British Vogue said it first: Having a boyfriend is embarrassing. Not because love itself is cringe, but because for the first time in history, women don’t need men for anything but emotional enrichment — and most men aren’t even delivering that. 

In a recent piece for British Vogue, writer Chanté Joseph asks why posting your relationship online suddenly feels “embarrassing,” and why publicly declaring yourself single has become the ultimate flex. Joseph attributes it partly to aesthetics: the “boyfriend content” era is over, the curated softness of coupledom is out, and people are tired of watching relationships play out like brand deals. There’s something “cringe,” she writes, about centering your entire online identity on a guy. But for me, the embarrassment has nothing to do with Instagram. It’s about the men themselves. If anything is embarrassing, it’s choosing to bring the wrong man into an otherwise full life. 

The timing of this shift is not random. Consider the landscape. Women make up 59 percent of college students in the U.S., according to Pew Research. They now hold 46 percent of managerial and professional jobs, up from 29 percent in 1980. More women own homes, lead companies and delay marriage than ever before. The material dependence that once tethered women to men has eroded. Women are accomplishing all of this within a society that remains fundamentally patriarchal. 

When you understand that, the emotional logic becomes obvious. When your life already brims with meaning — friends who sustain you, work that excites you, hobbies you love, a sense of independence that’s earned, not granted — inviting someone in who doesn’t enhance that life starts to feel less like romance and more like regression. TikTok user @parismwendwa put it succinctly. 

“We no longer need men, they’re competing solely on the basis of character, and they’re failing,” @parismwendwa said. 

The bar has shifted from “Can he provide?” to “Can he keep up?” 

This shift exposes a deeper question: why was romance ever positioned as the ultimate goal for women? From childhood, we’ve been fed the idea that a woman’s life arc begins at marriage. That no matter how brilliant she is, she is ultimately unfinished without a man. I internalized that story long before I ever had a crush; it was the background noise of girlhood. But the moment my life started to feel complete on its own terms, that myth stopped making sense.  

Much of this conditioning falls under what Adrienne Rich termed compulsory heterosexuality: the cultural insistence that women naturally want men, that straightness is default, desirable and inevitable. We were trained to want men even when men did not serve us. And when that compulsory desire continually leads to disappointment like stagnation, emotional imbalance and weaponized incompetence, we develop its darker sibling: heterofatalism, the resigned belief that heterosexual relationships will be draining no matter what. It’s the cultural shrug behind “men are the worst, but what can you do?” It’s why anecdotal jokes about terrible boyfriends resonate. They’re not funny because they’re exaggerated; they’re funny because they’re familiar. Just as Sabrina Carpenter sings, “That boy is corrupt, could you raise him to love me, maybe?” 

“The heterosexual romantic fantasy is crumbling,” Joseph said in a later posted Instagram video.  

The freedom of modern womanhood is that love becomes a choice, not a requirement. And she’s right. The fantasy is crumbling, not because women hate men but because women finally have the choice to question the cost of being with them. To be clear: This is not an anti-men manifesto. I have empathy. The male loneliness epidemic is real. Scholars like Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves have warned for years that men are falling behind socially and emotionally, struggling to build community or define themselves outside outdated masculine roles. Men are hurting. But empathy cannot become self-sacrifice. Women can care about male loneliness without contorting their lives to solve it. Caring about someone does not require shrinking for them. 

Romance has stopped being the default and become something women enter only when it expands their lives rather than constricts them. When Joseph writes in Vogue that audiences feel “icked out” by excessive boyfriend content, she’s gesturing at a deeper discomfort: It’s not the public display that feels embarrassing but publicly committing to a man who hasn’t grown, learned or shown up. It’s the publicness of settling. 

And that’s why singlehood feels revolutionary now. For centuries, being single was unsafe or impossible for women. Today, it’s a choice that protects peace, ambition and self-respect more than a mediocre relationship ever could. 

Part of what women are rejecting isn’t love itself but the emotional labor they’ve been taught to perform without question. The quiet managing, soothing, uplifting — the invisible work that becomes the backbone of the relationship until you step back and realize you’re carrying most of the weight. Sometimes a relationship doesn’t explode; it just slowly makes your world a little smaller, your ambitions a little dimmer, your confidence a little quieter. You start planning around his comfort. You start lowering your expectations.  

Because here’s the truth: We don’t need someone to save us, validate us or soothe our loneliness. That idea belongs to an older world. Women now know they are whole by themselves. Wanting love isn’t the problem; believing you must sacrifice your well-being for it is. A bad day being single is better than a bad day in the wrong relationship. The “wrong relationship” isn’t always abusive or dramatic; sometimes it’s simply one where you shrink.  

We live in a paradox: Women are freer than ever, yet they are still taught that fulfillment requires a man’s validation. To decenter men, whether you’re single or partnered, is not misandry. It’s clarity. It means your identity isn’t contingent on someone else’s affection. It means the goal is not proximity but reciprocity. It means romance and love becomes something you choose because it expands your life, not because you were told it should define it. 

At some point, you have to admit that dating a loser is a form of self-harm. 

Having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing. But settling for one who adds nothing definitely is.