In recent months, freelance writer Chanté Joseph noticed a surprising trend on her social media feeds: Women had stopped posting pictures of their boyfriends.
For a long time, boyfriend pics were good social media fodder. Whether on vacation or chilling at home, these images sent a message of heterosexual bliss, of contented couplehood. A world, as Joseph wrote, “where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed.”
But then the boyfriends disappeared. You might see a hand, or a shadow, or the back of a head. But the faces of these men were cropped out or blurred out, “as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”
Women were living their lives, and their guys no longer served their personal brands.
Joseph puzzled this out in an article for Vogue called “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The piece went viral, sparking a wave of TikTok discourse and prompting a follow-up story a couple of weeks later.
Today, Explained host Astead Herndon called Joseph up to talk about her piece, the reaction it received, and the state of heterosexual dating now.
You wrote what I would think is one of the most memorable pieces of the year, a piece for Vogue that went viral in 2025, specifically about a question that you put into the zeitgeist. Can you tell me about the piece?
The piece was essentially asking this question if having a boyfriend has lost the social standing it once provided women. And I was analyzing this through the lens of social media.
I was looking at the way that women are very private about posting their romantic partners online. A lot of people were sticking emojis over their boyfriend’s heads. We’ve all seen this and I think it started to ramp up, and then it became a little bit of a parody where people would just edit out their boyfriend’s heads completely.
But then I noticed that people would post their wedding videos or they would post their engagement videos and photos. They were edited in a way that you never knew what the husband looked like. And I was like, “Okay, this is feeling a bit extreme.”
You’re noticing something that has really become clear on the timeline. I remember boyfriend reveals or things like that, but it’s gone to outright hiding. So what did your piece find and what did you even mean by “embarrassing”?
So I found basically three things.
The first was, people said they didn’t want to do this simply for privacy reasons. And I questioned, “Well, why is it only this area of your life?” And then they would go on to say, “Well, if I posted my boyfriend and he cheated on me next week and I had to go back and delete the pictures…I’d have to deal with the shame of that.”
But then there were women who just outright thought the idea of having a boyfriend was inherently embarrassing because it didn’t align with the brand. A lot of people felt like “if I post my boyfriend on Instagram or on social media, I’m indicating something about me to the world that I don’t want people to know.”
In the piece, one of the comments that I quote is this idea of someone saying, “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” I think it’s the way that the heterosexual romantic relationship has almost been co-opted a little bit by the right. It feels traditionally very conservative. I feel like I’m aligning to this idea of the world that doesn’t really feel natural to me.
I was going to ask specifically about how we should think about this alongside rising trends like “tradwives” and others. Are these things that are happening at the same time? Are these just different communities?
I think they are happening at the same time. I think about the reaction to my piece — whether it’s from the men who were just really angry that I could ever talk disparagingly about men or the women who were very proud of their relationships — feeling as if [it] was an attack on them.
I think the way we talk about relationships online has changed so much. I was talking about the ReesaTeesa “Who the fuck did I marry?” [series] or the “Danish Deception,” these women coming online making these 60-part TikTok videos, detailing all of the horrible things that have happened to them.
West Elm Caleb. I remember that one.
All of these things. So there is no illusion around the fantasy anymore. And so I think that has gripped a lot of people.
You did a call-out on your Instagram, and the responses from followers said that there was “an overwhelming sense…that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was almost a guilty thing to do.” So are we talking here just about, like, shame of heterosexuality partnerships? It seems like straightness is at the core of this.
Oh yeah, 100 percent. And I think this is what really upset people as well. We don’t talk about heterosexuality in this way. We very much see it as a norm. This is just the way to be in society. And so we should never really question what’s going on here.
But actually, I was like, no, it’s deeper than that. So one of the inspirations behind this piece was a book by professor Jane Ward. Her book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, and in the book, she has a chapter that is dedicated to the things that queer people say behind their straight friends’ backs.
And it was absolutely fascinating to get into the perception of straightness, straight people, and straight culture. And I think the idea of embarrassment definitely came from reading that and really realizing the ways that, yeah, straight culture is very embarrassing.
What do you think we’ve learned about straight relationships from this episode?
I think what I’ve learned is that people are still trying to claim the privilege that being in a relationship, particularly a straight relationship, gives them. And I think for some people, their anger to this piece was about them realizing that they might lose this privilege, and they might not have many other privileges. And so losing this feels like a big deal.
Do you feel like you’ve come through this thinking boyfriends are more or less embarrassing?
Do you know what? I think I’ve come away thinking that they’re more embarrassing. I can’t lie because the men are being embarrassing, and the women with boyfriends upset about this piece are even more embarrassing. So I’m like, damn, I might have to double down.
