Is having a husband embarrassing now?

Women rejecting traditional partnership is not a rejection of love.

In a now viral and much-discussed essay over at Vogue, titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Chanté Joseph recounts her exhaustion with boyfriend content. “If someone so much as says “my boyf–” on social media, they’re muted,” the essay begins.

But boyfriend content is just the beginning, since it’s the premarital equivalent of what Sara Petersen calls “husband veneration content.” Joseph argues that if having a boyfriend is embarrassing, it’s not not because of all that heteropessimism discourse, and that’s a discourse that has no doubt changed our cultural conversations about marriage drastically in recent years. The divorce plot has shifted, the divorce memoir boom has boomed, and millennials are officially in their divorce era. And yet, because being partnered remains a primary arbiter of social status, we still see this kind of content everywhere.

Some women are doing more than promptly unfollowing their friends who are centering men a little too heavily on their grids. In a recent discussion event for subscribers of this newsletter, a woman shared that she doesn’t even like to be around her friends who are obsessed with the marriage market. She just doesn’t relate. Joseph cites similar stories. Other women told her they fear the men they date will embarrass them, so when it comes to social media, they simply won’t post about their male partners. I recalled Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” in which she begs an incompetent man not to embarrass her.

A caveat feels needed here: I certainly know many women who get divorced, write about the problems of marriage as a heterosexual institution plagued by inequality, and get their own share of unsubscribes. Plenty of partnered people, even of the liberal persuasion, refuse to engage with critiques about marriage as an institution, because such analysis can feel too confrontational, or implicating.

And I am already arguing in my head with the spate of hot takes that are no doubt stacking editorial calendars across the media landscape— articles and personal essays asking whether Gen Z and millennial women have gone too far with their critiques of dating and marriage, thereby destroying human intimacy. I’ve already read a couple.

In other words, it feels like a bit of a stretch— or at least like selective perception, or manifestation content?— to say without qualification that being partnered is now “fundamentally uncool,” or even that it is now a “flex” to be single. We’re far from a postfeminist world.

But Iet’s make this not cool anymore

What’s a source of social capital in one community/algorithm, is often a source of shame and embarrassment in another. That’s the very problematic nature of the purposely polarizing digital ecosystem in which we all live now.

Joseph’s essay explores these complications, and I found this passage especially true and compelling:

As straight women, we’re confronting something that every other sexuality has had to contend with: a politicization of our identity. Heterosexuality has long been purposefully indefinable, so it is harder for those within it, and outside of it, to critique. However, as our traditional roles begin to crumble, maybe we’re being forced to reevaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.

Of course, straightness has always been political, just as other supposedly neutral identity markers like whiteness and masculinity have been. Each are social constructs, categories of identity with political stakes, hierarchies, value systems, and moralism baked in. What has changed is that heterosexuality is now more politicized, which means that straightness has become a legible talking point, drawn out from the shadows of alleged neutrality and objectivity.

Conversations about how heterosexual institutions like marriage and motherhood uphold the status quo, for instance, have exploded online, in books, on social media, and in podcasts in recent years. All this thinking, of course, is descended from queer and feminist theory, which paved the way for the more accessible conversations we have today about heteronormativity and systemic gender inequality.

Joseph continues (and let’s not forget this passage when the articles titled “How Gen Z Learned to Dread Marriage” start rolling in!):

And as long as we’re openly rethinking and criticizing heteronormativity, “having a boyfriend” will remain a somewhat fragile, or even contentious, concept within public life. This is also happening alongside a wave of women reclaiming and romanticizing their single life. Where being single was once a cautionary tale (you’ll end up a “spinster” with loads of cats), it is now becoming a desirable and coveted status—another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with.

In other words, the conversations about dating and marriage are not going to cool anytime soon, just as conversations about motherhood and caregiving are not likely to get less contentious anytime soon, because we are all actively struggling toward another way of relating to each other.

