“Harry Potter” actress Emma Watson has now doubled-down on her claims of being “self-partnered” instead of single, saying she appreciates how the label has empowered people in their singlehood.
“I never believed the whole ‘I’m happy single’ spiel. I was like, ‘This is totally spiel.’ It took me a long time, but I’m very happy [being single].” Watson told British Vogue back in November. “I call it being self-partnered.”
Watson said her dismissiveness of the label single stemmed from the anxiousness of turning 30.
“I was like, ‘Why does everyone make such a big fuss about turning 30? This is not a big deal … ‘ Cut to 29, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I feel so stressed and anxious,’” Watson added. “And I realize it’s because there is suddenly this bloody influx of subliminal messaging around. If you have not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby, and you are turning 30, and you’re not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you’re still figuring things out … There’s just this incredible amount of anxiety.”
Speaking with E!’s “The Rundown” this week, Watson said she intended her label to be a “throwaway comment” and did not realize it would gain such traction.
“I literally said it as a throwaway comment, thinking it would go no further,” she said. “And then I woke up the next morning and my phone’s blowing up and I don’t know why and it’s all my friends messaging me being like, ‘Self-partnered?’ This thing’s gone crazy.”
“I’m so happy people feel empowered,” she added, asserting she is “100% committed” to being self-partnered even when in a relationship.
“It’s much more about your relationship with yourself and the feeling of not somehow deficient in some way because you’re not with someone,” she continued.
At the time, when Emma Watson unveiled her new phrase for singlehood, Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire decried it as a “recipe for misery.”
“This is a recipe for misery. It’s not just in self-partnership,” Knowles argued. “AI has permitted sex robot technology to get really, really advanced. So there are now sex robot brothels, there are now sex robots that don’t just move their arms and do whatever sort of things you want a sex robot to do, they actually have chest cavities that can breathe. They’re actually simulating human beings. They’re really close. I mean, Mashable did a report on this the other day. They said that the robots are just as good as people. But they’re not people, they’re just hunks of metal and plastic.”
Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro argued this new trend in self-coupling indicates that society needs to take the social institution of marriage seriously again.
“Solving the problem of making right and moral decisions that better your life — that is how your life gets better,” Shapiro said. “That means taking seriously the fundamental social institutions that [have] been broken by the Left since the 1960s, focusing on restoring those — because those are things you can do. Not things that you have to wait for some government savior to do — and, by the way, those government saviors ain’t showing up.”