Chapter 1: What sparked the question of whether boyfriends are embarrassing?
So, late last year, the internet asked an important question. Are boyfriends embarrassing now? And turns out, just about everybody had an opinion.
If you have not read the British Vogue article is having a boyfriend embarrassing, you need to run, not walk.
I think for me, it's that I don't want my identity or to tie myself to my relationship.
The fact that this even had to be written is a clear wake-up call for men.
I will never get behind this narrative that women don't need men and men don't need women.
Why would I... I allow anyone, let alone a man, lower the standard I worked so hard to earn. Like, people did this clap back, uh, Vogue is this embarrassing?
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Chapter 2: How does social media influence perceptions of relationships?
And it's some mediocre guy.
Coming up on Today Explained from Vox, an investigation into one of last year's biggest topics. Are straight people okay?
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Chapter 3: What privacy concerns do people have about posting their partners online?
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Chapter 4: Why do some women feel embarrassed about having a boyfriend?
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This is Today Explained. Shante Joseph writes about relationships, culture, lifestyle, friendships, and loneliness. And she wrote a piece in 2025 for Vogue that went viral, probably because it was titled, Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?
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
Chapter 5: How do political views shape perceptions of heterosexual relationships?
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.
And you're noticing something that has really become clear on the timeline. I remember like boyfriend reveals or things like that, but it's gone to... outright hiding. So what did your piece find and kind of what did you even mean by the question of embarrassing?
So I found basically three things. The first was, you know, people said they didn't want to do this simply for privacy reasons.
Chapter 6: What role does the rise of the Tradwife movement play in this discussion?
That sounds more like it's external validation from social media. There are people who truly value privacy. I'm one of those people because I'm an autonomous person. I mean, honestly, unless there's a ring involved. Wait, no, scratch that. Unless you have literally walked down the aisle with someone, there's really no reason to be posting them on your social media.
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.
Chapter 7: How has the conversation around heterosexuality evolved in recent years?
I think in this day and age, men are detrimental to a woman's brand.
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.
I'm not Republican. But I recognize that it is.
And now our relationships, well, particularly straight relationships, say more about us than they ever did before. Like, they almost have a political inclination in a way that I don't think straight people's identities have really been politicized in that way. Whereas before, if you posted your boyfriend online, it felt like a sense of achievement. But now it kind of feels like you are...
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Chapter 8: What solutions are proposed for improving heterosexual relationships?
are kind of like reverting to kind of old archaic ways. And I think it's the way that the sort of like heterosexual romantic relationship has almost been co-opted a little bit by the right. It feels traditionally very sort of conservative. I feel like I'm aligning to this idea of the world that doesn't really feel natural to me, that's what's really got people.
And I think this is also because of the rise in like the tradwife movement and this whole idea of like, you know, I'm just with my man and I'm making, you know, the butter and air from scratch and he's out working and it just represents that very kind of traditional cultural way of living that kind of gives people the ick a bit.
This idea that you now represent an ideology that isn't aligned to you because of your partner is definitely new.
Yeah, I was going to ask specifically about how we should think about this alongside rising trends like Tradwife and others. You mentioned it. I mean, are these things that are happening at the same time? Are these just different communities?
I think they are happening at the same time because I think about the reaction to my piece, whether it's from... The men who were just really angry that I could ever talk disparagingly about men or the women who were very proud of their relationships, feeling as if this was an attack on them. I think the way we talk about relationships online has changed so much.
I was talking about the recent, so who the fuck did I marry? Part 37, who the fuck did I marry? or the Danish deception. And I knew this man has the power to destroy me. And that was exhilarating, but also terrifying at the same time. These women coming online, making these, you know, 60-part TikTok videos detailing all of the horrible things that have happened to them.
Weston Caleb.
I also have a story about West Elm Caleb.
So around Halloween, we matched on Hinge.
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