The romantic advice given to women in their late 20s takes one of a series of forms—and is consistently awful.

Romantic Advice to Ruin Your Life By

A breakdown of all of the unsolicited advice that will hit an unengaged woman in her early 30s—and why you shouldn’t listen to any of it

By Cazzie David

I once saw a chart online that mapped out the people you spend the most time with at different stages in your life. From 0 to 18, it was family; from 18 to 22, it was friends; and from 22 onward, it was a slow incline of time spent with your partner, until finally it’s just the two of you and everyone else is dead.

This means that choosing a partner is the equivalent of choosing the person who you will eventually enter a mutual solitary confinement with. In this sense, it doesn’t just affect your fate; it is your fate. It is also the fate of the future children whose souls you wrench out of nothingness and into the cruel world—as well as the children whose souls your children subsequently wrench out of nothingness, and so on, and so forth, in perpetuity, until the apocalypse.