Opinion: Why I’m so curious about being ‘boysober’

Editor’s Note: Holly Thomas is a writer and editor based in London. She is morning editor at Katie Couric Media. She tweets @HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.

For most people, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that their school days weren’t the happiest of their lives. Show me the freak who wants to relive puberty, and I’ll show you an affordable property within an easy commute of the office.

The real shock comes when you realize your 20s sucked too.

That sounds dark. But can we seriously expect folks to shake off the neuroses of adolescence, swagger into the far bigger, far more complicated adult world and immediately find their footing? Of course not. It’s no wonder we’ve got templates for how to cope. No wonder so many of us shift, without even realizing it, into a preordained autopilot. And no wonder that so often results in a chaotic, maladaptive mess.

Hope Woodard, a 27-year-old comedian and content creator recently profiled in the New York Times, is on a mission to untangle some of that confusion. She’s embarked on a year without sex or dating — or as she puts it, she’s gone “boysober.” She believes that by taking time away from sex and romance, we can “remove the fake sense of validation that we get from dating and situationships and sleeping around, and refocus that energy” on ourselves.

It’s a good idea, but it sure brings up a lot off the bat. It’s great to see someone take the initiative to look after themselves, but declaring independence from external validation to nearly 400,000 followers seems a little contradictory. Deprogramming potentially damaging learned behaviors sounds positive, but the need to offer an explanation and to outline rules and a catchy brand name, is telling. It feels like the romantic equivalent of a compulsive overachiever explaining a brief gap on their CV — “Oh, those six months? I wasn’t unrelationshiped, I was boysober!”

The fact that Woodard needs to set such clear boundaries is far less a reflection on her than it is on the world at large. Nearly five years ago, Emma Watson announced that she was proud to have become “self-partnered” —  i.e., not in a settled relationship. She said she’d “never believed the whole ‘I’m happy single’ spiel,” but after a “long time” and at the grand age of 29, she’d realized that mere casual dating could make her happy.

Some observers booed, others whooped. It was sad, but not wholly unexpected that even Watson, who in the dating game sits at the very top of the food chain, might feel insecure about not filling her job/home/husband/baby bingo card within the first decade of adulthood. But, as she told Vogue, she’d become conscious of an “influx of subliminal messaging” all around her. The term “self-partnered” was her answer to the questions she could hear hanging in the air. Why aren’t you with someone? Is there something wrong with you? Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? 

Those questions are so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of society, that any deviation from a “normal” answer needs all the legitimacy it can muster to cut through. That’s where an affinity for branding — a rare advantage of growing up online — comes in.

Whereas “self-partnered’ connotes a vague but cheerful sense of romantic self-care, “boysober” very obviously comes with baggage. To get painfully literal about it: The existence of “boysober” implies the existence of “boydrunk.” Going boysober, one can therefore assume, isn’t just about celibacy or a break from dating. It’s about addressing a pattern of behavior that could be doing real harm. It’s not just about being allowed to enjoy something new. It’s about being allowed to let go of something old.

Woodard gets into this in a YouTube video she’s posted ahead of a podcast series on her boysober project. She says she looks to “generations of women that were never able to find their footing without a man,” adding that while “so many women” have emotional, financial, or cultural reasons for their codependency, she has “no excuse.” It’s the antithesis of the tradwife culture that evokes the submissive, conservative, often religious elements of traditional womanhood, in which a woman’s place is the home, subservient to a man. Her background may mirror that of those women in many ways, but Woodard isn’t mirroring their approach to life.

Indeed, Woodard addresses her own religious hangups, noting that the word “celibate” has “way too many religious connotations” and that, having been raised in Tennessee in a “very conservative church,” she has “a lot to unpack.” There’s obvious discomfort there: a need to reexamine values she may no longer recognize as her own. But even as she’s doing so, she calls on a religious reference to bolster her assertion that taking a break from dating is a worthy idea. “Fasting is a part of every single major religion because it’s just really healthy to let things go for a little while,” she says. There’s a constant tension between the old and new — and an awareness, one suspects, that the same tension exists for much of her audience.

Watching Woodard, and reading her audience’s reactions, it’s striking how nerve-wracking many young people still find it to deviate from the norm, and how earnest their need is to demonstrate they’re going about things the “right” way. It’s little wonder. When an unforgiving online world where presentation is everything meets decades of hard-baked tradition, people feel pressure to show they’re trying, whether to conform or resist conforming.

The idea that one way of life works out for everyone is demonstrably ridiculous. Just take a look at divorce rates. But finding the space to figure out what works for oneself is remarkably difficult amid the clamor of cultural pressures and an online tribalism that demands everyone declare their affinity with their chosen people. Even if you’re not wholly sure what you’re doing, claiming some agency over that process is reassuring.

From the vantage point of one’s 30s, surrounded by so many people who have sleepwalked into relationships that don’t truly make them happy, had kids with indifferent partners or are extricating themselves from marriages they regret, going boysober looks like a very wise plan.