Having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing; being reduced to them is. The problem has never been having a boyfriend…the problem is what happens to women the second they are perceived as girlfriends.
That shift from person to role, from subject to accessory, is where the collective cringe lives, not in romance itself, but in the flattening. It’s the way a woman’s narrative suddenly collapses inward, like a soufflé slammed into the oven door the moment her life is reframed around a man. Viewers don’t recoil because love is lame. They recoil because they’ve seen this particular downgrade before. This is why “boyfriend content” triggers such an immediate, visceral response. It’s not jealousy. It’s pattern recognition.
For example, Carrie Bradshaw. She dated relentlessly, disastrously, and often against her own better judgment—but she never confused proximity to a man with meaning. Even at her most delusional, she understood the hierarchy. That’s why her breakup monologue with Big still circulates like sacred text. She wasn’t just coping, she was correct. Because who wants to be him when you could be Carrie? She’s smart. She’s funny. She was this thing. She was it.
This distinction—between being with men and being diminished by them—is what separates women we love to watch from women we instinctively mute. Carrie didn’t orbit men; men orbited her. She was never embarrassed to have loved them. She was embarrassed for them. And crucially, she never let being chosen eclipse being herself.
This is why most audiences don’t feel betrayed by women who roast men, leave men, or rotate men. What makes people uneasy is when a woman reorganizes her identity around one. Not because commitment is cringe, but because we know who usually absorbs the consequences when it goes wrong.
Which is why the backlash toward hyper-performative girlfriendhood isn’t moral—it’s aesthetic. It’s political. It’s about watching a woman turn herself into a supporting character in her own life and being asked to clap. Danielle Walter, a TikToker and self-proclaimed “Brunnette Carrie Bradshaw” from San Francisco, caused quite the stir on social media for sharing her new boyfriend with her followers, claiming that this man—whom she’s known for two months—is the love of her life. She embarrassed herself in a TikTok series retelling their 1-month-old love story while telling her single followers that there’s “still time for them.”
That’s where public figures like her lose the room—not because happiness is offensive, and not because love moved “too fast,” but because partnership itself becomes the thesis. The man isn’t incidental; he’s the only point. And culturally, we are no longer interested in stories where women disappear into relational legitimacy, especially when history suggests that it is often temporary while the cleanup is permanent.
But here’s the part the discourse keeps missing: women are blamed for this reduction even when we didn’t initiate it. Men pursue. Men attach. Men benefit enormously from proximity to women’s personalities and social capital. Yet, when that proximity becomes visible, it’s the woman who’s accused of losing her edge, her character, her autonomy, as if we weren’t living perfectly coherent lives before someone plays onto our platforms and attention. Sometimes, often, these men choose us. The embarrassment people feel isn’t about romance. It’s about misalignment. It’s about watching a woman with momentum get miscast as a milestone. It’s about the fear of seeing someone interesting become legible only through heterosexual achievement.
So no, having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing. What’s embarrassing is pretending that girlfriendhood is the highest form a woman can take. What’s tiring is acting like men’s inability to keep up is a reflection of women’s judgment. And what’s overdue is admitting that the cultural recoil isn’t toward love—it’s toward women being asked, yet again, to make themselves smaller so men can look bigger.
We’re not rejecting relationships. We’re rejecting the idea that they should eclipse us. And if that makes the concept of “having a boyfriend” feel fragile or embarrassed right now, maybe that’s not a crisis. Maybe it’s a correction.
Words by Luciana Paiz
Graphics by Ariana Sancho