Narcissus already tried this one. It didn’t end well. And yet, over the past half year, I keep reading about young women who are declaring themselves in relationships with themselves.

First, I read about young Japanese women celebrating marriage to themselves, complete with wedding dresses, photo shoots, and ceremonies. One young woman described her solo wedding this way: “I wanted to figure out how to live on my own. I want to rely on my own strength.” When she gets lonely, she watches the video of her ceremony and remembers the support of all her friends.

Then I’m reading about Anna Eskamani, a recently elected member of Florida State House of Representatives, featured in See Jane Win by Caitlin Moscatello. As she reflects on the dynamics of being a young politician, she says, “I think it’s also falling in love with yourself a little bit.” Later, she adds, “I really need to embrace the notion of late nights by myself, of not being able to go home and have someone that is my source of empathy, and being able to do that for myself.”

And then I see that Emma Watson, actress and staunch feminist, recently described her wrestle with approaching thirty as a single woman. She rejects the label of single, stating that instead, she considers herself “self-partnered.”

Marriage, empathy, partnership…these words by definition require an other. I have nothing but love and sympathy for these women navigating the treacherous shoals of the modern world, littered as they are with the rotting hulls of wrecked relationships. Nevertheless, please! Let’s not hollow out these words to accommodate the pressures these women find themselves facing. More individualism is not the solution to isolation, stress, and loneliness.

Besides, all these declarations of self-love and self-fidelity miss something crucial: there’s not a single one of us who can survive on our own strength. We rely on an army of unseen and unthanked others to grow and make our food, build our shelters, harvest and distribute our energy, make our clothes, and keep us safe. You can only pretend to marry yourself when you ignore the wage slaves (and the literal ones) that have replaced the loving circle of hard-working family that used to sustain each of us.