Is it true that just four years after JD Vance lamented the “childless cat ladies” of the world that we’ve fully reclaimed the single life for women? I really love the energy, but I fear we have a ways to go. Women are romanticizing and sentimentalizing singlehood, as a counter to centuries of romanticizing and sentimentalizing marriage and motherhood as the only path to happiness and fulfillment for women.

Others want to toss young women’s rejections of dating and marriage off as a rejection of love and connection, or to blame technology, or the downfall of earnestness and the rise of cringe (was how I phrased that millennial cringe? hmmm). But the issue with reducing the “is having a boyfriend embarrassing” conversation to a symptom of a culture in which connection/love is cringe and earnestness is embarrassing (both of which are bad for all of us!) is that it sidesteps legitimate critiques of heterosexual culture and institutions, and of male behavior.

Many feminist thinkers have been telling us for decades that real love and connection are only possible when we free ourselves of patriarchal, heterosexual, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal institutions, and when love and connection are not defined by inequality.

In other words, it’s a depoliticized and myopic way of looking at the question of why so many women are withdrawing from relationships with men. To take that perspective, one also has to subscribe to the idea that heterosexual marriage and straight relationships today, as they stand, are a sure avenue to happiness and fulfillment. That’s a fool’s errand, because literally all the data, and all the women, have been telling us otherwise.

It’s certainly possible to be partnered and feel fulfilled. But it’s not statistically likely if you’re a straight woman. More often, relationships with men today feel like “a humiliation ritual,” a practice of begging for scraps and attention and some equality, as a treat. If being in partnership with men is “embarrassing,” it’s because too many men are being embarrassing right now!

Philosopher Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse that the dependence love produces is always somewhat of an embarrassment—saying I love you is so hard because the other may not meet the demand, or return the utterance. As a result, “the only addressee guaranteed not to be embarrassed or discomforted by it is a parent, or God.”

Yes, love, poet Olivia Rodrigo tells us, is embarrassing as hell.

But rejecting dating or traditional models of partnership in this cultural and political climate is not simply a rejection of the more unavoidable hazards of intimacy, pleasure, love, and connection. Neither is deciding not to have children. Especially not in an era in which red pill and incel thinking is going mainstream, and in which more and more social and economic policies are trying to coerce us all into regressive binary gender roles.

Many women, as Tressie McMillan Cottom put it recently, are simply learning from the legacy of Black women to organize at the site of social reproduction.

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Since I announced that my marriage was ending, I have had a vague, mostly unspoken sense around my married friends and family that they think I look down on them. It’s not untrue, but it’s not quite accurate. I look down on marriage as an institution, and the way it sucks the life out of brilliant and ambitious women. I look down on the way so many women are asked to rearrange their entire lives when they become mothers, even though they have husbands who could never handle the layers of work and pain these career shifts involve.

I look down on men who would rather argue with women about their experiences of the world than wrack their own damn brains to figure out how they could help women more, and be a part of the solution rather than the problem.

I look down on these fucks who are running our country into the ground because they believe we need them, or want them, or because they’ll literally become authoritarian to avoid going to therapy.

I look down on the idea that marriage is an arbiter of maturity and emotional intelligence, because everything we know about marriage tells us this isn’t true. And I Iook down on the idea that divorce and being single is any sort of failure. And actually, I’m a romantic at heart, hopelessly so, which means I’m utterly and sometimes dumbly tied to fantasies about heterosexuality. It is embarrassing!

But those uncomfortable feelings pale in comparison to how I know most married and partnered women still look down on me, and how so many in this country look down on anyone who seeks love, connection, and family outside the narrow confines in which we’ve been taught to recognize them. Right now, I’m working on an episode for Dire Straights about tensions I’m sensing between married and unmarried women.

For now I’ll just say, having a boyfriend, or a husband, isn’t embarrassing because no one wants love or connection anymore. It’s because so many women have for so long felt they needed men and marriage to complete them, and they’re finally figuring out that, all this time, that wasn’t true.