229. RE: Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?

06 Nov, 2025

Vogue Magazine asks the question, "Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?" and everyone, including me, is saying a giant, resounding "yes indeed!"

I do agree, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now. Not because love is uncool or because commitment is cringe, but because the veil has lifted. We’ve all seen behind the curtain. There is a collective, open, statistically undeniable truth that, for many women, relationships with men are not sources of safety or nourishment. Collectively, we’ve read the statistics, sat through the bad dates, debriefed the breakups, and come to the quiet conclusion that being partnered with a man is, more often than not, a downgrade in peace (of mind, and just in general). The data is grim, the anecdotes are grimmer, and the jokes are now coping mechanisms.

Relationships are still costly, and not equally so. For women, they remain a full-body investment. Our mothers and grandmothers stayed in marriages because they couldn’t open bank accounts, couldn’t buy homes, couldn’t exist outside the legal and social cage of a husband. Because society told them their value was in being chosen. Also because abuse wasn’t taken seriously, survival meant submission, and they weren’t free to refuse. They weren’t foolish at all, they were just surviving. But their daughters and granddaughters have freedoms they never had. To be this free and still center a man in your life, to make him the axis of your joy or identity, that feels like a betrayal. It may just go against everything we’ve fought to build: autonomy, stability, dignity. We’re not ashamed of being single; if anything, we’re ashamed of how long we stayed in relationships that demanded our smallness.

"Boyfriend Land,” as the original Vogue piece calls it, used to be the internet’s default setting. Women were rewarded for being visibly chosen. A man’s presence validated your existence, so that means that you’d made it. Now, that same visibility feels like regression. The cultural mood has shifted (See: Heterofatalism by Nicole Ocran). Posting your boyfriend isn’t cute anymore; it’s cautionary. The new aesthetic is obfuscation: hands, shadows, backs of heads. Women are still partnered, but now we redact the evidence like state secrets. There’s this secondhand embarrassment, not for caring, but for pretending it’s fine. For insisting that your boyfriend is different when the odds say otherwise (Sometimes I just don't care about my friends' boyfriends. They are simply ¹gargoyle boyfriends and forget their names...)

It’s not even about superstition or the evil eye (although that’s part of it!). It’s about wanting to avoid the particular humiliation of being publicly optimistic about a man. I think that I used to be the prime example of that. Having a boyfriend used to boost your social value; now it just risks your credibility. The safest position is detached irony. You can have a partner, but you’d better sound ambivalent about it.

It’s not that intimacy itself has lost value. It’s that we’ve run the numbers, read the group chats, scrolled through stories and threads. We’ve watched our friends’ confidence wither under the weight of “communication issues.” and endless situationships that go awry. We’ve had way too many coffee chats that start with he’s actually really sweet when it’s just us and end with I don’t know what happened to me.

So yes, having a boyfriend is embarrassing, like believing in trickle-down affection. It’s embarrassing because we know better now. Not in a smug, man-hating way, but in a tired, self-preserving one. The romance isn’t gone; it’s just moved elsewhere, For example, I had moved my affection and love into friendships, communities, quiet mornings, and the stubborn act of keeping myself whole.

And yet, here's the annoying part, is that I now do have a boyfriend! (yay)

I don't take back what I wrote at all. And also- I'm not that embarrassed by my boyfriend at all. I find that it is quite difficult to play the "game" in this dating landscape, where navigating this so publically is almost inherently uncool, so I do empathize. However, I realize that it might be kind of a shit opinion because it's time to stop caring what anyone really thinks and realize that if there's someone that actually cares about you, and you, living your life fully on your own terms, isn't embarrassing at all. In all honesty, maybe having a boyfriend is embarrassing (maybe just a bad boyfriend who could not care less whether you live or die), but worrying about what others think and being bitter is an even worse thought.

Public perception will always exist. People will scroll and judge, but when the person you choose to be with makes you laugh, calls you out, and helps you carry life without taking from you, all the "coolness" becomes irrelevant. Loving someone is not performative (or should not be). Maybe being happy quietly is way more braver and radicalized? In fact, I feel very happy to be uplifted and supported in a way that I haven't been in quite a long time :)

~ ur fav gf,

<3 K

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