British Vogue published a piece asking if having a boyfriend is embarrassing now, initiating debate online about women’s personal relationship statuses since the article’s publication in October 2025. The article by Chanté Joseph notes a cultural shift where women are strategically obscuring the presence of their significant others on social media: “soft launches,” blurred faces of partners in photos or fiancés being cropped out from wedding pictures entirely.
The piece gathered explosive attention online, with millions sharing their reactions on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter within days of publication. Podcasts dedicated entire episodes to dissecting this debate. Chanté Joseph’s article describes how Vogue author and contributor Stephanie Yeboah lost hundreds of followers after posting about her boyfriend, and how content creator Sophie Milner received messages begging her not to get a boyfriend.
Contrary to sentiments about Vogue’s article, giving weight to relationship status — even if it is the absence of one — is not the feminist feat that it tries to be. Not letting relationship status or hostility towards men define oneself is true freedom.
The article itself is well written; it fulfills its purpose of persuading readers by presenting opinions on a specific topic. However, the real issue is how eagerly the internet embraced its contradictory premise. While the article correctly identifies the problem of women being historically defined by their relationship status, it then goes on to do the exact same thing by declaring singleness as the new flex in the modern era.
This is the fundamental contradiction the entire internet discourse is missing. Saying that boyfriends are out of style is no better than saying that marriage is the ultimate goal — both make relationship status a determinant of women’s cultural relevance. Men as partners in the lives of heterosexual women should be, and are supposed to be, additions to their lives and choices made on their own terms. Having a man or not having a man is not a status marker determining whether someone is cool enough to be worth following. By declaring one relationship status cooler than the other, the Vogue article does exactly what it claims to critique and establishes singleness as the new metric of worth.
People’s reactions online proved that they missed this point entirely. Single women rushed to celebrate this cultural shift while others were left anxious about whether having a partner gave their followers an ick strong enough to have their content muted on social media.
Near the end of the article, Joseph writes, “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.” If being partnered doesn’t affirm womanhood anymore, why would being single need to be a flex?
This shift to anti-boyfriend rhetoric mirrors the commodification of intimate life sociologist Eva Illouz describes in her book “Modern Love and its Discontents.” Whether selling romance or singleness, relationship status is still treated as a product to be marketed and emphasized. It follows the same strategy of diet culture — alternation between declaring thin bodies out, thick bodies in, but be sure to keep the body types as the site of judgement.
According to the social comparison theory coined by Leon Festinger, there is a psychological tendency to evaluate ourselves by comparing our circumstances to others. Relationship status has been one of the most visible markers people use for social comparison. Joseph’s article mentions a comment that “having a boyfriend feels Republican.” A comment such as this is not just a comparison — it assigns a biased moral weight to a neutral personal choice.
Being loudly anti-boyfriend is just as male-centric as being a so-called pick-me girl. If a pick-me girl centers her life around male approval, what is it called to center one’s life around male disapproval? Psychological research on thought patterns shows that repeatedly focusing on something one claims to reject — in this case, the concept of boyfriends — actually keeps it in as the main focus of one’s attention span. So, in fact, spending many conversations spewing hate about how having no man makes people better off doesn’t actually free anybody from male-centric thinking. It does the exact opposite.
This debate circles back to the primary point of what feminism is about. Living as a feminist should not be centered around hostility towards men, but equality. And true equality means neutrality, the ability to exist with the other gender and being unaffected by their presence or absence. Freedom isn’t about hiding a boyfriend or announcing singleness. It’s about realizing that neither defines a woman.
Sara Khan is an Opinion Staff Writer for the fall 2025 quarter. She can be reached at skhan7@uci.edu.
Edited by Isabella Ehring and Joshua Gonzales
