Main Character Energy
Our romantic lives are often guided by a digitally-imposed need to be the main character, to live "for the plot." What if the story isn't our own?
People who engage in behaviors against their best interest are timeless. Among women in the movies, they are our femme fatales, our manic pixie dream girls, whatever other flat label we wish to use. Unlike the usual narrative arc of these labels in film, however, these contemporary, real-world women aren’t side characters. They aren’t here to serve some more compelling story of the men in question. No, the women are the protagonists. They’re all in pursuit of “main character energy.” And any main character, in order to be our protagonist, must go through some major tribulation, some conflict both internal and external, that yields a change. What better tribulation than a man?
Everywhere in New York — but especially in this little tragic corner of it — women are sleeping with men they shouldn’t. And not even just sleeping with them: pining over them, wanting to date them, screaming at each other in competition for them. “It’s like these girls have a death drive,” a new friend said to me recently, leaning inward over the compact bistro tables in a hushed tone at Le Dive. The women are often beautiful, the type who, in my mind, likely have thousands of Instagram followers and the ability to get “flown out” to some destination with the type of beach clubs that charge $50 for a bucket of four Fiji water bottles. But for some reason they’re not. They’re here, bundling up in thrifted floor length furs and kitten heels to descend into the Lower East Side. “The trenches,” as you might hear one of them say.
And who are the men in question? Well, losers. These men are hangers-on, whose only clout is vague association with people who maybe, in some abstract circle, have a hint of authority. They are men without bed frames, of course, which would be fine if they paid their own rent. They are between 25 and 35. They are not hot. Most importantly, they are not even nice. They are, however, just chaotic and interesting enough.
There are millions of other young men who are not losers who are having far less success in the sexual field. It isn’t because they’re doing anything all that wrong. It might even be the opposite: there is nothing about them that drives the story forward.
Several women in the influencer field have told me they shape their dating life according to a similar axiom. Their followers are most interested when they share the details of their latest awkward first date, or how they let a man they refer to as Finger Tats come over after he ghosted her again. They feel compelled to continue down these struggle paths because someone, maybe not them, is at least getting a laugh about it.
It’d be easy — for me, especially, as a writer who is known for lamenting the current conditions of our dating culture — to say that this dynamic is all a sign of how bad it’s really gotten. I could make this all a critique of men. I could just go on and write that the dating pool is so so so bleak that these beautiful gorgeous women have resorted to dating the bottom of the barrel, that these guys are the only ones on the market, the rest of their age group either is committed, not straight or has opted out of said market in favor of porn and Discord. Or maybe I could wrap this into a critique of the state of young womanhood, that most of us have no clue what we really want or that we’re naive for seeking fulfillment in the wrong places. Neither of those narratives would be entirely false. But they also aren’t why this is happening.
What does speak to the current condition is how this pursuit of a story has become mainstream, how young women are collectively being pushed to consider their lives through this lens. The concept of viewing yourself or someone else as having “main character energy” in meme-ified began proliferating somewhere around summer 2020, according to Google Trends charts, and has only grown firmer as a concept from there. It is a cousin to “main character syndrome,” which suggests that you view yourself as such a main character that everyone else around you is akin to a background actor in a show or non-playable character in a video game. In other words, you don’t see them as real people. But “main character energy” remains vaguely positive, framed as a necessary outlook in a world that wants to relegate you to an ensemble part.
“Main character energy, I think it originated on TikTok, but I think it’s so important as a concept because often times in dating you will start waiting around for someone who doesn’t care about you, and when you do that you’re elevating them to main character status in your life and it’s so important to remember that you are the main character of your life,” said influencer Tinx on the podcast The Viall Files in 2023. “When you wait for someone and you accept less than you deserve or when you accept the bare minimum, you’re literally saying ‘no, this character is more important in the Netflix movie of my life and it’s like no, you’re the director, you’re also starring, you’re writing this plot and you need to push that person out to make way for a great secondary character who’s worthy of your time.”
Even here, though, what sounds like a useful mindset reveals its cracks. Your life is a movie, sure, but it’s straight to streaming.
