a culture of narcissism, love can save us from ourselves

I’ve been writing about our world’s upheavals for more than three years now. Over that time one of the most personally significant conclusions I’ve come to is that no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.

Cultural narcissism and societal atomization, gender divides and demographic malaise, political nihilism and violence… the many civilizational problems we see manifesting today increasingly seem to me to only reflect something gone tragically wrong at a much deeper level. Our societies feel more and more broken and mad because we are broken and mad, and we no longer seem able to keep a collective lid on it. The political is personal. So although I won’t be going full Faulkner and concluding that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself,” I do often find myself hungry for those discussions that manage to go beyond surface-level commentary of culture and politics to explore more lasting human truths beneath.

Which is why I’m particularly pleased to publish this extensive dialogue with

Freya India

.

Freya is in my estimation one of the very best young authors writing today. Her talent is to combine a fearless personal honesty with a genuinely penetrating examination of the human heart—with all its anxieties, hopes, and sufferings—and then to trace seamless connections between our common struggles and the realities of our broader cultural and technological landscape. Most importantly, she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

Freya India

Freya writes with a focus on issues facing young women at her Substack GIRLS, which feels a bit like reading a Tolstoy or Jane Austen disguised in the aesthetics of a teenage glam magazine. Do subscribe.

We both wanted to try something a bit new and different here and allow back-and-forth written dialogue to flow naturally and delve into some important issues in a unique way. So what follows is not a typical interview, but something more like a podcast—except in print and not three hours of shallow banter. And I do think we succeeded in producing something somewhat special, because the dialogue manages to tease out some really fascinating connections. For which I largely credit Freya’s open and refreshingly un-ironic style.

Below, we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.

And in the best half, after the paywall: why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and that you’ll check out some of Freya’s other fantastic work.

(Notes: This post will be too long for Gmail, so click on the title to open online or in the Substack app. Freya’s quaint British misspellings have been left intact for affect, do not be alarmed.)

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N.S. Lyons: You’ve written extensively on how social media appears to be contributing to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other mental health problems in our society, especially among girls and young women. The link seems well established, and the stats you’ve cited evidencing this are pretty crazy, such as the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14 increasing 138% between 2012 and 2019, after social media and smart phones became a thing. I encourage everyone to go read your work on this, on your own Substack and with Jonathan Haidt on After Babel. But I want to focus here on teasing out what I find to be a really intriguing thread running through your more recent writing, which hints that your thinking on these problems and their causes has evolved in some pretty important and interesting ways.

As I see it, this begins with your critique of “therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” This is clearly completely endemic today. As you’ve pointed out, just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.” Relationship difficulties are probably down to “anxious attachment.” Constantly “opening up” online about your issues and medications is celebrated; an SSRI prescription is a form of “empowerment.” Getting a Brazilian Butt Lift is now sold as a “life-changing and empowering experience” of “resculpting your confidence” and becoming “your authentic self,” and so on… 

And yet individuals—especially women—and society generally only continue to become more depressed, anxious, and risk-averse. All the therapy and empowerment doesn’t seem to be working. If anything it seems to be having the opposite effect, serving to make people less confident, more fragile, and more emotionally immature. What do you think is going on here? What’s driving this turn to the therapeutic, and what is it doing to us?

Freya India: Well, firstly I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy. Take the obsession with fighting the stigma around mental health. We are relentlessly reminded that mental health problems are stigmatised, that we need to tackle the stigma around medication, that we aren’t opening up enough, that we aren’t aware enough. This is just accepted as fact. Meanwhile the number of young people taking mental health medication is unbelievable. In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five! We have girls self-diagnosing with anxiety disorders and OCD and Tourette’s. Young women putting their mental health diagnoses in their Twitter bios and Tinder profiles. There was even a study recently revealing that 32% of all adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the US received prescription medication, treatment, and/or counselling for their mental health in 2023. And it doesn’t seem to make any difference. At this point, I think it’s an insult to tell young people that stigma is our most pressing problem.   

It’s easy to forget that mental health has become an industry. And like any industry, it has profit incentives. It has to drive demand. It needs to expand its customer base. And “mental health awareness” has become a very useful marketing campaign for therapy and medication companies. I think two things can be true: girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world, but also, a major part of it is the marketisation and medicalisation of their normal distress. Their despair and disempowerment is making billions.

In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?

I also think we get it backwards sometimes. People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. Young people hang out with each other far less than previous generations did at the same age. Friendships are much more shallow and superficial. I don’t get the sense that young people are honestly opening up to each other. We talk to therapists. We join online forums. We open up on TikTok, or chat with mental health chatbots. When we do talk about our problems, we disguise it in DSM diagnoses and obscure therapy-speak.

And so the worst part is, therapy culture deprives young people of the language to talk about what’s actually happening in their lives. They can talk about their ADHD symptoms and anxiety disorders, but find it hard to get at anything deeper. Instead of saying oh, maybe I feel insecure because I’m in a situationship where there’s no commitment or expectations or even basic respect, we have all these young women worrying that they are anxiously attached, or have an anxiety disorder, or relationship OCD—and even getting medication for it.

