Love, Selfhood, and the Cultural Scripts We Inherit

There is a metaphor that circulates in therapy rooms, especially with teenage girls and young women. Your life is a cake. You choose the flavor. You decide whether it is dense chocolate or something lighter and layered. Education becomes one tier. Travel becomes another. Friendships, leadership, professional ambition, creative risk, each chapter adds height and texture. Then comes the question: Where do men fit? The answer often lands with clarity and relief. They are the sprinkles.

The psychological power of that metaphor is not accidental. It is corrective. For generations in Western culture, girls were subtly and explicitly taught that their lives would culminate in being chosen. Marriage was not simply one domain of adulthood; it was often framed as the organizing principle. A woman’s desirability frequently shaped her perceived value. Even ambitious, capable young women absorbed a message that romantic attachment would ultimately define their adulthood.

Research on gender socialization supports this pattern. From early childhood, girls are more likely to be reinforced for relational attunement, cooperation, and emotional sensitivity. Boys, by contrast, are more often rewarded for independence, performance, and self-reliance. Carol Gilligan’s work on moral development suggested that many girls construct identity through connection, while boys are encouraged toward separation and individuation. Attachment research later complicated these categories, but the cultural scripts remain recognizable: girls are often socialized to prioritize relationship; boys are often socialized to prioritize achievement.

Against that backdrop, telling young women that men are the sprinkles is a deliberate act of proportion. It decouples worth from romantic destiny. It says: your education, your competence, your friendships, your interior life are not placeholders while you wait to be chosen. They are the substance.

But the metaphor also opens a deeper question. What happens when that same message is heard by young men? Does it function the same way? And what does it reveal about how we talk about identity and romance more broadly?

The answer is not about cultural dominance or reversal. Structurally and institutionally, we still live in a world where men disproportionately hold power in politics, finance, media, and corporate leadership. A shift in therapeutic language does not equal a shift in institutional control. The question here is developmental, not political. It is about how different socialization histories shape how relationship advice lands.

For many young women, the developmental risk has historically been over-identification with romance. The psychological task has been differentiation, building a stable self that does not collapse into partnership. In that context, decentering men is stabilizing. It restores proportion.

For many young men, however, the developmental vulnerabilities have often been different. Traditional masculine norms, as noted in the American Psychological Association’s guidelines on boys and men, have emphasized stoicism, dominance, and emotional restraint. Boys frequently receive less coaching in emotional literacy and relational nuance. The risk is not fusion with romance but emotional underdevelopment or outsourcing self-worth to performance.

In the current cultural moment, this picture is even more layered. Young women now outpace young men in higher education attainment. Surveys from Pew Research Center and Gallup show rising loneliness among young adults, particularly young men. At the same time, digital subcultures increasingly frame romantic success as proof of worth. In some spaces, female attention becomes currency. In others, detachment becomes armor.

In that landscape, the cake metaphor does different psychological work depending on who hears it. For a young woman socialized to see marriage as destiny, it may be liberating. For a young man struggling with direction or relational skill, the same metaphor could either reinforce detachment or challenge him to build substance independent of validation. The difference lies not in who deserves empowerment but in the developmental realities each group inherits.

This is where the conversation becomes more nuanced than slogans allow. It is tempting to reduce the message to sequencing: self first, then love. But real life is rarely so orderly. Many people develop relational skills precisely through early dating. Adolescence and early adulthood are often practice fields for attachment, boundary setting, repair, and conflict navigation. For some young people, especially those emerging from chaotic or toxic family systems, pairing off can feel like escape or survival rather than philosophical choice. The ability to calmly “develop self” before intimacy is not evenly distributed. It can reflect stability, support, and privilege.

So the deeper question is not whether love comes before identity or after it. The question is how identity and romance become entangled in the first place.