The most dangerous relationship advice floating around the internet right now is “know your worth.”

Not because it’s wrong, (it’s obviously not) but because of what it has slowly started to imply. Somewhere along the way, self-awareness drifted into self-valuation, and now people speak about love with a vocabulary that feels almost…financial. Once you begin thinking about what you can ‘command’, it becomes surprisingly easy to forget that intimacy was never meant to operate like a market.

Listen to how we talk about relationships now: high-value partners, non-negotiables, standards. Everyone seems to have a framework. Much of the advice online carries the steady confidence of people who recently found language for their experiences and are understandably relieved to have done so. Naming things creates distance from them. It makes us feel less at their mercy.

I believe in boundaries. Mine arrived later than they should have, but I’m so glad they did. Still, I sometimes wonder how often what we have started calling empowerment is simply the decision to never feel at the mercy of needing anyone anymore.

I’m not sure knowing your worth is really about worth. It may have more to do with what you can remain open to- the loneliness of waiting, the ambiguity of something still in a flux, the deeply boring work of building a life alongside another person who is also in the process of becoming.

The internet, inevitably, has nudged us toward treating love like an investment thesis: conviction, alignment, decisive exits. I work in a world that respects optimization, and I’ve seen what happens when it becomes a part of your process. Eventually you stop asking what you actually want and start asking what performs well. Dating can begin to feel like a valuation problem.

We forget that so much of a good relationship is just a slow, steady accumulation of trust and responsibility. It’s not something you can speedrun or get a ‘return’ on in a set timeline.

What feels harder now is staying soft. Remaining permeable in a culture that is constantly congratulating you for becoming harder, more self-contained, less easily moved. We’ve become very skilled at protecting ourselves, though incapable of articulating about what we are protecting our lives for. The result is a peculiar kind of adulthood: emotionally literate, highly defended, and, beneath all that competence, often quite alone.

Real intimacy is rarely process oriented. People know how to show up for catastrophe; crisis gives everyone a role to play. What is less comfortable is being seen while you are still figuring things out. Not at your worst, but at your most unresolved. To let someone witness you there without rushing to optimise yourself into something more investable.

I no longer think the goal was ever simply to be chosen. It may be closer to this: to stop performing long enough that the right person does not have to work so hard to understand you.

Maybe the point isn’t to know your worth so well that no one can ever ‘underprice’ you. Maybe the point is to choose the kind of love where you don’t need to keep proving your worth. Where you can stop negotiating, stop bracing, stop performing, and just be a person.

Not “high value.” Not “low maintenance.” Just a person who can be loved.