What You Actually Want vs. What You Were Told to Want

Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed a script. It goes something like this: find a partner, get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after. In that order. By a certain age. With a certain kind of person. The script was handed to you by your family, your culture, every romantic comedy you watched between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. And here's the problem: you didn't write it. You probably didn't even choose it. You just… inhaled it.

By your mid-thirties, if your life doesn't match the script — no ring, no nursery, no picket fence — you start to feel like you're failing. But what if the script was never yours to begin with? What if the things you think you want are actually things you were told to want? This is one of the most liberating questions you can ask yourself, and it deserves real time and real honesty. Here's a guided exercise to help you answer it.

The "If No One Else Knew" Test. Take each thing on your mental "want" list — marriage, kids, a certain kind of partner, a certain kind of life — and ask: if no one else ever knew about this choice, would I still want it? If your parents never asked, if your friends never judged, if social media didn't exist, if you lived on an island where no one had opinions about your life — would this still matter to you? If the answer is no, or if the question makes you uncomfortable because you're not sure, that's worth sitting with. Discomfort here is a signal. It means there's something to untangle.

The Values Clarification Exercise. Get a blank piece of paper. On the left side, write down everything you were told to want — by your mom, your culture, your religious upbringing, your high school self, the version of you who hadn't lived any of this yet. Be brutally honest: "Marry a doctor." "Have kids by 32." "Own a house in the suburbs." "Be the 'cool wife' who doesn't need anything." Write every script you've absorbed, even the ones you're embarrassed to admit you still carry. On the right side, next to each item, write what you actually want — not what you're supposed to want, not what you think you should want, but what you genuinely, quietly, in-your-bones want. Some of them might match. Marriage? Maybe you genuinely want that. Kids? Maybe not. The goal isn't to reject everything — it's to own what's yours and release what isn't.

Rewrite Your Own Relationship Script. Once you've separated the inherited from the authentic, write a new script. One paragraph. What does a good relationship look like for you? Not for your parents' approval, not for Instagram, not for the version of yourself that was trying to fit in at twenty-five. What kind of partnership would make your actual, current, thirty-something self feel safe, seen, and excited? Maybe it includes cohabitation but not marriage. Maybe it includes marriage but not kids. Maybe it includes solo travel three months a year and a partner who celebrates that. Maybe it looks nothing like anything you've ever seen modeled. That's not scary — it's creative. You get to design this.

Unlearning is harder than learning. It requires you to disappoint people — sometimes people you love. It requires you to sit with uncertainty while you figure out what's genuinely yours. But on the other side of that discomfort is something rare and valuable: a life you actually chose, not one that chose you by default. And that is worth every uncomfortable question.

Want to go deeper?

If this resonated, What Do You Actually Want? ($35) guides you through the full self-discovery process, and Not Behind, Just Different ($49) helps you release the scripts that were never yours. Explore the shop →