Having A Boyfriend Is Not Embarrassing, Your Need For Clout Is

Vogue recently published a viral op-ed entitled, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” and it’s kind of an anthropological case study on the evolving status of being taken. Where historically, women’s identities were centered around their partners, now we’re finding ourselves in a culture of status reversal. Out with “Boyfriend Land” and in with… Perpetual E-Girl?

Writer Chanté Joseph is documenting this shift—whereby women used to derive status from their proximity to men, specifically by being claimed by one—into an era where having a boyfriend, or worse, being a “boyfriend girl,” takes a hit on a woman’s aura.

Why Women Are Ashamed of Their Boyfriends Now

In investigating this phenomenon, where women’s “taken” relationship status inspires more shame than pride, she observes how women are engaging in behaviors that de-center men in their lives. Rather than hard-launching boyfriends, content creators and casual social media users resort to soft launches, where boyfriends are not explicitly featured in their content nor named or claimed. They exist, instead, in ways that vaguely haunt the narrative—in the form of clinking glasses, a hand on the steering wheel, their reflection in a window, a shadow beside their partner. The question the author asks is, why are women doing this? Are they embarrassed by their boyfriends now?

For many, it seems that they are. Having a boyfriend is described by women with large platforms as “lame,” “out of style,” even coded as “Republican” or, more sinisterly, “spiritually Israeli.” This mindset and the avoidant behavior that follows seem to be rewarded by audiences who lament that the women they follow on social media for entertainment so predictably become watered-down, beige versions of themselves once a boyfriend enters the picture, that they’re not willing to stick around to be proven wrong.

Because they anticipate a shift in content that becomes all about the boyfriend and strips the female creator of all the qualities that made her interesting to watch, they flee. As a result, public-facing women are mass-unfollowed the moment they announce they’re booed up, dismissed as “cringey” or “embarrassing,” even by other women in relationships. The unobscured boyfriend, then, is not just a relationship status marker; it’s a signal of how male-centered a woman is.

But these aren’t the only reasons. Joseph cites some other commonly cited fears, like superstition. Some women report fearing “the evil eye,” the idea that posting their happy relationship online would spark jealousy so strong that the relationship would come to an end. Others say they don’t want to be boastful in an era of widespread romantic discontentment. Others were more utilitarian in their concerns, worrying that the relationship could end and they’d be stuck with a digital footprint littered with the evidence of their ex-boyfriend’s imprint on their lives.

Joseph cites one woman who was in a relationship for twelve years, whose breakup reinforced her belief that claiming a man is lame because they can still embarrass you twelve years in. In other words, a low-grade disillusionment with and lack of faith in men has taken hold in young women. She concludes that women want to straddle two worlds—one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across as “culturally loser-ish.” Women will post photos from their wedding day with their husband’s face blurred out. For some, this is a matter of privacy, but others admit it’s a stylistic choice, leading us to wonder, why post them at all?

De-Centering Men

Joseph argues women “don’t want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.” This is because female society—those with a lot of public influence—has become largely “heterofatalist,” with more women embracing single life and no longer placing value in partnership. With so many discontented daters who have embraced the femcel life or turned to radical feminism, they’ve romanticized their discontentment into ideology.

Their uniting force is their disappointment in men. It’s no accident that the women most visibly annoyed by boyfriend content and the idea of fully risking your heart in earnest to another person are all women who have been let down by men in pretty substantial ways. Maybe it was a two-way street; who knows? But as YouTuber Time to Yap points out, model-actress Emily Ratajkowski didn’t start calling it “chic” to marry young and be divorced by thirty until after her own marriage ended, reportedly due to her husband’s cheating.

Since then, she’s reinvented herself as a feminist firebrand who claims to keep “zero straight men” in her life, except, as she says, for “pleasure and fun,” but “not a part of [her] core.” Yikes—imagine if a man was boasting about how women are for his own pleasure and fun, but not to be taken seriously as potential life partners. He’d be burned at the stake for being a misogynistic man-child, and maybe there’s a good reason for that.

This shift away from male-centeredness is extremely popular these days, especially as an avoidant coping mechanism developed after being blindsided by romantic heartbreak or betrayal. Women close off their hearts and elevate their female or “queer” friends and demote men to background characters in their lives that come and go. I can understand the need for a season of life following heartbreak that is divorced from romantic relationships as the highest calling or as the primary focus of a woman’s life.

But now, as with most things, the mimetic desire of it all (the elevation of single life and disgust that boyfriend girls inspire) is keeping women perpetually locked in this season, never moving past it. This obviously can’t be healthy. It rewards performative detachment and fear of vulnerability while treating women who still “naively” believe in love as silly fools who haven’t discovered the big lie yet. Not everyone is ready for a relationship, but nurturing an intimacy wound like this—by promoting avoidant attachment, living in fear and distrust that the next man is always one breath away from “embarrassing you”—turns your relationships into PR campaigns. It ironically sounds like the sort of tropes you’d hear women critiquing about men as “toxic masculinity.”

