Having a Boyfriend Is Fine—Building Your World Around Him Isn’t

It needs to be said that when a simple inquiry ruffles a lot of feathers, a conversation worth having is very likely to take place. A question as innocent as “is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” wouldn’t normally cause an internet divide rivaling the breakup of Pangea. But add an article published on a major international platform on top of that, and you end up striking the first domino of today’s feminist discussions.

Honestly? Good for her. Chanté Joseph’s viral piece deserves the noise. To touch a cultural nerve is to give room for a collective sigh of relief: yes, it does get tiresome to look at a girl’s once unique feed and realize that her identity has become a shrine of repetitive date nights and “he’s my peace” captions. Now, was it Joseph’s intention to belittle heterosexual relationships in general? Not entirely. Love isn’t something to be embarrassed about—until it becomes our only personality trait.

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We often forget how hard women have had to fight for selfhood in the first place. For centuries, being an extension of a man was the default identity assigned to women. So it makes sense that in a time when we can finally choose ourselves, we outright dismiss this notion. Laugh about it. Make memes about it on social media, where Joseph’s insight hinges on. It’s a fantastic victory that we can celebrate women who are autonomous. 

It is interesting, however, that the conversation continues to be framed through the same lens. Worse, the discourse seems to equate scoffing at men as decentering them. 

It’s Still About Him

The dilemma with the current cultural shift that elevates the unattached woman above her sisters is that it only demands a change in performance while the mindset stays the same.

It’s a paradoxical trap. When we cringe at a woman’s apparent romantic devotion, we are measuring her worth by her proximity to a man. If we now position singlehood as a stance against men rather than a posture of personal contentment, are we not also doing the same thing, just inverted? The bias has changed, yet men are still the metric, be it their presence or absence. We have replaced the requirement to obtain a man with the requirement to visibly perform not needing a man. 

Through media, we’ve made independence a valued status symbol, but even that still demands that we define ourselves by what we reject—namely, him. Decentering men is far more complex. A woman can be self-aware and self-possessed, and still fail the Bechdel test. As the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously stated, the root problem is that a woman is defined as “the Other” instead of the “Self”. She is not defined by her own existence, but by her relation to a man.

Did the pendulum swing in a different direction? Yes. Did we, as women, move forward, though?

Bigger Than Social Media Optics

Having a boyfriend is fine because one average man alone cannot uphold the entire patriarchy. A single non-violent man, even a difficult or mediocre one, is not the system. Yes, he still unknowingly benefits from it, and yes, his personal actions, however well-meaning they are, might still reflect male-centric views. But unless he’s in a seat of institutional and financial power, he doesn’t have the leverage to fundamentally shift societal power dynamics.

Does a woman lose “aura points” once she starts dating a man? That doesn’t remotely scratch the surface of how deeply tethered the patriarchy really is. The anxiety over appearing “boyfriend-obsessed” is a smokescreen for the intrinsic constraints of women’s (and even men’s) lives. We are debating about social media optics while, globally, patriarchal institutions are actively working to rewrite legislation for further control over our fundamental rights. 

Heterofatalism—the belief that heterosexuality is fundamentally doomed to fail women—is understandable and relatable. It also frustratingly doesn’t take into account the other facets of womanhood beyond dating. Race, class, age, sexuality, gender—those intersect and create unique experiences of inequality, too. What of the women whose oppression is structural and inescapable? Their freedom isn’t determined by whether they post a “soft launch”; it is determined by the laws that this constant cultural distraction allows to fester unchecked. Hence, the importance of intersectional feminism.

What We Build Together

With controversial and satirical critiques, there’s always a chance that it’ll be taken too literally, especially as soon as it gets condensed into a forty-second reactive Tiktok stitch. While fostering a competitive comments section wasn’t Chanté Joseph’s intent, it happened. 

The irony is that the single woman who dedicates her energy to proving she’s superior to her sisters because she’s sworn off men, and the partnered woman who dismisses independent women as merely jealous, are both constantly fighting within the shadow of a man. 

That emotional labor is another form of centering him. Joseph put it best: “Obviously, there’s no shame in falling in love. But there’s also no shame in trying and failing to find it—or not trying at all.” The only embarrassment is in living a life where your most important decisions are ultimately outsourced to the collective opinion of a patriarchal “who’s the cool girl” framework. And we already know that author Gillian Flynn had a lot to say about cool girls.

Poet and theorist Audre Lorde also once cautioned: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Trading the shame of singlehood for the shame of coupledom is merely swapping one tool of male measurement for another. And as writer Roxane Gay pointed out, it’s far too easy for feminism to surrender to assimilationist notions wherein women can achieve equality if we just acted like men. 

Many of us have heard the marriage horror stories of our predecessors, and so it is worth celebrating that we might actually be the first of our lineage to have this option of freedom. It’s a win for women, and the beauty of Joseph’s virality is that in spite of the absurdity, women are talking to one another and to the world. 

Still, it doesn’t end there. Nurturing that freedom counts, too, when the rights of our sisters—trans women, women of color, single mothers, indigenous women, sex workers, differently-abled women—stand precariously.

Thus, Lorde encouraged us to imagine what our realities might look like if masculinity was not the aspirational ideal, and to look for the answer together, free from division. The question, then, is not whether boyfriends are embarrassing, but whether we women can visualize power, love, and freedom that exist outside the binary of attachment and rejection.

Photos: MEGA ARCHIVES, July 2018 & February 2020