I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! Modern culture asks young people to accept and excuse more and more behaviour, to adjust to more and more change, and then diagnoses them when they can’t cope. So lately in my writing I’ve been trying to emphasise that it’s okay to be emotional. It’s understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now. That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. 

Because yes, humans have emotions. Women are emotional! That seems almost offensive to say now, but I don’t see why. I actually think not properly expressing our emotions is what makes us neurotic. The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. And an absolute joke to call it empowering.

For most young people, I don’t think they have a disorder. I think they’re experiencing normal distress, and they do need to open up to each other. Girls shouldn’t hide when they’re really not alright. But they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families—not on TikTok or Reddit forums or to some sketchy BetterHelp counsellor. And they need to use real words, not always couching everything in medical labels and therapy-speak. That’s what we should be encouraging.

Maybe it’s just me, but today there definitely does seem to be a deeply creepy top-down push to sever us from human connection, or even the human in general, and replace it with the digital and the unhuman. It’s as if there’s a growing suspicion of human interaction as something inherently messy and dangerous, while the virtual world is seen as cleaner and safer. We can envision this will, if taken to its maximum extent, deposit us in a “no contact society” like that which, for some reason, has been planned as a future for South Korea (with predictable results so far). Is it possible for us to disentangle the growing role of therapy culture from that of the internet and social media, or do you think these two forces have become inextricably linked in some way?

Of course the foundations for this therapeutic view of the self were laid a long time ago. Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and many others were writing about this in the ‘60s and ‘70s;

Frank Furedi

covered it excellently in the early 2000s.

But I think social media took things to a whole new level. Therapy culture mixed with social media is, in my opinion, a very damaging combination. Therapy culture encourages girls and young women to focus on themselves and their feelings; social media then not only spreads these messages but constantly reminds us that we are each a self. That we are the main character. That our selves are something to be endlessly managed and obsessed over.

Neither encourages actual self-improvement. Social media platforms reduce us to our identity labels or consumer preferences. Therapy culture distills us down into a diagnosis or collection of symptoms. Both fit us into neat categories. What actually matters—our character, our virtue, how we treat other people—is not something easily displayed online. Sure, people try—they tweet their political slogans and post about their activism, but that’s got nothing to do with their character. Says nothing about their private code of conduct. That, I think, is the most important thing about who we are, the most important thing for young people to work on and improve, but we can’t display it. So it holds very little value these days.

All this makes me think about how, from the outside, it looks as if young people are inundated with mental health advice. We have so much guidance! But the truth is, our culture has very little to say to anxious young people. So little to offer. We are too afraid to give actual guidance. There are no clear milestones or markers to follow to adulthood anymore. We stopped appealing to moral character. We got rid of anything more substantial—that was judgemental!—or anything to assure young people that they belong to something bigger—that was superstitious! All that’s left are endless empty platitudes. We tell young people whatever you want to do, do it! As long as it makes you happy! And if they say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we don’t wonder if it’s this morally ambiguous world, the collapse of any real community, this feeling that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. We don’t investigate further. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but I’d say that’s far from the truth.

While I’m saying all this, I can’t help but wonder whether young men and women even inhabit the same world now. From what I can see, young women are going further and further down the therapeutic rabbit hole—ruminating over “red flags”, obsessing over “trauma”, increasingly seeing the world and themselves through these psychological labels and terms. Do you see any of that happening with young men? Does therapy culture affect them?

Therapy culture definitely affects men, though I think in different ways. There are of course some men who adopt the feminine model of the therapeutic, becoming the soyboys of internet infamy. But increasingly the equivalent “rabbit hole” for men seems to be one of what we could call “self-optimization.” Instead of obsessing over trauma, we have young men obsessing over whether they’re doing enough. Whether they're waking up early enough to get in their daily stoic journaling practice, internet-sourced ideal workout routine, ice bath, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplement regimen—all before heading out to grind their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about how they need to side-hustle more on their passive income scheme. Others obsess over trying to discover and capitalize on whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, so that they can potentially find a leg up in a ruthless dating market.

Frankly this is all probably still healthier than women’s tendency toward internal rumination and self-diagnosis, since it at least emphasizes personal agency and encourages taking action in the world (and so is also a healthier choice than that of the large subset of men who check out entirely and retire to a quiet life of video games and depression). But the self-optimizers’ is still an anxious response to exactly the same societal situation, in which as you say there’s been a “collapse of any real community” and the dominant feeling is “that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves.” It’s the frenzied behavior of atomized individuals adrift in a world without anything solid, reliable, or permanent to support them, in which they can’t be sure of anything except relentless competition with each other.

I also see the predicament facing both men and women as in large part rooted in our modern crisis of authority. By authority I mean that power which can tell you what to do and you will accept this decision as legitimate and trustworthy. Our egalitarian culture is basically allergic to the idea of legitimate authority, or at least moral authority and all its traditional sources. Today it tends to be associated with authoritarianism and oppression of the individual.

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.

In any case, today authority has been relocated to the individual herself, in the name of liberation. Even the state now bases its moral legitimacy on guaranteeing freedom from repression for the self’s desires. But this means it is the shifting emotional whims and desires that move the self from moment to moment that become the real highest authority. The vaunted therapist then serves as a kind of priestly figure, an oracle who helps divine the sacred commands of the authentic self.

