As I clicked my seatbelt shut and peered down at the tarmac below, my heart started to race. Not because I’m scared of flying — but because of the emotional turbulence I was headed for. ‘What the f*ck am I doing?’ my thoughts blurred. What drove me to say yes to boarding a 22-hour flight from Sydney to New York, at the request of my ex-boyfriend, who I hadn’t seen in over two years?
Truthfully… A big part of me did it for the plot.
Over time, my interest in my ex had faded, but communication lingered — fluctuating between obsession, dissonance, blocking, nudes, confusion, clarity… lather, rinse, repeat. The will-they-won’t-they was endless, and when he offered to fly me over to “see if there was still a spark”, it felt cinematic. Like an episode of Girls playing out in real-time, set to the same cityscape backdrop. The high likelihood of an upsetting outcome aside, and whether or not I actually had feelings for my ex that I wanted to pursue, the lure of being a part of a narrative quite so intoxicating? I was powerless to resist. The part of me that was genuinely curious about seeing him again — and keen to pulse-check a relationship I knew was probably, definitely dead (and for the best) — was overshadowed by the pub anecdotes I knew I’d get from the trip.
And this feeling, this doing-it-for-the-plot attitude, is something that many Gen Z and millennial women say they’re experiencing: an urge to risk emotional whiplash and justify chaotic choices, even when we know they’re bad for us.
But why are we all suddenly throwing caution to the wind, actively leaning into potentially damaging scenarios? And how is this ‘live like the main character at all times’ energy impacting our lives (be it romance-related, career-wise, or our mental health) in the long run?
Is delulu the solulu?
Social media has given us ‘main character energy’ as cultural philosophy. We’re told to romanticise life, to find meaning in the mess (and what a mess ‘it’ is: amidst a shallow dating pool, cost of living crisis, and political hell). But beneath the glitter of self-mythologising is something darker: a kind of generational nihilism, where uncertainty and instability have made us both hyper-aware of our lack of control and desperate to reclaim scraps of meaning. So now, the motive isn’t necessarily about finding what’s best or healthiest for us, it’s about harnessing the most out-of-pocket experience. Nothing’s that deep anymore — we live in a simulation, right?
Everyone's clicking on...
#ForThePlot has amassed over 52,000 posts across TikTok, with videos declaring, ‘No better feeling than talking to the forbidden man again’, ‘Every mess in your 20s is just content for the plot’, and, ‘It makes all the fear go away cos it’s too effing funny’.
One creator’s video, with 4.2 million views, sums up the realities of plot-living: consequences aside, you’re going to do it, even when you already know on one level that future-you wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you for it. This sentiment clearly resonates with people, as evidenced by a comment under the video, which amassed over 17k likes: “Doing it for the plot sounded fun until the plot got messy and the main character needed therapy.”
Jokes aside, it’s overwhelmingly young women turning ‘plot’ risks into a genre of its own, on and offline. That’s not a coincidence; we’ve grown up being told that stability and safety come from following a certain script (marriage, mortgage, motherhood), only to realise this might not be the only option we have — or want. Creating our own plotlines can feel less like recklessness and more like reclaiming authorship.
Calling my romantic chaos ‘the plot’ made it feel like agency — a fun little rebrand of emotional tumult in a world that sees fewer women in their 20s and 30s meet the traditional ‘milestones’ our parents comfortably hit.
The patriarchal rule book hands men more financial freedom, time, and fewer social penalties for being ‘behind schedule’ — so it makes sense that women might be drawn to ‘live for the plot’, as they attempt to retaliate against tradition and expectations, and strive to write their own scripts. But as Dr Jilly Kay, an expert in feminist media and cultural studies, reminds me: “Trying to play the patriarchy at its own game is very different from trying to abolish it.” In other words, what looks like rebellion is often just survival cosplaying as empowerment.
And when the plot inevitably collapses, we don’t just lick our wounds — we narrativise them. Heartbreak becomes a story to tell, an anecdote for the group chat, a lesson to frame. But, adds Dr Kay, when we start lowering the bar and justifying bad relationships as growth, “there’s no possibility of changing heterosexual culture for the better”. We might tell ourselves it’s resilience, but sometimes it’s just another performance.
Still, faced with a dating landscape that feels rigged, many women are developing emotional survival strategies — one of which is reframing chaos as empowerment, or even mediocrity as adventure. I call my own emotional exhaustion a ‘strategic surrender’ of sorts. In a world that’s post-feminist, post-app, and still defined by patriarchal pressures, maybe the real question isn’t what we want from love — it’s what we can leverage from men.
“At least [doing it for the plot feels] alive, cinematic, like you’re starring in something instead of endlessly swiping and feeling nothing,” suggests relationship therapist Simone Bose. “It’s not really about love, it’s about wanting to feel something.”
But is the thrill of narrative escapism always such a bad thing — or is it actually just part and parcel of being young, living life, and learning important lessons?
When the plot gets too twisted
For Megan*, adopting a devil-may-care attitude has led to both pain and a vital life lesson. Two years ago, aged 26 and living in Cardiff, she decided to move across the world with her then-partner of just six months. He’d been offered a job abroad, and Megan had always wanted to relocate, so, she says, when “he asked if I wanted to go, I was game”. Oblivious to the red flags — before they got together, he’d just broken off a previous engagement, and within a month he was talking about getting engaged to her — she was caught up in the excitement of it all. “Everyone told me it would go up in flames and I laughed it off. But when it actually did, it destroyed me,” she reflects.
