358. Why you should decentre romance in your 20s
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
There is a huge emphasis on treating romance as the main marker of a successful life – from questions from family, to seemingly perfect online couples – it’s hard to believe anything else when society celebrates this kind of ideal.
In this episode, we look at how romance is often seen as the main focus of our 20s, what it can distract us from, and how we can start to approach it differently.
We explore:
• The social script of our 20s
• The role of milestone anxiety and FOMO
• How this can lead to us neglecting other areas of our lives, including our goals
• Emotional bypassing and avoiding the deeper work
• What a healthy approach to love looks like
• 5 tips to decentre romantic love
If you’ve ever felt like your life is on pause until your relationship status changes, this episode is for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:08.4 | Hello everybody. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk |
| 0:15.3 | through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:27.1 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, |
| 0:32.8 | old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, |
| 0:39.3 | break down the psychology of our 20s. So the other day I did an episode on the five biggest regrets |
| 0:47.2 | I have about my 20s so far. And one of those regrets that really stood out to a lot of you was this regret I have about |
| 0:57.8 | focusing too much on dating in my early 20s. I remember being 19 in my college university dorm room |
| 1:07.3 | downloading Tinder and being like, this better get me a boyfriend. Like, I need a |
| 1:12.8 | boyfriend. I need to fit in. I need to have this like relationship that like others can see and |
| 1:17.9 | that's like going to feel amazing. And this is going to make me feel really great about myself. |
| 1:22.6 | And I got the boyfriend. It wasn't very satisfying. I ended up back in this cycle of again and again and again |
| 1:29.3 | chasing validation from men, chasing validation from romantic partners that was actually |
| 1:37.3 | pretty unfulfilling and took away a lot of the time that I should have devoted to figuring myself out, to traveling, exploring, |
| 1:47.3 | putting time and effort into friendships. |
| 1:50.9 | You know, there was especially this relationship that I've spoken about before where, you know, |
| 1:55.6 | the very fact that I was in that relationship cost me a lot of friendships. |
| 1:59.4 | And it's something that I still think about fairly often. I still miss those friends so much. And I'm not even in that relationship anymore. And it's a huge regret of mine that romance often took precedence over not just all other kinds of love, but just everything in my life. |
| 2:20.4 | Nowadays, we're seeing this incredible, and I would also say personally really admirable |
| 2:25.2 | trend of decentering men, decentering dating, taking your time to find the right person, |
... |
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