They’ve embraced the emotional unavailability, commitment aversion, and self-protection of the tragic male figures in virtually every story about the ways men try to maintain their power after being humiliated, and they’ve internalized it as feminist self-protection. Every person with a chip on their shoulder about the opposite sex, every person “going their own way” and abstaining from romantic relationships, has their reasons to distrust, but you can never claim that this disposition is healthy or aspirational. We all used to laugh at this archetype; how foolish their nihilistic outlook was in collapsing the most sacred aspects of the human experience—love, intimacy, connection—into utilitarian calculus.

The Clout of Cynicism & the Aura Drain of Earnestness

Joseph closes out the article with two inflammatory points. She says that being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore and is no longer considered an achievement. If anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single. I agree with this behaviorally. This is certainly what’s happening. But then she parrots this academic jargon that’s pulled straight out of heterofatalist dogma: “As straight women, we’re confronting something that every other sexuality has had to contend with: a politicization of our identity. Heterosexuality has long been purposefully indefinable, so it is harder for those within it and outside of it to critique. However, as our traditional roles begin to crumble, maybe we’re being forced to reevaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.”

This is literally just incel culture, but for women. “Men are so disappointing that we should give up on them entirely; this has nothing to do with our own wounds.” Women are not burnt out on heterosexuality; most “heterofatalists” love to romanticize the tension between being attracted to men and hating the suffering that comes along with it, unable to transcend their god-given or biologically ordained attraction. And the thing these people frame as disturbing (uncritical heteronormativity) is literally just being unburdened by the peering eye of soul-damaged queer academics.

The domain of “Boyfriend Land,” the author mentions early in the article—a regrettable “world where women’s online identities center around the lives of their partners”—is framed as pathetic because the “situation is rarely seen reversed.” I read the Substack article the author linked and implied was brilliant, and it’s just pathologizing women with unguarded hearts who earnestly delight in the little quirks of their boyfriends, or men more broadly. The jaded Substack writer, too consumed by her erroneous need for uniform gender parity, is seething over the unequal proliferation of content on TikTok. It’s too lopsided, the author argues, in favor of women observing behaviors, posting about, and constantly talking about their male partners, whereas men hardly ever partake in this behavior over their female partners. They take women’s harmless indulgence in the quirks of the men in their lives as insidious patriarchy.

It’s obvious that women evolved to focus on relationships and therefore define themselves more through connection (who they know, how they relate, how people feel). Men, by contrast, define themselves by standing out or ranking within hierarchies. These biological differences bleed out into the larger culture because they are gender essentialist, not socialized behavior. Women’s conversations and online posts revolve around people, especially men, while men’s lean more toward things and abstract ideas, if they post at all. In other words, women dominate the visible culture of posting and personal storytelling, while men engage more passively or focus on different kinds of content.

Status Games

Joseph also observes that where once being single was a cautionary tale (ending up a spinster with loads of cats), it’s now becoming a “desirable and coveted status.” She refers to this as “another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefitted women to begin with.” Here’s what I think is really happening: Women now think it’s uncool to have a boyfriend or be a boyfriend girl because they associate having a boyfriend with being a watered-down version of themselves. This point, I can most sympathize with and understand. I’ve seen some women critiquing this point as perplexing because they’ve never felt this before and suggest it’s nothing more than an indication that you’re not with the right partner. I have a slightly different take.

Being in a committed relationship, especially as a woman, often requires restraint—modesty, even. When you’re single, your public persona can be impulsive, reckless, and unfiltered. Only once you’re in a relationship do you start thinking about how your digital footprint might reflect on someone else. It’s no secret that men don’t like it when their girlfriend is perceived to be “easy,” but our modern age adds an additional online element to the purity question: whether she is perceived to be for public consumption. That may mean posting thirst traps, having a large online following as a public figure, having a predominantly male audience, being flirty online, or talking about intimate subjects men don’t find appropriate to discuss with others—especially other men.

Miley Cyrus recently reflected on those pivotal years of her career that infamously shed her Hannah Montana persona and gave birth to something much more raunchy and divisive. On Monica Lewinsky’s podcast, she reflects on this time of her life with a sense of sorrowful remorse. As much as she successfully shed the ghost of Hannah Montana’s past and forged her own path into pop stardom, it came with a lot of sacrifices, embarrassment, and pain. She recalls her public image taking a toll on her romantic relationships because they felt like she was taking something that was supposed to be sacred—something that was just for them—and sharing it with the world, that she was giving it away.

“I lost everything during that time in my personal life because of the choices I was making professionally. My relationships fell apart. I was engaged at the time. That didn’t work out because the fact that I would, you know, pose nude or dance in very little clothes or show my body was making them feel like I was taking something away that was meant to be for them. So, I would have really hard times dating.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the pop star life, much like the rock star life, is somewhat incompatible with a thriving love life—at least one built to last, to weather the storms, tethered around commitment and respect. But it seems like, thanks to social media, women en masse want to lead pop star lives, and as a result, make pop star bargains.