But without any legitimate external authority to shape the self, whether cultural or familial, there can’t be any real stability for the individual. There can be no real constraints on the desires of the self, since that would have to come from an authority beyond it; nor can there even be any awareness—let alone shame—that what the self desires might be wrong in some way. Because without an authority providing a moral framework there can be no right or wrong, indeed no moral absolutes at all—without some authority to judge, who’s to say? And today we abhor judgement. But it is external authority that helps keep the self anchored, imposing some structured identity, and directing it toward higher-order ends, including proper relationships with others. Without any authority, there is no universally recognized framework for establishing when someone is behaving wrongly toward another. Nor can we truly connect with others if we cannot move past self-regard.  So relationships of all kinds become tainted by solipsism and laced with suspicions of exploitation and repression. This status quo seems to be causing all kinds of social chaos today.   

You’ve similarly written before that: “My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness.” That, “when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more. This is not enough.” I think that’s exactly right. Without a strong preexisting moral and social framework to bind us and guide us—a “cultural jig” as the philosopher Matt Crawford would call it—we may be “free” to stretch in any direction we please but are left exposed without shelter, and without firm contact with ground in which we can grow the roots of an unshakeable character of our own.

I completely agree. This crisis of authority, combined with a lack of coherent moral framework to follow, makes life very confusing. I especially think it makes relationships confusing. To feel secure in a relationship, we need some sense of shared moral values, a foundation to fall back on. I wrote recently about how we’re all encouraged to set boundaries with our romantic partners now, essentially making up our own morality and deciding for ourselves what behaviour is acceptable and what isn’t. Which gets very confusing, since there’s no external authority guiding us on what’s right and wrong.

It’s also confusing because, on one hand, we’re told to set firm boundaries and not back down, but on the other, we’re encouraged to tolerate more and more behaviour. As you said, today we abhor judgement. So it feels as if we are expected to excuse more in relationships—we’re told that having casual sex is healthy and normal, that our partner watching porn is fine, that wanting monogamy might be asking for too much. If you feel uncomfortable with any of this, you’re made to feel insecure—or, the worst sin of all nowadays, needy. God forbid you have needs! We have a progressive movement that seems to kick down every societal boundary that’s been built over the years, and then demands we put our own back up—and defend them alone.

As for the whole self-optimisation trend, you put it perfectly. I agree that it’s another response from atomised individuals trying to anchor themselves to something stable, much like therapy culture. Both trends, I think, are ultimately driven by fear—a deep fear of hurt and abandonment, and an attempt to avoid it as much as possible.

As I see it, we’re so fearful now that we try to control every aspect of our lives and relationships. We try to “hack” dating and falling in love through graphs, statistics, and strategies. We try to control our emotions by diagnosing them or optimising ourselves until we don’t feel them anymore. It’s all very mechanical. Thinking in terms of input and output. If I just process my trauma, then I can reset my system. If I just become a high value mate, I can perform better on the market. And sure, some of this advice might be useful, but beneath it all seems to be this belief that there are perfect formulas for dating, for productivity, for success, and if we follow them rigidly we can avoid disappointment.

But it’s not true. Human connection is messy, it’s unpredictable, we fall in love in weird and incommunicable ways. And sometimes it’s not a perfect, rigid routine that makes you productive—it’s the messy, unplanned morning waking up next to someone you love. Sometimes it’s the chaos of your kids clambering into bed with you that inspires you to be better, not the morning breathwork or perfectly timed caffeine shot to activate your adenosine system.

I saw a tweet recently that was the perfect example of this. This young guy shared his Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine: journaling, red light therapy, breathwork, meditation, gym, ice bath, sauna, reading, all in perfect silence. No interruptions; no spontaneity. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s just not the kind of lifestyle you can have with other people around. Watching it, my first thought was, wow, if this is the ideal, no wonder young people are delaying marriage and having children. We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient…and alone.

And eventually, you end up seeing other human beings as distractions, as annoyances. Other people become obstacles. For women, men become obstacles to our healing and mental health. For men, women seem like obstacles to their ambition and self-development. Or vice versa. It all seems like an avoidance strategy to me, everyone trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt.

Maybe it’s the hopeless romantic in me but, in my mind, you do all those things for love. For family. We try to heal, we work harder, for our relationships, to build a more stable and reliable foundation for the people we care about. Isn’t that the point? What’s all this for, otherwise? But now it seems like we’re optimising ourselves away from each other, hiding away to heal ourselves, protecting our peace so fiercely we end up alone.

But no surprise, really. The constant cultural message is that we’re better off alone. Heal faster alone! Hustle harder alone! It’s such a cruel lie. Loneliness isn’t empowerment.

You’ve said before that “Our culture is actively de-masculinizing, dispiriting, demoralizing, degenerating, and frankly desexualizing (in the sense of putting men and women at odds and undermining truly fulfilling relationships between them…)”. As we’ve talked about, a lack of higher authority and moral framework is definitely part of this problem.

But beyond that, what else do you think is driving men and women apart? What do you see as “de-masculinizing” and “desexualising” in modern culture? And how do you think men and women can find the courage to come together again? Is it even worthwhile in today’s world?

Visiting Budapest not too long ago I was pleasantly surprised to find it a sexier city than what I’ve grown used to in the West. Today most Western cities, and our culture as a whole, often feel somehow deeply unsexy. Pornographized and depraved, sure. But sexy, as in the sense of an ambient electric thrill between men and women, masculine and feminine, that actually draws them to one another? No. There is too much mutual disconnect and suspicion between the sexes, layered over by social tension, risk avoidance, and a constant sense of frowning bureaucratic surveillance. Not to mention top-down cultural pressure to adopt a kind of universal medicated androgyny as a therapeutic ideal. Record-high rates of sexlessness and low family formation seem to reflect this dour vibe.

Hungarians have a reputation as being a bit cold and reserved relative to other Europeans, and certainly to Americans. And yet I found women in Budapest startlingly open and easy to end up flirting with, in comparison. For us to do so often simply felt more natural, relaxed, fun. But why? The thing is, Hungary is generally a much more sexually conservative culture than most of the West. In terms of language, at least, couples don’t even “date” there; they still engage in “courting.” How can a less libertine place feel more sexy?

On reflection, I’ve come to suspect these things are actually connected. Hungary’s social conservatism, its maintenance of latent traditions of more defined courtship rituals and gender roles, provides a more solid framework of established and assumed boundaries—Crawford’s “cultural jig” again—that helps contain and structure male-female relations. Simultaneously, it must be added, Hungary is just a much safer country than most of the West, with far less crime and much greater social cohesion—there’s less ambient public tension. In combination, these result in the opening of a protected sociocultural space between women and men in which, even if strangers, they can interact with less pressure and fear about where things may lead and how suddenly. Within this space, interaction with each other is free to become a spontaneous kind of light and unstructured play—which is precisely what flirting is supposed to be. Playfulness between men and women, between masculine and feminine, is basically what “sexy” is.

Play is the opposite of routinization, optimization, mechanization, coercion. Play helps make us human, even. That it so often seems to be missing today feels like a sign that we’re managing to lose something critically important to us as people—and that we’d better try to recover it.

Sadly there are many aspects of modern life that seem to be more broadly conspiring at once to drive men and women apart. The loss of traditional social structural supports is definitely one. Then there’s the dominance of algorithm-driven dating apps (truly the opposite of unstructured play), economic imbalances, and on and on… But if I have to pick just one thing to focus on here as a deeper cause of what’s gone wrong, I think we need to step back a bit and talk about the nature of that most fundamental source of connection, love—and how our understanding of it may have been derailed by both therapy culture and some well-meaning but misleading egalitarian conceptions.

The root of the issue, it seems to me, lies somewhere in the reality that the nature of a man’s love for a woman is not the same as a woman’s for a man—at least at first. And we disregard this difference to our detriment, because I think it has some real consequences.

From the beginning, a man’s love for a woman is expressed through sacrifice. He sacrifices time, resources, energy, attention, optionality, and more for her (catching feelings really is a disaster for self-optimization). In part this is the acting out of that ancient and universal courtship ritual, in which he demonstrates he can and will protect and provide for her. But, while this ritual yielding up is open to deception and exploitation in both directions, it is not, in the case of genuine love, something that’s quite transactional. Rather a man in love is liable to find that he desires to do so; often the longing of a lonely man is not just to be loved by another, but to have someone to love—someone to make all the inevitable labor, hardship, and sacrifice of life meaningful and worth it.

And, not infrequently, this male instinct to self-sacrificial love is revealed to be total. During the mass shooting attack in an Aurora, Colorado theater in 2012, for instance, a full quarter of those killed were young men who physically sheltered their girlfriends from bullets. Tellingly, we can find with even a cursory look that such behavior by men is not in fact extraordinary, but remarkably commonplace. This is something that can hardly be explained by a view of relationships as merely a transactional exchange or compromise between self-interested individuals.

This means, however, that there is a kind of subconscious but fundamental asymmetry present in male-female relationships from the start, because a woman cannot afford to engage in the same kind of self-sacrificial love for a man. Not because women are incapable of it, but because by nature she rightly reserves that kind of love for her children. A woman who wouldn’t leap to take a bullet for her husband, let alone boyfriend, absolutely might do so without hesitation to protect their baby—and we would not find this discrepancy unusual or morally compromising. Indeed our moral instinct is that we ought to expect her to choose the life and wellbeing of her children over her mate if she must make a tragic choice between them, and we may even find ourselves troubled if she were to choose the reverse. She is needed more by her child, and so has a responsibility to act accordingly.

When women do try to apply the same mode of self-sacrificial love towards men, it seems to always end badly one way or another. Either a codependent dynamic degrades her respect for the relationship and for him over time, or they have children, she transfers this love to them, and the man feels abandoned. And when men expect women to act in this way it’s even worse—surely few flaws are more fatal to attraction than for a man to want his woman to take on the role of his mother. To do so is to try to elide the responsibility of his own given role. In fact it’s probably an important moment of maturation for any man to come to terms with the fact that, after having left boyhood, he can expect to receive unconditional self-sacrificial love from no one but God.

