Last week, Vogue published an article titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”
“The script is shifting,” wrote the author, a British social-media influencer called Chanté Joseph. “It is now fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl.” Yesterday, she discussed the story’s devastating impact in an Instagram video. “So many girls have messaged me saying they broke up with their boyfriend because of my article, because they realized he was embarrassing, and it was embarrassing.”
Instead of wondering what Joseph’s own relationship status is, or contemplating the irony of a magazine whose bread and butter is wedding content publishing a story bashing relationships, I panicked. I’ve been terrified of being “fundamentally uncool” since a bully threw away my headband in the fourth grade. If having a boyfriend is bad, I thought, worriedly, what could that mean for those of us with husbands?
I got married on October 25, four days before the article was published. It was very unfortunate timing—less than a week’s time could have saved me from losing any and all shreds of coolness I’d had. (Sorry, Ludovico.)
My spiral didn’t stop there. One woman quoted in the article said that, for 12 years, she never posted about her boyfriend because “claiming them feels so lame.” Had I been “claiming” my now husband for the five years we were dating? And what about the two I dated my ex? Add to that my discovery that I’d probably been living in what Joseph calls “Boyfriend Land,” or “a world where women’s online identities center around the lives of their partners,” and I was teetering on the edge.
What really did it for me was the apparent power of the “evil eye,” a concept I’d never given much thought to beyond the bracelets I picked up as a child in Greece: in this new context, it’s the idea that other people’s jealousy could hex your relationship into oblivion. Is the author suggesting we should store our partners in a closet until the curse lifts? Ludovico is restless, so I fear he wouldn’t cope well.
The prospect of divorce emerged when I learned that having a boyfriend is, apparently, right-coded. On a recent episode of the Delusional Diaries podcast by New York influencers Halley and Jaz, a top comment reads, “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” It doesn’t matter if you campaigned for Mamdani, the thinking goes—if you’ve opted for monogamy, congratulations: you voted for Trump.
There was, to be sure, the small chance that, by some miracle, I’d battled all of these headwinds and retained a semblance of coolness walking down the aisle. Alas, I know now that I blew that chance, because at the wedding I broke the most important rule of all: when Ludovico’s grandmother approached me to congratulate me, all I did was thank her, forgetting to remind her that, according to Joseph, “being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore; it is no longer considered an achievement, and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.”
Thank God that, contrary to appearances, I do have other pursuits.
| Boyfriend-ified: It’s you, but now you have a boyfriend, so your whole online identity naturally revolves around him. |
| Boyfriend-girl: You’re a girl, and you also have a boyfriend. |
| Boyfriend content: Anything on your social media related to your boyfriend. (For example: a photo of the two of you at a wedding arm in arm, Aperol spritzes in hand. Caption: “Celebrating the [insert newlywed couple’s name here].”) |
| Evil eye: “A belief that [a woman’s] happy relationship would spark a jealousy so strong in other people that it could end the relationship,” according to Joseph. |
| Soft launch: Your boyfriend makes it into your Instagram Story, but all you can see are his Loro Piana loafers. |
| Hard launch: The hard version of a soft launch. Your boyfriend makes it onto your Instagram grid, from head to toe (akin to a red-carpet debut). |
| Claiming: What’s really happening when you hard-launch, deep down. In other words, “He is MINE!” |
| Callout: Asking your followers for their profound thoughts on meaningful topics. |
| Normie: You’re not just normal, you’re also not famous, and therefore you are boring. |
| Norminess: The way one acts as a normie. |
| Beige: The new vanilla. |
| Heterofatalism: “A persistent lack of faith that those [men] we [women] desire will be able to recognize us as commensurately human,” according to The New York Times Magazine. |
| Boyfriend Land: “A world where women’s online identities are centered around the lives of their partners,” says Joseph. |
Elena Clavarino is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL
