When I was in high school, I had the same mindset as everybody else. You needed a girlfriend to be happy. My friends and I would spend hours texting local girls on Snapchat quick add in hopes of finding a date. The weeks I went on dates, I was over the moon; the weeks I spent alone made me feel like a shell of a person. It was as if I was an incomplete human being without a girl's company.

This continued until that fateful day I set out for Wyoming on a solo camping trip. For the first time since childhood, I felt happy and ALIVE without a woman's validation. Over that week, I realized that life has so many different ways for one to find happiness, and that being with a beautiful girl was just one of them. Hobbies, interests, and simply being OUTSIDE seemed to make me feel just as good, if not better, than being on any of those dates from high school.

Now that I'm in college, I've found that doing well in my major, exercising in nature, and having a halfway-decent social outlet are more than enough to have a baseline of fulfillment. Sure, I'd still be better off with a girlfriend (as long as we had some common interests) but I'm nowhere near how I felt during my high school dry spells.

The "decentering" and "4B" ideas many feminists have been tossing around since the orange guy's reelection have applied surprisingly well to me, and have taken me from depressed to doing just fine.