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🎧 Listen: Session 371 — Decentering Romance · ▶️ Watch: TBG on YouTube
From the time we were little, the story was the same. The fairy tales, the rom-coms, the well-meaning aunties at every family function asking when you’re going to settle down. The message lands early and lands hard: a romantic partner is the prize, and everything else — your friendships, your passions, your family, your own becoming — is just the waiting room until they arrive. But what if that story sold us short? What if a romantic relationship was meant to be one rich part of a full life, not the whole point of it?
That’s the heart of Session 371 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. “Decentering romance” doesn’t mean swearing off love or dating. It means refusing to let the search for a partner crowd out the other relationships and parts of yourself that make your life whole. It’s about loosening romance’s grip on your sense of worth and rediscovering everything else that’s already worthy of your devotion.
The Quiet Cost of Putting Romance at the Center
There’s actually a word for the belief that everyone should want — and prioritize — a romantic relationship above all else: amatonormativity. It’s so baked into our culture that we rarely question it. Friendship gets treated as a placeholder, something that fades once you’ve “found the one.” Our solo time gets framed as loneliness. And our worth gets quietly tied to our relationship status.
The cost of this is real. When romance becomes the center of gravity, we can pour everything into a partner (or the pursuit of one) while letting friendships go quiet and personal goals collect dust. We can stay in relationships that aren’t serving us because being partnered feels safer than being “alone.” And we can hand someone else the job of making us feel whole — which is a heavy load for any one person to carry, and a shaky place to build self-worth. You are a complete person right now, partnered or not.
Friendships Are Not the Backup Plan
Here’s a truth worth tattooing on your heart: your friendships are primary relationships, too. The research is clear that strong platonic connections are powerful for our mental health — linked to lower anxiety and depression, better emotional regulation, lower stress, and faster recovery during hard seasons. Friends are often the people who hold us without the particular expectations that come with romance, the ones we can cry in front of and speak freely to.
And yet how often do friendships get the leftovers — the energy we have after the date, after the situationship, after the dating apps? Decentering romance asks us to flip that. To text the friend back. To plan the trip. To show up for the people who’ve shown up for us, again and again, no matter our relationship status. These bonds aren’t a consolation prize for the un-partnered. They’re a foundation worth protecting in every season.
How to Date Without Losing Yourself (or Your People)
Decentering romance and dating can absolutely coexist. The goal is to date from a place of fullness rather than scarcity. A few ways to keep your footing:
- Protect your friendships while you date. Don’t disappear on your people the moment someone new appears. Keep your standing plans. Keep your group chats alive.
- Keep cultivating your own life. Your hobbies, goals, rest, and growth aren’t things you pause until a relationship begins. They’re what make you you.
- Notice when you’re shrinking. If you find yourself reorganizing your entire life around someone’s availability, pause and check in with yourself.
- Let dating be additive, not all-consuming. A good partnership should expand your life, not require you to abandon the rest of it to make room.
Building a Life Full of Many Kinds of Love
When you decenter romance, something freeing happens: you start to see how many kinds of love already surround you. The friend who knows your coffee order. The cousin who always answers. The community that celebrates your wins. You can even cultivate family dynamics that honor your non-romantic life partners — the chosen people who anchor you. A life with many sources of love and meaning is more resilient than one balanced on a single relationship, and far more nourishing.
This is especially worth claiming for Black women, who are so often handed narrow scripts about partnership and worth. You get to write a fuller story — one where your value was never up for negotiation and your life was always rich, with or without a ring.
You Are the Center of Your Own Life
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: you don’t need to be chosen by someone else to be whole. A romantic partnership can be a beautiful addition to your life, but it was never meant to be the foundation. The foundation is you — your friendships, your purpose, your community, your relationship with yourself.
For the full conversation on the pitfalls of making romantic love the center of everything, how to keep your friendships thriving while you date, and how to honor the non-romantic relationships that hold you, listen to Session 371: Decentering Romance on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, available wherever you stream. Here’s to building a life that’s full from the inside out.