But while men cannot expect this particular form of love from a woman, they nonetheless obviously do need something reciprocal from her in a relationship. They can’t just sacrifice for her indefinitely for nothing. What does a man hope for from a woman’s love? In short, for someone whose loyalty he can fully trust, and commit to in turn. A woman who, though she may disagree and argue on everyday matters, he knows is fundamentally on his side because, bound together at a deeper level, they form one indivisible team. Not just another competitor in life, but a helpmate. Someone with whom he can truly relax his guard and confide in. A woman who will always have his back, even when he stumbles, shows some vulnerability, or needs support. A haven in a heartless world.

There’s a problem, however: this hope is complicated, even directly contradicted, by a woman’s priorities during the courtship process. As many men will recognize, a woman tends to enter a relationship in a mode of intense surveillance and evaluation that feels almost antagonistic. Consciously or subconsciously, she is constantly challenging and testing him, even seemingly fabricating disagreement and drama out of thin air if necessary to do so. She is probing his defenses, looking for vulnerabilities. She is essentially trying to determine whether he is as personally strong and solid as he appears to be, or whether he’s faking it. And so she’s constantly trying to find ways to shake him, to sniff out any disqualifying evidence of weakness. That she does this is only understandable and natural, because to women and children weak men are the dangerous men.

But this dynamic—which women may interpret only as part of an innocent romantic desire for a man to be open and vulnerable with her—presents a real risk of sabotaging the development of a deeper relationship. She may demand more and more vulnerability, like she’s peeling an onion, but a man can’t actually afford to allow too much of this until there is some fundamental transformation of the relationship out of this antagonistic mode. The truth of course is that everyone is flawed; if a woman looks hard enough for weakness in any man she will always eventually find something (the infamous “ick”), degrading her own attraction to that man. Push hard enough and do this enough times and she will inadvertently destroy her own relationship, either by instinctually developing contempt for a man she once respected, or by driving him to resent her for providing none of the supportive love he needs while still expecting his continuing sacrifice.

So both partners find themselves at an impasse. To her, he seems unsatisfyingly emotionally detached. To him, emotional detachment is the only thing keeping her attached and at least still sleeping with him. From my amateur observation a huge number of relationships today seem to end up stuck at this point, sometimes for years, and eventually crumble.

How can this chasm be crossed? I think it requires a leap of faith—by both partners, but today maybe especially by women. She must choose to effectively make her own reciprocal form of sacrifice. Not of herself, but of her initial self-centeredness in the relationship. She has to subdue the self-interested pragmatism of her own nature, with its relentless desire to optimize, and choose him as the man he is, flaws included. This further requires recognizing the full value of the sacrifice he is offering her in his role, and the legitimacy of the claim, in a sense, this makes on her. Her own sacrifice is then a submission, not so much to him—though it may look that way to outsiders—but to loyalty and trust in him. Though for many today it may feel uncomfortably close to submission to his authority, in throwing herself fully behind him—rather than above or below him, let’s say—in this way she turns the orientation of her self outward from the merely individual and takes on a manner of loving another person different from that of either man or mother.

This act functions as something like a miracle. The antagonism latent in the relationship is defused, the chasm overcome through a new unspoken covenant. In allowing herself to become fully his, the freedom is granted to him to reciprocate and fully open to her. Together they have carved out a space beyond the competitive world for that rarer and deeper love which is

The secret sympathy
The silver link, the silken tie
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind

Love is salvation from selfishness. It is always rooted in sacrifice, necessarily including some of the priorities of the self and its interests. Our culture used to understand the magic of this sublimation implicitly, as in the old wedding vows declaring unity “for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health…” Indeed the whole ritual symbolism of marriage was to affect the transformation of binding two selves as “one flesh.” But we seem to have managed to mostly tear this apart today.

This is all a very long way to try to explain just how distorting and damaging I think therapy culture really is today, especially for women, and why. If one is told constantly that the epitome of personal “empowerment” and self-actualization is precisely that one should never sacrifice anything of the self and its desires—to always prioritize “finding yourself,” “staying true to yourself,” and maximizing autonomy—then the formation of deeper relationships is made effectively impossible. Even acts of love then become mere “emotional labor,” to be weighed up and traded as a transactional commodity. But while women may be told they needn’t and shouldn’t ever sacrifice anything of themselves, of course they do—without doing so they will never be able to solidify a genuinely loving relationship. And men will either do the same and remain in the shallows of non-commitment or become resentful that the sacrifices they do make are not recognized and properly reciprocated. The solipsism and narcissism of our culture is pure acid to relational bonds of all kinds, but especially the romantic bond.

Meanwhile our insistence on a strict egalitarian ideal, not only in law but also in expectations, roles, and responsibilities, works hand-in-hand to undermine relationship formation. Male-female relationships not only naturally feature but require asymmetries in sacrificial roles and responsibilities in order to achieve the truer equality of higher, unifying love. Insistence on rigid egalitarianism deters us from the humbling ourselves that’s necessary to willingly embrace those given responsibilities to others along with our rights.

Finally, to tie this back, our cultural schizophrenia seems to dilute and confuse the core motivating erotic “story” driving each of the sexes emotionally. If for men this story is making a desirable woman entirely, willingly his, for women it is notably the mirror image: something like attracting the strong and capable (i.e. potentially dangerous) man and forging an unbreakable bond with him that is uniquely, exclusively special. All romance then becomes basically about developing and proving that bond. With this story disrupted, both are left in an unfortunate place: shallow sex (if that) without real eros. Society is then left “desexualized” at a deeper level, unfulfilled and without the natural pathway to higher sacrificial love that eros points to. No wonder in that case that our culture feels “unsexy,” unloving, and unhappy.

