Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to answer all of the questions asked in last week’s Question of the Week post for today, so I’m postponing the answers until next Sunday. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I was watching a reality TV show the other day¹ and the people behind the camera were asking a teenage girl to talk about herself. She had to give her stats, like her name and age, as well as several adjectives that she thought best described her. The first words that came out of her mouth were, “I’m a girl with a boyfriend.”

This, not surprisingly, caused my eyebrows to shoot up so high that they practically disappeared into my hairline. This girl thinks her relationship is so important, so relevant, and so pivotal in understanding how she is that she thinks it’s necessary for her to throw that out there as the very first thing she says about herself? Was there absolutely nothing else about her that was remotely interesting for her to talk about?

I think that it’s only necessary to talk about your relationship status as the first thing you say to someone if they’re trying to awkwardly hit on you but you’re taken or something. In a relationship or not, I certainly don’t tell people my relationship status right off the bat! I don’t think being in a relationship (or being single) should affect how you perceive yourself at all!

Question of the Week: Does being in or out of a relationship change the way you define yourself?

1. Can’t remember the name of it as I only watched it for about ten minutes before I changed the channel. [↩]

Tags: opinions