At a dinner a few weeks back, I was seated with a fun and pretty young woman who works in PR and lives with her family in Queens. Just the night before, she had ended a five year long situationship. Her own description, not mine. “It just wasn’t giving,” she said, of almost everything we discussed that evening. She had tons of friends and went out with them often, but still couldn’t figure out how she or any of them were supposed to escape the horror of the dating apps or the incestuous inter-friend group mixing that yielded said situationship. You all go out to the same bars, you see the same people. The only ones having any romantic luck were the ones who paired up years ago.
Another young woman told me recently that she worries she’s self absorbed. “We all think our dating life is special, right?” she asked. She wants off the dating apps, in part because she wishes the romantic arc of her life could be one that transcends this current norm — that’s how everyone meets. It’s not sexy. “I feel there’d be some cosmic justice and I’d have this totally perfect cinematic love story,” she said. Instead she has some tedious flings on Hinge, breaks the heart of a guy she met at a bar in her neighborhood and occasionally hooks up with a friend from college who is probably in love with her.
Between these two women is a shared sense of defeat and anxiety. They want a life that gives; they want a love story that could be told in a movie. Maybe we just haven’t yet figured out how to depict true lust and yearning while filming someone swiping through an app, or maybe none of this was really designed to give us what we want and need.
I don’t need to remind you what Joan Didion said, the whole “telling ourselves stories in order to live” bit. She also said a good deal about self respect, too, but that part isn’t as easily distilled into a repeatable sentence. Everyone deserves to be the main character of their own life. Everyone is the main character of their own life. There’s no blame in desiring this, no crime in wanting to find a compelling story in your relationships — be they positive ones or not. My critique here is not with the specific men or women and their wants, or even with “men” and “women” as broad political subjects. It is with a culture that through osmosis encourages us to behave against our own interests, against our own desires, and against happiness through subtle ideological maneuvers like being “the main character.”
There is again some element of this whole dynamic, then, that is contemporary, indicative of some broader social malaise.
Much of what they’re doing here is “for the plot.” It’ll make a vaguely interesting anecdote down the line, I guess, to say that you spent months hooking up with a man who never once paid for your drinks but occasionally slept on the floor of a conservative philosopher’s basement. You’ll feel connected to a specific political moment, this bizarro cultural zeitgeist. Or for some girls, this all feels part of their Carrie Bradshaw moment, the lifestyle they want to have in order to make paying exorbitant Manhattan rent on a room smaller than Bradshaw’s closet all worth it. These connections bestow meaning. They makes you feel a part of something.
It offers that in a time with few other opportunities to do so. It offers that in a time when the only arbiter for it is social media, constantly pressuring you to view your life as though you’re the star of the iPhone screen. It is much easier to trade a sense of community and place for a pre-packaged sense of self delivered via Internet. And it’s not as though we haven’t all historically made those trades before. It was easier, for example, for some women in the first three-fourths of the 20th century to trade creative ambition for an early marriage, children and household duties. This, too, was a type of pre-packaged narrative, a ready-made identity.
This all makes for a compelling arrangement. The main character persona bestows a sense of protection. The main character can be hurt, damaged, even be momentarily embarrassed, but redemption always comes. In that sense, the main character is never vulnerable. We know she’ll never be killed off. When we live as the main character, we’ve forfeited our vulnerability for the sake of the story. In real life, though, that exchange does not always hold.
In a recent essay,
explored the state of hetero-optimism through Anora, which I finally watched last month. It’s a film that, depending on your interpretation, flips much of this main character redemption arc on its head. Here, Fisher-Quann places the trades we make as women the context of our own commodification. “The largest and most powerful systems in the world have been working for centuries to provide both the conditions and the incentives for smart, practical people to identify the promises of patriarchal capitalism as the best deal available to them. And to put it frankly: smart, practical women take this deal all the time,” she wrote. She further invokes the problem of social media: “Female dating strategy influencers, who encourage women to hetero-optimize by seducing high value men for personal gain, accept it as inevitable that women are for sale and push smart women to focus their energy on selling high. At their most self-aware, these women offer a simple idea: you’re going to be exploited anyway, so why not get what you can out of it while you’re still the type of girl men want to buy?”The “for the plot” narrative offer a similar emotional way out of this exploitation: rather than getting paid or some sort of material gain, at least you’ve got a good story out of it. Most of us aren’t going to bag a rich man who saves us from the indignity of the sexual and economic marketplace — most of us won’t even have the chance to try. Sure, maybe their youth and beauty are good for a few nights of boring bottle service at TAO, but that’s an indignity in itself. And worst of all, it’s not even interesting.