Is it “worthwhile” for men and women to come together again? Of course! Men and women need each other; we are better with each other than we are alone. But we should remember that, fortunately, love exists because we were in fact made for each other, whether by evolution or design. We already know deep down how to come together. We probably just need to escape the storm of pathological cultural interference that’s descended between us in order to be able to recover the old ways again. Which, who knows, we may even find enjoyable. But then maybe I’m also just a hopeless romantic.

Haha, well we might think of course it’s worthwhile, but I really do see young people giving up. Or at least, giving up in quiet ways. Maybe they’re still having relationships, but they’re doing it all very half-heartedly. Half-in, half-out, to avoid being hurt. Never quite letting their guard down. No real commitment or compromise.

I love what you said about play, and I really think that’s missing today. It reminds me of one of my favourite C.S. Lewis lines from The Four Loves: “Until they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always laughing at each other.” To me that’s true love—laughing together, laughing at yourselves, laughing through life and its milestones, even through tragedies and arguments. The best couples, I think, are always smirking, grinning, winking at each other, like they share some secret the rest of the world doesn’t know about. They see something we can’t. It’s so playful. And I think that when you slip into your worst traits sometimes—your neurotic, overthinking side, or maybe your forgetful, absent-minded side—if your partner only gets frustrated, you’re with the wrong person. The right couple can laugh and find humour in each other’s flaws.

The problem is, for many young people, we never saw our parents play. We grew up in broken and blended households. Our parents are often two strangers who can barely look at each other. We associate relationships with trauma, turmoil, disloyalty, deceit, and suspicion. Relationships were always serious, strained, never relaxed enough, never safe enough, to play. You can’t play when you’re searching for threats.

Of course, young women should be wary when choosing partners. Especially if they have divorced parents or had an unstable childhood, and they don’t know what healthy love looks like (which, tragically, is true for many young women now). They should be looking for risks and warning signs, particularly if they want to start a family. But what they need is real guidance—wisdom and advice from older women they trust, not from TikTok therapists funnelling them endless lists of “red flags”. Our relatives hesitate to give their opinions on our partners now, friends don’t want to do it either, but I think we need more judgement. We need more scrutiny from people who know us intimately, and less from “experts”. More stepping in from friends and close communities to help us make that huge decision. Then, once you’ve chosen someone, both men and women need to take that “leap of faith” you mentioned—what

Mary Harrington

would call “radical solidarity” between the sexes. Now it’s both of you versus the problem. You’re staying put, so it has to be solved. From that foundation, you can give each other grace. Accept each other’s flaws, and hopefully even laugh at them. Poke and tease each other about them. I agree that, for the most part, a man’s love for a woman isn’t the same as a woman’s for a man and vice versa—and part of that grace is not trying to change each other, but filling in one another’s gaps.

And so I agree with what you say about women needing to take that “leap of faith”, but I would add that this of course only works with a partner they can trust. There’s no sense wishing your girlfriend would relax and stop nagging and being neurotic, if you aren’t making her feel safe. If you aren’t trustworthy, or even kind. We have to feel safe to relax into the relationship. That’s when the self-centredness drops, and the guard comes down. I guess what I’m saying is two things are required. Men need to show that it’s safe to stay. And once women see that, they can work on relaxing, and submitting to, as you say, trust in him.

Ultimately what both sexes need, I think, is a cultural message that it’s okay to depend on each other. We should depend on our partners—to stay, to be faithful, to give support. And from that we can be more independent. Long-term relationships shouldn’t be about losing yourself, but becoming more of who you are.

Which makes me think about how I often see older conservatives trying to convince young women to get married and start families by talking about duties and obligations. That just doesn’t work. I agree that we should be encouraging meaningful relationships, but I would phrase it more like, the modern world is so chaotic, so unpredictable, and everything changes so rapidly, you deserve a constant in your life. Something stable to depend on. A grounding force. Shelter from the storm. Christopher Lasch’s “haven”, a “last refuge of love and decency.” If you look at the world and feel disheartened about where it’s headed, if you believe there must be more to human existence than consumption and competition and hedonism, that’s the value of love, and family. You can create what Lasch calls a “small corner of the world”. Bad as things get, fake as things feel, you have something real. I suppose I think of love these days as Bob Dylan put it, “Nothing ‘round here to me that’s sacred ‘cept you.”

But yes, the trouble is young people seem to have a core belief that love is transactional, a commodity that can be exchanged. Probably because we grew up displaying ourselves like products on social media, then advertising ourselves on dating apps, and maybe even had a parent who left the marriage for someone else. I see this belief in young people’s obsession with appearance, in the obsession with optimising ourselves, even in the terror of ageing we’re now seeing among teenage girls—all seems to me an attempt to become a better product, to avoid getting traded in, or exchanged for someone of “higher value”.

But again, back in The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes true Eros as a voice that “makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.” And that, “No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman”—that would be to “step outside the world of Eros altogether.” True love is illogical. It’s this person and this person only, whatever the obstacles.“ Better to be miserable with her than happy without her,” Lewis writes, “Let our hearts break provided they break together.” (Sorry, I love that book!)

