A few weeks back, Vogue published an article titled ‘Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?’. In the piece, writer Chanté Joseph argues that in recent years being single has become “more of a flex” than being in a relationship. “Women don’t want to be seen as being all about their man,” she writes. “Audiences are icked out by seeing too much boyfriend content.” Almost overnight, it went viral. Viral viral. Innumerable thinkpieces have been written in response to the piece, published everywhere from The Guardian to Grazia. TikTok has been flooded with creators offering their two pence on the topic. Even New York’s incoming mayor and man of the moment, Zohran Mamdani, was asked for his take on the debate on a popular podcast.

On the one hand, feeling sheepish about being attracted to men is nothing new. Many men are disappointing, disrespectful, and do embarrass their female partners. Women shouldn’t be the ones to take on the shame that should be felt by their terrible boyfriends, of course, but they often do it anyway. Asa Seresin made similar points in his seminal essay ‘On Heteropessimism’, published all the way back in 2019. “Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience,” he wrote. As the heterosexual dating landscape has failed to improve – or, as I’m sure some would argue, gotten worse – it’s no surprise that straight women are still feeling ‘embarrassed’ by their straightness.

What is striking about the Vogue article, though, is that it reveals the extent to which embarrassment now governs our lives. Everybody feels perceived. Nobody wants to look gauche. It’s an attitude that has been catalysed by social media and the subsequent rise of surveillance culture, with many of us offering up our private lives for public consumption and self-censoring in order to pander to our ‘audiences’, even if we’re not traditional influencers ourselves. Apparently, we’re now at a stage where young women, influencers or not, are more concerned with maintaining a coherent personal brand – often cool, aloof, and cynical – than being openly sincere about being in love. 

To be fair, I don’t think how (or if) you present your relationship on social media necessarily says much about the quality of your relationship. Many people simply can’t be bothered with posting on social media. Others may, understandably, prefer to keep their romantic relationships private; as Joseph mentions in her piece, many people worry that posting about a relationship can jinx things. But the idea that significant numbers of women let fear of embarrassment influence how they conduct their relationships is deeply disturbing (equally disturbing is the fact that some people care so much about how others – in some cases strangers – conduct their relationships).

I can see why an influencer might take pains to portray their relationship (or lack thereof) in a certain way on social media (this is artificial and dystopian, but influencers in general are artificial and dystopian). Florence Given, for example, has built an entire career on embracing singledom. But why should a normal person care what their audience thinks? As James Greig argued in a Dazed article published earlier this year, everyone is a content creator now: “Maybe we‘ve just been watching [influencer] content for so long that we’ve started to see it as the normal way to behave,” he wrote. But it isn’t normal to worry about what your ‘audience’ will think about your boyfriend. It isn’t normal to think of being single as a “flex” (nor, for the record, is it normal to think of being in a relationship as a “flex”). Relationships aren’t identity markers. They’re bonds forged and cultivated between two real people.

It isn’t normal to think of being single as a “flex” (nor, for the record, is it normal to think of being in a relationship as a “flex”). Relationships aren’t identity markers. They’re bonds forged and cultivated between two real people

And these bonds are the only things that matter: the longest ever study on happiness, conducted by researchers at Harvard University, found that strong social bonds are the single most important predictor of happiness and health, more so than wealth or career success. Of course, these don’t have to be romantic bonds – they can be platonic, too. But if you do have a good romantic partner – someone who supports you, cares for you, loves you – why would you ever feel ashamed of them? If you’re lucky enough to experience the miracle of being in love with somebody, why would you care about something as arbitrary as a stranger’s opinion of your relationship? (On the flipside: if you have a bad romantic partner, and they make you feel ashamed, why don’t you… break up?)

One thing that gives me hope is that it’s unclear how widespread this attitude is. Joseph writes about straight women preferring to ‘soft-launch’ partners nowadays – “a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head” – and this is something I’ve seen, sure. But then she writes: “On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots.” Which made me think: really? Are people really going to such heartless lengths to… maintain a social media persona? I don’t doubt that Joseph is drawing on examples she’s seen on her own social media feeds. Perhaps I should just be thankful that, for now, my corner of the internet doesn’t look quite the same.