“He broke up with me out of the blue because he thought I was the issue,” she says. “But it turns out he was actually depressed and blamed all his problems on me.” The root of the issue, continues Megan, came from him lying about his entire personality when they met: “He was my perfect man because he made me think we had the same passions and dreams. But after a while he got tired of the charade, turned against me and made our lives a living hell.”
Ultimately though, she’s glad for the lessons that experience taught her. Break-up trauma aside, moving countries with a man she hardly knew has delivered, as Megan puts it, the important lesson of “not diving in head first with a man again, I need to see people as they are, instead of indulging in a narrative”.
When everything becomes a dramatic arc, there’s a risk of prioritising intensity over intimacy and stability — and Bose says an increasing number of Gen Z and millennial women are coming to therapy emotionally wrung out from exactly this. “Reframing chaos can be a survival strategy, but it’s also a form of self-abandonment,” she says. “Over time, it leaves people feeling unanchored, emotionally drained, and unsure of what they truly want.”
Bose sees a lot of people claiming they are letting go of perfectionism or unrealistic ideals. But often, it’s a quiet form of giving up. “When we tell ourselves crumbs are fine because we chose them, it delays the addressing of unmet needs,” she says. Particularly in a dating culture where breadcrumbing — that is, keeping someone hooked with just enough attention to stop them walking away — is normalised, it’s easy to confuse survival with satisfaction. “It becomes hard to tell the difference between resilience and resignation.”
These impulsive leaps often come with a physical cost. “Chasing emotional highs keeps your nervous system on edge — it’s draining, physically and spiritually,” says Bose. “It can disconnect you from your real self; you’re curating your life instead of living it.”
This mindset isn’t just limited to the romantic world, either. Ellen*, 26, works in marketing in London and recently quit her job on a whim. “I hated the agency I was working for; it was well paid but boring and unsatisfying, and my work ethic was slipping,” she says. “I needed a change ASAP — before I was fired.”
When interviewing for a different start-up agency, she was drawn in by the charismatic, unhinged energy of a prospective boss. “I thought, Fuck it, this will be hilarious. In hindsight, I ignored the ‘fun but wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you’ vibe.”
On day one, her new boss, a 40-something mum of two, laughed about how much she loved getting drunk and doing drugs. “She was scatty; she’d shout at me for the most random things. By week three, she’d fired another new girl, before re-offering her my salary, and then firing us both anyway. It was insane,” she recalls.
Ellen now regrets not trusting her instincts, and admits she was flippant about her livelihood. “I felt awful when my parents had to help me financially. It made me realise that chasing chaos isn’t always bold or glamorous — sometimes it’s just reckless. Now I’m trying to make choices that don’t just entertain me in the short term, but actually set me up to feel secure.”
Making good choices
But relinquishing living ‘for the plot’ doesn’t mean you have to abandon all sense of adventure. “Stability doesn’t have to mean boring — you can still be the main character,” Bose reminds me. “Just in a story that doesn’t keep breaking your heart and hurting you.” Instead of chasing emotional fireworks, she suggests asking yourself: ‘Does this feel genuinely exciting — or am I just sparking a fiery anxiety to feel something new?’
If, like me, you cycle through highs and lows in search of a climax that never quite arrives, Bose suggests anchoring yourself in emotional self-checks: “If you’re hooked on the drama, it might not be about love, it could be about trying to feel something in a society that often leaves us disconnected.” As women emptied out by modern dating, I fear some of us (myself included) have been conditioned to take what we can get.
These cultural trends “reward fantasy over reality”, says dating coach Hayley Quinn. “But real growth often comes from confronting the truth... And walking away? That takes strength and pragmatism.”
She adds: “Styling low effort or toxic dating behaviours as part of an ‘exciting love story’ between you and the other person keeps you addicted to the romantic high. Instead you need to put down the ‘love hurts’ narrative, and realise that true love heals.”
My story somewhat delivered a cathartic arc of resolution — we can finally agree that our differences prevent our relationship from working long-term. But I’m still trying to mine the meaning from yet another ‘almost’. Although all that’s left from this particular narrative is different time zones and fresher memories of the same fatal incompatibilities, my trip to New York isn’t something I regret.
We had a lot of fun together, but there was no grand declaration of love, no cinematic proposal (would I have said yes for the plot? Probably) — just two people circling something that had already ended, trying to convince themselves it was worth reopening. I craved a taste of intimacy in a world of romantic hollowness.
I knew our relationship couldn’t be repaired, so I don’t know if saying yes to the trip was an act of self-authorship or just a way to sweeten emotional self-sabotage. Yes, I did get a good story out of it, but underneath that, I walked away with a closure I didn’t know I needed. I saw, with fresh eyes, why I’d been holding onto the fantasy. It forced me to confront the parts of myself that still confuse recklessness with romance and intensity with intimacy.
That trip didn’t return us to what we once were, but it gave me something I needed more: a clearer understanding of the pieces of me that I still need to heal.
*Names have been changed
