Main Character Delusion:

In 2020, a TikTok creator named Ashley Ward told her followers to start romanticizing their lives and to think of themselves as the main character, and tens of thousands of users borrowed her words. The phrase spread because it touched a hunger men and women share, the need to be seen. Every main character depends on supporting characters for that seeing, for validation, acknowledgment and approval, which makes the main character the most dependent person in any story. Psychologist Ramani Durvasula describes what happens when someone disrupts that story. The main character reacts as if the other person is messing up the plot. Now look at who plays the supporting characters today. Grandparents, aunties and neighbors once shared the work of feeding our needs. As those villages thinned, Esther Perel says, all of us began asking one person to give us what an entire village used to provide. Men’s friendships took a steep hit. The share of men with no close friends rose from 3 percent to 15 percent in three decades. In corners of TikTok led mostly by women, strangers test partners with orange peels and tell wives to divorce their husbands over the dishes. Research suggests the more time any of us spend on social media, the less we confide in the real people around us. Some answer the pressure by cutting people off to protect their peace, which leaves a partner holding even more of the story. Others swing the other way and refuse to need anyone at all. Some couples proudly call each other everything, and their voices belong in this conversation too. So today I’m asking whether one intimate partner can be everything we “NEED,” and what changes when we let the person beside us be the main character of their own life.