Why sublimate my need for attention, belonging, and affirmation that I matter into something long-lasting and risky when I can enjoy it from a distance—from thousands of regenerative, faceless followers? Why should I be anything but the main character of my own life? That’s the question modern women are contending with, and many are deciding that they no longer wish to be the side character to a man’s main quest.

Because heterosexual relationships do require some sacrifice—shifting from maiden to wife and then mother—women are now in a position to ask themselves, well, why should I want to become a wife and mother if I can just be a perpetual maiden, forever? I’m not judging women for milking their youth and beauty, pushing off commitment as long as possible. I do, however, think countless women are avoiding intimacy for pretty bad reasons, and if they are doing that, it would be beneficial for them to realize that endless hedonism is not necessarily their highest calling. That they might be putting it off as a misguided defense mechanism.

Changing Attitudes About the Good Life

Clinical psychologist and content creator Dr. Ana Yudin worries that Gen Z’s intimacy avoidance problem is incredibly psychologically unhealthy, noting that a defining characteristic of Gen Z, as laid out in the book iGen, is a belief that your twenties are “for yourself” and therefore a time to put off relationships, marriage, and kids. Based on the Zoomers interviewed and the attitudes they espoused, these relational commitments are seen as impediments to self-development.

One of the Zoomers interviewed for iGen stated matter-of-factly, “Our 20s are meant to be the best years of our lives. The years in which we can be completely selfish, let loose, and ignore the consequences of bad decisions... To be honest, sometimes a long-term relationship can just get in the way of all that fun.” But is there ever an appropriate time to be completely selfish and ignore the consequences of bad behavior? Dr. Ana pushes back: “If that’s how you’re spending your twenties, I can almost guarantee you’re going to end up in your thirties pretty isolated with no sense of community. Everything in life is about balance—in this case, juggling self-interest with, also, the well-being of others.”

Another Zoomer in iGen voiced believing it’s unhealthy to build up emotional reliance on other people and that this is why avoiding dating young is safer and healthier, but Dr. Ana says this rests on two faulty assumptions: first, that emotional reliance is avoidable (it’s not—we’re social creatures); and second, that if you’re emotionally relying on someone and that relationship ends, you won’t be able to handle the distress, which speaks to how little Gen Z thinks of their own ability to handle stress.

She argues, “It’s gotten to the point where I think younger generations genuinely believe their safety is at risk if they experience any form of discomfort or painful emotion. But the truth is, you can be emotionally reliant on someone, have that relationship end, suffer because of it, and survive. And maybe even become a more well-rounded, resilient person because of it and learn something from that experience.” Her larger point is that you can only enrich yourself so much as an individual, divorced from any relational context. “The self exists within a system of relationships, regardless. So, while it’s important to do individual work, it’s also important to contextualize that individual work within relationships.”

Another Zoomer interviewed for iGen suggests that relationships with that level of intimacy are distractions, to which Dr. Ana asks, “Distractions from what, exactly?” She entertains a few possible ideas: “making as much money as possible, achieving status in your vocation, posting the perfect selfie,” then asks the million-dollar question: “Are any of these things going to matter on your deathbed?” What are the odds that the happiest, most meaningful moments of your life are totally devoid of other people?

I’m willing to bet most of them happened in the context of relationships—familial, friendship, romantic, mentor—whatever it was, they probably weren’t just you sitting alone in a room surrounded by objects. And even if they were, the objects couldn’t have mattered that much to you if there were no other people to perceive them. It’s curious, too, that Zoomers see their twenties as a pivotal period of self-development, which is somehow achieved through endless hedonism. Our most meaningful moments rarely happen in isolation. In fact, Dr. Ana makes the case that romantic relationships can actually prompt, rather than hinder, self-development. There’s a saying, “You have to love yourself before somebody else loves you,” but she doesn’t believe that’s true.

“We learn that we are worthy through relationships with other people.” Most learn it when they’re little from their parents, but some don’t. It’s very challenging to prove to yourself that you are worthy and you deserve love if no one has ever made you feel that way. It’s going to take a lot longer and it’s going to be a lot harder than if you genuinely meet another human being and you connect on a deep level.” I couldn’t agree more. People rarely develop self-worth in a vacuum. Love itself is transformative. It exposes the futility of chasing status or comfort for their own sake, because those things only mean something when there’s someone to share them with.

De-centering men from your life is your prerogative, but if you’re doing it for clout—some next-level, vague “self-development” fantasy that idolizes singlehood, fears intimacy, and indulges in endless hedonism—you’re chasing a false god that won’t get you there. The most self-actualizing moments in my life have all been the handiwork of my relationships with other people; most significantly, a loving, long-term one.

Maybe that’s not for you right now, but there’s nothing embarrassing about love. What’s embarrassing is performatively distancing yourself from it so a bunch of terminally online, damaged losers can commiserate with each other and pass off their female inceldom as some profound ideology. It’s all the same—just more fear, avoidance, and blackpilling. Indulge in the “embarrassment” and let the love flow through you.