Story scent: burnt circuits, vape, stone, hotel hallway

Story flavour: cold leftovers

Play on repeat while reading: “#19”, by Aphex Twin

I was considerably late to the party when it came to reading the famous article in Vogue, “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” by Chante Joseph. Nevertheless, it didn’t take much time to understand why it gained popularity on social media. I was not surprised by the article’s popularity, but rather by its own limitations. Yes – the article thoughtfully documents women’s experiences yet stops short of asking what shaped those experiences in the first place. I would have to disagree that various culturally familiar statements can, on their own, adequately explain why having a boyfriend has come to feel embarrassing. So, here are my thoughts on what the article gets right – and what it avoids.

1. It belongs to a specific socio-cultural bubble

If you are a woman living in the West, particularly in big cities like New York or London, you are likely to agree with the article’s premise. In such cities, where the entire existence of an individual is aestheticised and commercialised, having a boyfriend, of course, is a concept as well. While living in these places, we begin to perceive everything as an aesthetic, or a vibe, focusing on the meaning it carries within society and how it defines individuals, rather than simply appreciating something for what it is. In the 21st century, to exist is to perform, and when the concept of having a boyfriend stops being curatable, especially over social media, we stop appreciating it. Therefore, from a Westernised standpoint, we are not embarrassed because we have boyfriends. We are embarrassed by what having a boyfriend looks like from the lens of others, facing the fear of losing social currency and losing our “vibe”. However, this assumption collapses outside a narrow Western, urban context. In the majority of the world, particularly in developing countries, social currency operates through materially grounded relationships rather than online presence. A partner is often valued not for how they appear, but for what they do: helping during family crises, fixing a leaking sink, and showing up for you when life becomes heavy. Therefore, when social value is not dictated by an algorithm, the premise that having a boyfriend is embarrassing ends up being largely unintelligible. Admittedly, there is another world out there outside of our postcodes, and it looks very different. Perhaps, rather than contemplating whether we should call ordinary things embarrassing, we need to start travelling more often. To places that feel unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable at times. Somewhere other than Tokyo or Rome.

2. Why social media overlooks boyfriends now

My central contention is that the root cause of this belief is misdiagnosed. If we want to understand why boyfriends started disappearing on social media, there are other factors to dissect. First of all, we didn’t suddenly grow disenchanted with the idea of boyfriends over our Instagram feed, but it rather disappeared with the pandemic. Prompting the spread of individualised content caused by lockdowns and social distancing, we found ourselves trying to make living great again in our homes. As a departure from the pre-2020 content on Instagram, centred around cute couples travelling the world or doing quizzes and pranks on each other, we were instead greeted with homemade pumpkin spice latte recipes, workout programs, journaling ideas, and sourdough bread tutorials. To cope with isolation, we invented ways to spend time alone, romanticising the concept of “me-time”. This type of content had a prolonged effect on our lives, persisting even after the lockdowns ended. At-home pandemic activities shared on social media were later replaced with solo travel, dining out alone, or watching movies without company, which is a content type that still dominates our feeds. Hence, what we may be witnessing is not embarrassment about boyfriends, but the endurance of a post-pandemic visual language centred around self-sufficiency.

3. The criticism of the dating landscape

The article also gestures toward the bleakness of contemporary dating, which is a point I find valid and worth expanding upon. But why has dating become so mentally taxing in the first place?

By the 2020s, we had embraced new vocabulary in our daily life, such as lovebombing, gaslighting, and situationship. The question is not simply why these words exist, but what conditions made them relevant. It is also worth asking why, after 2020, hours of scrolling on Instagram and TikTok, and the normalisation of doomscrolling, embedded themselves into the daily routines of our lives.  The timelines, tellingly, overlap.

In my view, this overlap is not accidental. We’ve begun living in a world that we continuously seek to escape from, into another one, each day – sometimes for a few minutes, and sometimes for hours. The more we escaped, the more absorbing it became, powered by an algorithm designed to prey on our weaknesses, reinforce our beliefs, and feed us what we like and filter out what we don’t. We got wired to be more impatient and less attentive over time via scrolling, targeting poor attention span and quick rushes of dopamine, compressing as much content as possible into the shortest amount of time. Over time, we grew desensitised to the contrast between a video of a dog playing in a park and footage of starving children in Palestine, followed by the holiday reel of an influencer, all consumed within 10 seconds. The flattened emotional contrast established a false sense of reality and a distorted understanding of how the world actually works. Over time, we started seeking the same instant gratification offline. If someone fails to impress us within the first five minutes of a date, we disengage. If a conversation slows, we label it a lack of chemistry. If someone requires patience, we call it boredom. At that point, what truly distinguishes doomscrolling from dating a new person?

This behavioural shift in our generation implies that social media has not merely changed how we date, but reshaped our thresholds for attention, novelty, and a constant need for validation. When connection is mediated through continuous comparison and infinite options, commitment begins to feel restrictive rather than grounding, and intimacy becomes transactional.

4. In reference to the article

Circling back to the original article, what we find embarrassing is not having a boyfriend, but what the relationship comes to signify. As mentioned earlier, in Western culture, having a boyfriend is deeply conceptualised: strategic withdrawals, intermittent ghosting, and texting back less. It simply signals participation in a game that feels more theatrical than intimate. Posting a boyfriend, therefore, becomes a quiet confession that you surrendered to the script.

Perhaps, then, the embarrassment does not come from love itself, but from the choreography necessary to achieve success in dating. It might instead be the shame we feel toward ourselves for agreeing to bend to a set of illogical conventions and how readily we silence ourselves in the search for connection. We are not ashamed of romance, but of the parts of ourselves we sacrifice in pursuit of it, only to feel less like ourselves at the end of the journey.