Anyway, what I’m saying is, real love is a little deluded. It’s not, yes this person will fit perfectly around my productive schedule, or, yes I’ve done my healing work and assessed my attachment style and now I can allow in an equally healed person. It’s meeting someone at a random, probably inconvenient time, right when your career is peaking or before you’ve even begun your big healing journey, and thinking, damn, guess I can’t get things done now. Guess that’s me not concentrating for the next year. Your head is just spinning with them. Dying to have them with you all the time, to know what they think of everything, to listen to every song they love. Hearing them in every lyric; reading them in every word. We’re ashamed to admit these sort of feelings now because we’ve had it drilled into us that dependence and attachment is a bad thing, but that’s love, that’s being alive. Ask someone truly in love about their partner, ask how they met, and this giddy, delirious, almost childlike voice comes out. They light up talking about them. It’s them, it can only be them. It’s not transactional, there was no cold calculation.

And you know, we have all these negative words for long-term commitment now. “Settling” has become a bad thing. But I love that word. Settling down. Settling your nervous system. Because only once you’re settled, can you play.

Beautifully put. To shift topics only slightly, you recently published a rather searing essay asking “What’s Become of Us?” In it you write about how you increasingly find yourself “becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.” And that the collapse of moral norms, “our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image,” is perhaps as much a cause of our mental health crisis as a consequence. 

You note that “So much of modern culture now seems to exist to excuse our self-obsession,” and conclude that: “I think more generally our problem is a progressive culture where we are afraid to say what is decent moral conduct, where we can’t really call out what is undignified or distasteful anymore, where we’re terrified to enforce any ethical expectations.” From this perspective therapy culture and its demand for personal psychic comfort suddenly looks a lot more like a means of covering up and justifying a collapse of moral norms than a genuine concern for well-being.

I saw this as something of a turning point in the direction of your work and broader perspective on our culture and its problems: from health to virtue; from how we feel to how we ought to behave and who we ought to be as people. This seems like it’s begun taking you into a quite different, deeper level of critique than what you were focused on previously. But how do you see this? What was it that prompted this shift in your perspective?

Yes there was definitely a turning point, but I think more so in my personal life and then it came out in my work. I’m quite an introverted and sensitive person, and—as you can probably tell from my writing—I often overthink things! I’ve spent so much of my life quietly obsessing over how I feel. Stop feeling this way. You should feel more like this. Why do I feel so much? What’s wrong with me? Way too much time in my own head.

But over the years I’ve realised I have to cut it out. I can’t solve my feelings. To live my life and actually be helpful to people around me, I have to stop going inwards and start looking outward. Anxiety is very self-absorbed. The only relief I’ve ever gotten is by turning toward other people and their problems. Which is why I cringe when I see girls being told on TikTok that “people-pleasing” is a trauma response, or warned against giving too much of themselves to others—don’t do any “emotional labour” for anyone, careful of being too “codependent”, that kind of thing. Basically, being told not to be selfless because it’s a trap. I think we should be very wary about telling this generation to be less selfless and attached to people. I think the answer to a lot of anxiety lies there.

And yes! I do think this cultural emphasis on therapy and our own psychological comfort is a cover-up—or at least a way of coping with—the collapse of moral norms. We don’t feel like we can rely on others anymore, so we obsessively manage our own mental health. We don’t have as many obligations and duties to others, so we obsess over what we are owed. We fixate on what would make us feel better, not be better. And yeah, maybe we’re not so much at the mercy of others anymore, but now we are stuck at the mercy of our own feelings.

So yes, I started out writing about social media and therapy-speak—but I’ve realised it’s all part of something much bigger, a deeper rot. This worship of the self. Our loss of obligation to others. The collapse of moral norms. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re looking for answers to anxiety but never think about how you act, never really reckon with yourself, you are searching in vain. I’ve been trying to work out this mental health crisis for years now, and I keep coming back to this big gaping hole—we don’t talk at all about character. You know, the basics. Do you lie? Are you selfish? How kind are you? How grateful are you? I really believe that the only way to find relief from anxiety, to find self-esteem, self-respect, self-love—everything we’re searching for and is so prized in modern culture—is trying to live a more virtuous life. The attempt of that, again and again. Anyway that’s what I see myself focusing on for a while, mainly because it’s so missing in the mainstream and it’s the advice I need to hear.

It’s also just been my experience. A few years ago, I made a commitment to myself to focus more on how I behave rather than how I feel. It’s hard, really hard. But since I’ve tried my life has changed around me. I’ve come to believe that what’s making a lot of people anxious is there for a reason—that sometimes it’s telling you to work on yourself, so that you find your way to better people, better places, onto a better path. Not because you manifest a better life or anything, but because, as C.S. Lewis put it, “Good and evil both increase at compound interest.” Little by little, you find a heaven forming around you. But first you have to get out of the hell of your own head.

“Whoever walks in integrity walks securely…” I think it was Aristotle who argued that only a virtuous person could ever hope to be free from anxiety, because only in virtue can every part of the soul, emotional and rational, achieve psychological unity and coherence and “speak with the same voice.” Or at least “character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” Funny how we seem to keep having to relearn the oldest lessons. Certainly that’s been my experience. Where do you see this path taking you moving forward?

