Shante Joseph

I think for me, it's that I don't want my identity or to tie myself to my relationship.

I will never get behind this narrative that women don't need men and men don't need women.

The piece was essentially asking this question, if having a boyfriend has kind of lost the social standing it once provided women.

And I was analyzing this through the lens of social media.

I was looking at the way that women are very private about posting their romantic partners online.

A lot of people were kind of sticking emojis over their boyfriend's head,

know we all kind of seen this and i think it started to ramp up and then it's it became a little bit of a parody where people would just edit out their boyfriend's heads completely but then i noticed that um people would post like their their wedding videos or they would post their engagement videos and engagement photos and in these very i guess private moments they were online but they were editing in a way that you never knew what the husband looked like and i was like okay this is

Feeling a bit extreme.

And fair enough if you are, you know, maybe a celebrity or a huge influencer, but people I knew with like 10 followers were doing that.

And I was like, why are you doing this?

And so I really wanted to, yeah, explore this strange trend.

So I found basically three things.

The first was, you know, people said they didn't want to do this simply for privacy reasons.

And then they would go on to say, well, if I posted my boyfriend and he cheated on me next week and I had to go back and delete the pictures, people would be like, well, where's so-and-so?

How's so-and-so?

And I'd have to deal with the shame of that.

But then there were women who just outright, the idea of having a boyfriend, they felt was embarrassing inherently because it didn't align with like the brand is why I got a lot.

If you have a boyfriend and he sucks, he's terrible, he treats you poorly, you don't want to be telling people that, because like, what does that say about you, you know?

A lot of people felt like if I post my boyfriend on Instagram or on social media, I'm indicating something about me to the world that I don't want people to know.

In the piece, one of the comments that I quote is this idea of someone saying, I do recognize that having a boyfriend is kind of a Republican thing to do.