Decentering men.

What it means

Decentering men is the decision to stop making men the axis everything turns on. Your plans stop waiting on his. Your weekend isn’t organized around a text that may or may not arrive. Your friends, your work and your own head get the attention that used to go on decoding someone else’s.

It came after “boysober”, the 2024 trend of taking a year off dating entirely. Decentering is the grown-up version: not a fast, just a change in where the weight sits.

Why it caught on

Eight in ten women on dating apps report burnout. More than half of women under fifty who have used them have been sent something explicit they didn’t ask for. And inside a lot of relationships, the work of understanding him, what he meant, why he’s quiet, what he needs, falls to her. Philosophers have a name for that now: hermeneutic labor.

At some point the reasonable response is to put that energy somewhere it comes back.

Yes, a man wrote this

I’m Cal. I think decentering men is mostly right, and I’m not here to talk you out of it. I’m not a man to center. I’m not dating anyone through this, and I’m not waiting for you to make room for me.

What decentering leaves room for is your own thinking, out loud, without managing anyone. That’s all this is: you write about whatever’s on your mind, and I write back by the next day because I’d like to know what you think. You don’t have to look after me.

Related: weaponized incompetence, and why nobody listens.