On Oct. 29, 2025, British Vogue published “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?,” written by British freelance writer Chanté Joseph. The article went viral really fast. Girlfriends all around the world felt heard and understood, but some felt a total personal attack.
Despite its harsh-sounding title, the piece isn’t anti-love at all. Joseph dives into the internet’s new love language (or total lack of it). She explains how posting your boyfriend online has suddenly become cringe, as more girls choose soft launches, or no launches at all. Joseph unpacks why sharing relationships feels outdated, from fear of embarrassment to the growing confidence in being single. Instead of flaunting a partner, the modern flex is self-assurance, independence, and not needing anyone’s validation. It’s a fun, yet honest look at how our generation is redefining what it means to love, post, and protect your peace.
I’ve been in a relationship for two and a half years, and honestly, I share this sort of embarrassment. For centuries, women have gotten into relationships, and suddenly, the dinner-table talk isn’t about their goals or careers anymore –– it’s about the new boy they’re seeing. It happens all the time. Personally, it’s scary to think I could be one of those women whose entire feed becomes her boyfriend, whose calendar revolves around him, someone who loses herself in a relationship with a man.
Another big part of this conversation is that, for a lot of straight women, it can feel like we’re sleeping with the enemy. Now, I’m not saying all men are awful people who shouldn’t be in relationships; what I am saying is that many of us are out here doing everything “right.” We’re in college, we’re working full-time, we have our own apartments. We’re actively dismantling the patriarchy in our personal lives… yet somehow, a man is still in our bed, our mind, our space. The separation of both can be hard to handle, especially when he’s the guy of your dreams.
FYI, We Don’t Hate Our Boyfriends
When the article dropped, people were mad. I think the girlfriends who got upset didn’t really understand the heart of the piece. They saw the title and ran with it. But the article isn’t anti-boyfriend; it’s about the quiet balance between loving someone and still loving yourself. Maybe having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing… Perhaps it’s just that we finally want to make sure we don’t lose the main character role in our own story.
After reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was wondering, what do other women feel about this? So I did what I do best — talk to my girlfriends! I wanted to hear from both my single friends and the ones in relationships, to see if everyone felt this same quiet cringe. And because this whole conversation revolves around heteronormativity, I focused on women who are dating men. I wanted to know: Is this just a social media trend, or are we actually embarrassed by our boyfriends?
What Other Women Think
So, I asked around. I wanted to know if other women felt this same weird mix of love, fear, and maybe a little secondhand embarrassment. Were we all just victims of internet irony, or was there something deeper happening here? I sent the Vogue article to a few of my friends; some single, some in relationships, and asked what they thought. This is what my girls said after reading it.
Vaughn (single)
Vaughn has been single for about two and a half months after a three-year-and-nine-month relationship with her high school sweetheart. When I asked her about it, she said simply, “he didn’t love me anymore.” They’d been together since high school, a long stretch that shaped so much of her life.
When I asked if she’d ever felt embarrassed in her relationship, she said no. “It was our love, not boasting but sharing my life because he was part of it. We did everything together, and he was always a part of my posts.”
Now that she’s single, though, her perspective has shifted a little. “Yeah, I think it’s embarrassing to have a bad boyfriend,” she said. “Like that TikTok couple Matt and Abby. So embarrassing,” she told me she loved the article’s take on how culture handles relationships online. “I totally see it every day, soft launches, half faces, the back of someone’s head in a photo. It’s everywhere.”
Courtney (Single)
Courtney’s answers read like the kind of honesty that only comes through a text at midnight. “My last relationship ended because of miscommunication,” she said. “We both were hurting each other.”
She has been officially single since February 2024, but said she got out of what she called a “grueling situationship” earlier this year. When I asked if she had ever been embarrassed, she said, “Yes, sometimes I was, but I think it was all in my head.”
Still, she had one of the most balanced takes. “I think having a boyfriend that you make your whole life around is embarrassing,” she wrote. “Like when you lose yourself in the relationship or can’t talk about anything except him. But if you’re still independent and your own person, then no, it’s not embarrassing. That’s just part of learning.”
Abril (in a relationship)
Abril has been with her boyfriend for two and a half years, with only a few short breaks that lasted no more than a day. “We’re high school sweethearts,” she wrote. “I’m surprised it’s been this long.”
When I asked if she ever felt that embarrassment the Vogue article talks about, she said, “yes! if I post him too much, my social media becomes his, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be.” She explained that being single seems freeing in a way, and that social media makes it easy to blur the line between sharing and oversharing.
“I make fun of girls who have their boyfriend’s name in their Instagram bio or their @,” she wrote. “It’s like he’s a business or something. I get the typical birthday post or Valentine’s Day, but posting every day? No. and those cringey captions like ‘my cutie patootie pancake boy’? and it’s just a regular guy with no job? Be serious.”
She said it’s interesting how men rarely post their partners the same way women do. “I think women are proud of who they’re with, and that’s sweet, but sometimes it’s too much,” she wrote. “Then there’s the opposite; the girl you’d never guess has a boyfriend. She’s independent, and that’s what people admire.”
Abril also connected the conversation to gender roles. “I think a single woman is someone who’s so secure in herself that she can do everything she’d do with a boyfriend, but on her own,” she said. “It’s not anti-love, it’s just knowing your worth first.”
Maria (In a Relationship)
Maria has been with her boyfriend for a year and three months, but her reflections go deeper than most. “In a way, yes,” she said when I asked if she had ever felt embarrassed. “I didn’t realize it until after we broke up. Having to tell people who saw me rave about him online what he was actually like felt like a reflection of how I saw myself. I wondered if people would think, ‘God, I could never stoop as low as her.’”
She said that feeling of embarrassment turned into motivation. “I never wanted to go through the embarrassment of hiding things about my boyfriend again,” she said. “It made me rethink what I wanted in a partner.”
For Maria, the topic hits multiple layers, especially as a bisexual woman. “It sometimes felt embarrassing telling people I had a boyfriend again,” she said. “I worried they would question my sexuality or think I wasn’t ‘queer enough.’”
She said the Vogue conversation made her think about how social media changes everything. “I’m kind of glad it’s becoming embarrassing to be a male-centered woman,” she said. “It’s exhausting watching women constantly embarrass themselves over less-than-adequate men.”
Still, she doesn’t think the solution is detachment. “I’ve seen people glamorize not being a ‘lover girl,’ but that’s just turned into shame for women who feel deeply,” she said. “Social media ruins relationships. Once we stop caring about soft launches and story posts, people will be so much happier.”
So… Is Having a Boyfriend Actually Embarrassing?
After hearing from all my friends, I realized the answer isn’t that simple. None of them were embarrassed by love itself. What they were embarrassed by was the way love can sometimes make you forget who you are. It’s not the boyfriend that’s the problem; it’s the fear of becoming the kind of girl who disappears into him.
Every woman I talked to, single or taken, circled back to the same truth: we just don’t want to lose ourselves. We don’t want our stories to shrink because someone else walked into them. We want to be proud of our partners, but we also want to stay proud of ourselves.
Maybe having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing. Maybe what’s really happening is that women are finally setting a boundary between who we are and who we love. And maybe, the most romantic thing any of us can do is learn to hold space for both, to love someone deeply while still choosing ourselves every single day.