My writing is definitely moving in a deeper direction than I ever anticipated. In one way or another I keep circling back to religion, without even consciously trying. I’ll start writing about the problems I have with some popular therapy term or TikTok trend, and end up talking about how we need roots, shared values and something more enduring, like it comes out of my fingertips.

But it’s also not something I’m comfortable preaching to others. Some readers have noticed my writing leaning toward religion lately, and a few have urged me to be more explicit about it. Some have guessed I’m scared to go near it, or that I think it’s “uncool”. It’s not that. It’s just that I think religion is a very private thing. I cringe a bit when I see people display it online too much, like part of their personal brand. As with anything personal or intimate in our lives, I think displaying it online degrades it. So I’m going to keep a lot of my experience to myself, at least while I’m working it out.

Besides, I don’t think that approach works. I’m not sure you can instruct someone to become religious, even if you believe it’s the way out. I think it’s something that happens to you, when you’re open to it. It happened to me after heartbreak, at a time when my life was falling apart around me. Everything crumbled at once, and I found something lying in the rubble. I don’t think you can just demand people have that kind of experience.

What I can do, what I’m trying to do, is put into words how hard it is to be without religion. To feel your way through this world without moral guidance. To exist without any sense that you belong to something bigger. To have nothing to atone for; nobody to feel indebted to. And to show that yes, we might not be shackled to old-fashioned morality anymore, but this world will certainly shackle us to something—fame, followers, feelings, our own reflection. All of which seem to make us miserable. After all the mental health awareness, girls and young women are more anxious and depressed. After all the female empowerment, we are more fearful and risk-averse. After all the mantras about self-love and self-expression, we seem even more unhappy with who we are. It’s just not working.

What I do know is this world is chaos and if it’s going to drag you anywhere it will be downward. That without anything secure to hold onto people tend to sink. And I really believe our anxiety is alerting us to something. The torment is real; young people are suffering. But I can only think it’s calling us, calling us to something more, to hold ourselves to something higher, to find something to follow. We each have a moral compass and it’s spinning out of control. So are our heads. I can’t help but feel it’s time to change direction.

I know you’ve spoken about having a similar journey (another word therapy culture has ruined for me) and I’m curious how you see this. Do you think those who find religion, or feel they’ve gotten closer to God, have a duty to talk about it? To help others who are struggling? Does that even work, or is it something better wrestled with privately?

I share your tendency to cringe when people are too vocal about their faith and their personal piety, or trying to make absolutely everything about religion and its importance. Whenever I see that kind of thing I can’t help but recall Christ’s warning about those who love to pray “on the street corners, that they may be seen.” In fact, honestly I view all forms of preaching and assertive evangelism with, if not distaste, then at least deep skepticism. I see it as often outright counter-productive. Maybe it works for some, but in my case it never did anything but put me off, and for a long time. I feel lucky to have come late to religion despite the best efforts of preachers!

I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, by people who in their genius showed the Truth rather than told it. And, even more than that, by witnessing people I knew and admired who, even when the world was falling apart, even in the face of personal trial and persecution, remained unbowed and undaunted from speaking truth with courage and doing right with love. Invariably I discovered they were people of faith—a quiet, happy, steel faith. Theirs was an evangelism that didn’t need words.

There’s a concept in Chinese philosophy that has always stuck with me known as de (德). It can be roughly translated as “virtue,” but it implies more than how we use that word. De is also a kind of charismatic power, sometimes described as an invisible “radiance,” that others can pick up on subconsciously. Someone with de draws others to him, inspires trust, and makes them want to willingly obey and participate in the cosmic right order that this virtue represents. Confucius speaks of the ideal leader, “one who rules through the power of de,” as being like the “Pole Star”: he merely remains in place and the gravity of his virtue pulls everyone around him into their proper place. Peace and order is maintained effortlessly by virtue, not by force. Meanwhile we’re told of Daoist sages possessing de being able to walk among wild lions unharmed and what not—people and even the natural world respond automatically to virtue because it represents a kind of recognizable “fittedness” to the higher reality of the Dao (the Way) established in Heaven.

This notion stays with me today for a couple of reasons. The first is the sheer similarity to the idea that Christ, as the Morning Star, the Way and the Truth, is both ultimate virtue and the Logos that centers and orders the universe. The Christian principle that to conform to the right order of virtue is to conform to the will of the divine order notably seems essentially identical. It’s a bit eerie. More importantly, though, in my experience the basic idea of de is just demonstrably correct: there are virtuous and loving people who radiate zones of order around them; everything just seems to align, the force of it drawing in other people and changing them for the better. This result is virtuous cycles, and the proliferation of goodness.

I don’t know quite how to put it, but when Christ tells his disciples to be “the light in the world,” I think this is what he means. Individuals have power beyond what they know, but that power is in the force of their example—in their deeds, in their inner virtue, not necessarily their words. Personally I think this is how someone who has found God can really best help those who are struggling (and who are liable to be watching even when we don’t know it): by showing that walking a better Way is possible in life. This doesn’t mean we can’t ever try to also put what truths we’ve learned into words, but I think those words can only ever be secondary to the truths we live. And that is hard enough.