“Have you seen Charles’ girlfriend? She’s so hot,” a journalist I met at the Melbourne Grand Prix tells me. He was referring to the Formula One driver for Ferrari, Charles Leclerc and his girlfriend, 22-year-old art history student Alexandra Saint Mleux. As soon as he is at a far enough distance from me, I look Mleux up on Instagram. She is thin, tanned and always well-dressed. She is wearing make-up in almost every picture. Tatler has described her as a “Ferrari WAG, Rhode pin-up, Monaco gallerina” who is potentially “the most glamorous woman in Formula One”. Comments on her Instagram and TikTok praise her for being a “good” girlfriend to Leclerc, even though we know nothing about their relationship.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships; the ways we perform in them and why we are in them in the first place. When I first started dating my partner, I used to make this joke that I felt the urge to listen to Ariana Grande. It was not a joke, and I was listening to a lot of her music at the start of our relationship, especially her lead single, “Positions”, from her 2020 album of the same name. “Switchin’ the positions for you / Cookin’ in the kitchen, and I’m in the bedroom,” she sang. “This is some shit that I usually don’t do / But for you, I kinda, kinda want to.” I cringe writing this now and looking back on that period, but at the time, dating my now long-term partner made me finally feel like a woman. A category that I, like many other Black women, have felt denied access to. His recognition of me as someone worthy enough and “feminine” enough to date affirmed my gender, and I didn’t want that to be taken away from me. As Andrea Long Chu writes in her book Females (and I’m paraphrasing), gender is not innate to us; it is given, and it can be taken away.

With this reality at the forefront of my mind, I wanted to be immersed in anything feminine. Anything that reminded me of how I should feel, act, and even look as a girlfriend, and I did this mostly without even realising. Dating is weird (particularly in a heterosexual context) because even the most progressive-minded of us can find ourselves following conservative ideas of gender and relationships, even when we do not hold those beliefs. In her book, Love In Exile, writer Shon Faye recognised this same behaviour in herself when reflecting on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend B: “[I was] always good-humoured, unconditionally accepting: there was perhaps something of the Stepford wife about it.” She continued: “In my keenness to show to myself and the world that I had been chosen, I started to warp, pressing myself into a shape I did not recognise.”

So much of romantic relationships is about pressing yourself into a shape you do not recognise, as Faye so accurately puts it. We are told that women are meant to be hyper-feminine and that the right man will put you in your “feminine energy”, as divine feminine con-influencers incessantly express online. But this isn’t a natural state of being as we are so often told, but a naturalised one. We act this way because we are told to and because it gets the best reception from both our desired partners and from the public.

Nobody knows what Leclerc and Mleux’s relationship is like, and yet they assume it’s good because she is beautiful and feminine and adheres to her gender correctly. Conversely, so does he – Leclerc is seen as being good-looking and is immersed in the hyper-masculine and perilous world of motor racing. We praise certain relationships and those within them for their ability to keep up with appearances. It’s one of the reasons footballer Bukayo Saka’s girlfriend, Tolami Benson, had article upon article written about her last year during the 2024 Euros. British Vogue exclaimed that she was the woman “reviving WAG fever” with her “insane face card” and hyper-feminine glam. These articles were all written because she’s beautiful, which isn’t inherently bad, but discussions such as these subconsciously tell us that women must look a certain way (have their hair and make-up done and present as feminine as possible) to be valued in our society, to be seen as important and to be loved.

When you are in a relationship, and you do not obey conventional eurocentric beauty standards, you are ridiculed and punished for it. Last year, footballer Declan Rice’s long-term girlfriend (and mother of his child) Lauren Fryer was bullied off social media for her appearance and weight, and people remarked on her pictures that they didn’t understand why Rice was with her. The same comments are made about Benny Blanco, who is in a relationship with musician Selena Gomez. He is shorter than her, and the internet never fails to bring up the fact they think he’s ugly – commenting on his Jewish facial features and body hair. Recently, Blanco posted a TikTok video of himself getting his eyebrows plucked, to which people rejoiced in the comment section, writing: “Keep that brow specialist on the payroll” or “The girlfriend effect is finally happening!”

Whether you like Blanco or not, many of the negative comments about his appearance are anti-semitic, and these opinions have extended into a belief that his relationship with Gomez is strange, dysfunctional or bad. People on social media have variously claimed that Blanco is not Gomez’s partner but her “handler”, that she must be drugged because he has a face only an “MK-Ultra’d victim could love,” and that the relationship has no passion, it is just two lonely people desperately “clinging” to each other – comments that, of course, leave no space for the possibility that these people bonded and fell in love over shared values, dreams or interests, including their mutual passion for music.

This is not surprising. As beauty critic, Jessica DeFino wrote in her newsletter last year, as a society, we tend to have the moral code of Disney cartoons. We superficially believe that beauty is good; thus, a beautiful couple must have a healthy relationship (look at the contrast with how people talk about and aspire to Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s relationship). When we see people we perceive as “ugly” (ie who sit outside narrow European beauty standards), we are quick to assume the worst. That their relationship must be bad, that something must be wrong, that they are not really in love. This is exactly why people feel the need to change and transform themselves beyond recognition. It seems contrary to what we ask of people when we are looking for love in the first place. We ask that people genuinely love us for who we are, but the world repeatedly proves that we will only be rewarded for looking a certain way, for not being or looking like ourselves.

In her book Right Wing Women, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin writes that “the tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognise that they are committing suicide.” Dworkin was making a specific reference here to right-wing women who make accommodations to male domination for their own survival. But when I read that quote, I immediately thought about beauty and relationships and the ways we transform ourselves entirely for love and survival. But we deserve to do way more in this life than just survive.

We “survive” by adhering to our gender roles, with their own built-in violence that often result in tragedy. We “survive” by adhering to beauty standards, where people go under the knife and sometimes do not wake up or have lifelong complications due to surgeries. We “survive” by changing ourselves, making ourselves smaller and more easily digestible, to the point where we look in the mirror and can no longer recognise who is staring back at us. It may seem like survival, but as Dworkin would put it, it is a type of death.

Not all people feel forced to look a certain type of way in their relationships; but many of us can relate to feeling pressured within these dynamics to keep up with appearances. Love and the pursuit of it (albeit challenging) are supposed to be fun, exhilarating, and life-affirming, but rarely ever feel that way. So, what really makes a good partner? Maybe once we deprioritise the importance of physical appearance from our lives (and gender), we will genuinely know the answer to that question.