The 5 Relationship Questions Everyone in Their 20s Is Secretly Spiraling Over

If you’re currently in a relationship you’re low-key auditing, spiraling about whether you’ve wasted your 20s, or staring at a group chat that mysteriously no longer includes you, first of all: breathe.

Second of all, this episode is going to feel like someone hacked your Notes app at 2 a.m. and responded to every intrusive thought with brutal clarity.

On Note to Self, host Payton Sartain opens her Ask P mailbag and answers the exact questions many of us are quietly panicking about. She’s not a therapist—she’ll tell you that immediately. But she has lived it. And instead of packaging everything into tidy, Pinterest-ready advice, she says what actually happened.

No fairytale language. No “when you know, you know.” Just real answers about love, friendship, milestones, and the very specific flavor of existential dread that hits somewhere between 23 and 29.

Here are the five takes that might sting a little—but will probably make you feel less alone.

Should I Stay or Leave the Relationship?

‘We love each other but we’re basically incompatible. Do I stay?’

A 23-year-old listener is two years into a relationship that started out feeling perfect but now feels like an uphill battle. Different attachment styles, different love languages, different communication needs. None of it is toxic, it’s…just constant friction. Sartain’s answer isn’t “leave” or “stay.” It’s that love is a choice, and you either commit to making it work or you move on, and both options will probably be fine.

“Could I live without [my husband] Joe and could he live without me? Absolutely,” she says. “But we decided we wanted to be together. We decided that our lives were happier with each other.” She and Joe started couples therapy before they got married because they were butting heads on the same stuff. He’s avoidant, she wants to resolve everything immediately. He’s touchy, she wasn’t. They met in the middle. But she draws a clear line—there’s a difference between compromising on things like physical touch and compromising on core values. 

“If someone needed me to convert to a certain religion, I just wouldn’t do it. It does not matter how much I’m in love with them.” The real question isn’t whether it’s hard. It’s whether the hard stuff is asking you to abandon who you are or just grow into a better version of yourself.

‘I hit all the milestones and now I feel like…is this it?’

An engaged listener approaching 30 is having a full existential crisis because she followed the expected path (college, career, engagement) and now feels like she’s just…here. Sartain says she felt the same thing after getting married. “It’s almost like a ‘what now’ moment. I have a career. We got married. I did all the things I was supposed to do. And now I’m looking around like, all right, what’s happening now?”

She also talks about the kids question, because the listener went from wanting babies immediately after the wedding to panicking that motherhood would somehow close the door on everything else. That shift, Sartain says, is normal. She’s gone back and forth herself. What changed her perspective was watching women in her life become moms without disappearing inside the role. “Their kids get to watch their mothers live and bear witness to them living their lives and making their own decisions,” she states.

And that’s the part that hits. Maybe the fear isn’t that kids will end your life. Maybe it’s that they’ll force you to decide what you want it to look like.

‘My friends removed me from the group chat because I said I was overwhelmed.’

A recent grad moved to a new city, started working full time, and couldn’t keep up with 400+ unread messages. When she told her friends she needed some grace, they removed her from the chats and kept hanging out without her. “That is f*cking harsh,” Sartain says. “Like they’re freaks. You should definitely let them go.” That’s it. That’s the answer. Sometimes the most helpful thing someone can say is just: it’s not you, they suck, move on.

‘Every guy tells me I’m amazing but nobody actually wants to date me.’

A 22-year-old listener keeps hearing “you’re incredible, anyone would be lucky to have you” right before getting dumped. People tell her guys are intimidated by her goals. Sartain pushes back on that. “I don’t necessarily think that men are scared of clearly knowing what you want. I just think some people and some men do not know what they want. So they’re just kind of out here f*cking around.” 

She says love should be rare and if you’re not finding it everywhere, that’s normal—not a sign something’s wrong with you. Her practical advice is to take the pressure completely off dates: “Go on a date as a way to get out of the house because you wanted to get ready. That’s what I used to do. I just want to be cute today and I want someone to buy me my drinks.” For the record, she and Joe met during what was supposed to be a one-night stand. So…

‘I trust my boyfriend but I can’t stop spiraling.’

A 19-year-old listener knows her boyfriend is a good person. She just can’t shake the trust issues from being cheated on in the past, and the guilt of not being able to trust someone who hasn’t done anything wrong makes it worse. Sartain shares that even after she and Joe got back together and got engaged, she still had a deep distrust that he’d leave her again without warning. 

“It was coming out in the ways that him and I were existing,” she says. And it spreads. “This deep distrust that he’s not going to show up when times get tough also makes you start thinking, well, is he following girls on Instagram?” She ultimately had to face it as a ‘her’ problem, not a ‘him’ problem, and work through it in therapy. Her closing point is the one that sticks: “Even if this isn’t the relationship you end up with, it makes the next one better. So only good can come from that.”

Listen to the full episode on Note to Self, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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