But maybe instead we can choose different indignities, one we can reframe as unique or empowering or at least a tale to share through a “storytime Get Ready With Me (GRWM)” TikTok, even if we’re probably leaning in to the gaze of patriarchal capitalism — if you believe in that sort of thing — just the same.
There are more optimistic ways of interpreting all this, though. Influencer
writes a popular newsletter here on this platform called The Plot. “The Plot is a newsletter about becoming the main character you were fucking born to be,” the subhed reads. I first explored her writing with a healthy dose of skepticism: surely, with a description and title like that, we’d be receiving a litany of the same sort of aggressive chaos that leads women toward ego destruction.What I found instead, alongside the usual influencer routine of shopping inspiration and “glow up” tips, was some genuinely thoughtful advice on navigating the problems of contemporary dating for the universal young woman. In one, for example, she details with clarity and empathy her advice for “finding your person.” First on her list: go to therapy, or at least do the internal work of figuring out what sort of emotional barriers you might be upholding as a false means of self-protection. She further recommends pivoting from a scarcity mindset and negative language around dating toward a more positive, albeit still simple, ethos: “Words carry weight - you write your plot, after all. So if you want your plotline to head in a positive direction, it starts with you. The energy you put out into the world will come right back to you.” And, critically, she encourages women to be more open-minded about who they date, focusing on the personality traits and values of a guy rather than the height and income box-checks. It is bleak that it all needs to be said, but I can’t knock someone for saying it.
And what else can we do but attempt to push each other toward a narrative with a bit more faithful ambition? Most young women are not guided by their death drive to pursue absolute losers. Most young women — those still giving that still want to make a bargain with the heterosexual contract, I mean — want to find their person, and would prefer a romantic story to go along with them. But there is something, maybe a million things, making that task near insurmountable. I don’t think it’s just the men, or at least not just the abundance of losers. Maybe it’s that in the face of these million things, it is easier to just give in to whatever story is in front of us. And constantly, when we open our phones, that story is that we are supposed to be the main character in a movie someone (or something) else is directing.
Under this framework, though, haven’t we all become losers? Whatever force we see as oppressing us, be it our phones, men, work, politics — we will always position ourselves as on the losing end. To be the “main character,” though, at least tells us otherwise. But even then I fear we are not actually striving to be the main character of our own lives. We’re trying to be the main character of an imagined reality on TikTok, instead. The digital screen becomes a protective veil of its own.
It’s worth asking whether men suffer from the main character internalized plotline in the same way young women do. I’m not sure that’s the case. The population can probably generally be divided in two, not equally: men who do not see themselves as worthy of such framing, and men who see themselves as so worthy of it that it doesn’t even necessitate thought. The majority are likely the former. Or most men just don’t think about it at all. They are not free from the indignities of life-building and romantic pursuits and the judgemental gaze of the current era, regardless — their problems just have different names.
There might be something that some of the women who date New York City losers are doing right. They’re living in the moment, I think. They’re succumbing to the dumb will of our most base desires. They’re skirting rationality. They’re letting a drive, be it sex or death, be their momentum forward. It baffles the rest of us because, at least in part, we aren’t connected to our drives in the same way. And honestly, God bless ‘em. Still, maybe they aren’t quite looking at their lives as Netflix movies, but they pursue a cinematic narrative just the same. Maybe it’s a Safdie Brothers film. It could even be Sean Baker. Much of what I witness looks closer to something by Lars von Trier. Or maybe, with any hope, it’s a narrative of their own making.
You are the main character of your own life. So is everyone else. The question is, who exactly is in the director’s chair? Is it you?
As a father who would only appear briefly in a scene with the Main Character mid-way through the plot, let me offer this observation: distilled through the lens of decades of living, the narrative of one’s life is always interesting. You don’t have to force weak plot points or mediocre character introductions. Following your own interests, nourishing key friendships, and making tough decisions when they arise will always provide you with a unique and fascinating story. It may not fit into the timeframe of a TikTok video, but it will be yours.
Great essay, Magdalene. To continue your metaphor: if you're thinking about yourself as a "character," you've already lost the plot.