In 2025, being loved might actually hurt your engagement rate.
That’s the strange reality the latest viral Vogue article exposes in its headline: “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The piece quotes one woman saying, “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right.” Others confess they hide their relationships for fear of losing followers or diluting their “personal brand.”
It would sound absurd if it didn’t feel so familiar.
Somewhere between dating apps, dopamine hits, and endless scrolling, intimacy got converted into data. The number of likes became a proxy for connection. The algorithm became a third partner in every relationship.
Welcome to the algorithmic relationship, where visibility equals value, detachment signals power, and love has to compete with virality.
When Love Becomes Content
Online life runs on validation; real life runs on connection. The problem is we’ve forgotten the difference.
If your content suffers because you’re happy in love, it’s not that you became less interesting; it’s that your dopamine source shifted offline. But the system we live in doesn’t reward quiet fulfillment. It rewards performance.
We don’t just date people anymore. We brand them.
The “boyfriend reveal,” the “soft launch,” the anniversary post—all of it becomes a kind of product rollout. The relationship becomes the aesthetic.
And when that aesthetic doesn’t sell, we call it embarrassing.
Social media hasn’t just changed how we date. It’s rewired how we define love, worth, and masculinity itself.
Performance Masculinity
Most of today’s men were raised in the absence of emotional modeling. We’re a generation taught how to win, not how to relate.
Our fathers were distant or overworked. Our education focused on achievement, not connection. And our heroes—the athletes, rappers, and influencers—taught us performance masculinity: appear confident, stay stoic, never need.
We learned to perform strength instead of embodying it.
To seek validation instead of vulnerability.
To chase control instead of intimacy.
Scott Galloway calls it “the boy crisis,” a generation of men falling behind in education, income, and connection. But underneath those numbers is what psychologists call Peter Pan Syndrome: men who resist growing up, not out of cruelty but out of habit. The modern world makes it easy to stay a boy forever, with porn, dating apps, and social media offering endless novelty without accountability. Why face rejection or responsibility when the algorithm always says yes?
The result is a generation of men subconsciously looking for what they missed—comfort without challenge. In practice, that often looks like seeking a mother with benefits: a woman who provides care, structure, and emotional safety while also fulfilling romantic and sexual needs. It isn’t manipulation; it’s confusion, a search for the maternal presence they never learned to internalize.
This isn’t just cultural; it’s generational. Many men were raised by women who had to be both nurturer and provider. They saw strength modeled through sacrifice, not presence. Now, as adults, they unconsciously recreate what they witnessed—women overfunctioning, men emotionally underdeveloped. It’s not ill will. It’s inheritance.
The Cultural Mirror: Women Are Evolving Too
At the same time, women are redefining what it means to belong and to be seen. The rise of trends like “girl dinner,” “hot girl walks,” and “divine feminine” content reflects a generation reclaiming agency and softness at once.
Women are carving out spaces to reconnect with their feminine essence, places where intuition and depth matter more than performance.
But even there, the algorithm watches. Online empowerment can quickly turn into another kind of performance—freedom curated for the feed.
So both genders end up in parallel prisons.
Men perform strength.
Women perform independence.
Both ache for connection.
What Women Are Really Saying
At its core, what women are craving isn’t perfection; it’s safety. Not the kind that comes from protection or money, but the kind that comes from emotional steadiness. A man who doesn’t need to be mothered, fixed, or managed. A man who’s worth being proud of not because he’s flawless, but because he’s consistent.
When women say boyfriends are “embarrassing,” they’re not rejecting love; they’re rejecting emotional labor. They’re tired of carrying men who confuse stoicism for stability and self-reliance for maturity.
For decades, women were taught to make themselves smaller to make relationships work. Now, they’re being told to make themselves bigger, louder, and more self-sufficient. The result? Many feel they must choose between freedom and partnership, between being seen and being safe.
Meanwhile, men interpret that distance as rejection, not exhaustion. The conversation collapses before it even starts.
We mistake numbness for strength.
They mistake boundaries for indifference.
Everyone walks away feeling misunderstood.
The Bridge: Communication as the Missing Curriculum
The gap isn’t just emotional. It’s educational.
No one taught us how to speak honestly without defensiveness, or to listen without trying to fix.
Healthy love shouldn’t cage you; it should expand you.
If you can’t express your needs, boundaries, or desires within your relationship, that’s where the work begins—not in deleting your partner from your feed.
True growth isn’t found in singlehood or coupledom.
Both can be classrooms for becoming who we actually are.
The Way Forward
So what do we do now?
We stop performing.
We start practicing.
Men need spaces with other men: councils, groups, brotherhoods where they can be challenged and supported, where accountability replaces ego, and where emotional literacy becomes as natural as ambition.
Women continue to lead in creating spaces that honor authenticity over appearance, intuition over image. They’re showing us that strength doesn’t always look like control; sometimes it looks like surrender. The kind of surrender I’m referring to comes from feeling safe enough to settle into their feminine, to relax into trust rather than armor up in self-protection.
Both need to slow down, feel, and unlearn the stories we inherited about what communication, strength, and independence should look like.
Because we were all taught the same lie: that our emotions shouldn’t be talked about or felt. And now, we mistake numbness for strength.
From Embarrassment to Evolution
Relationships aren’t embarrassing.
They’re mirrors.
They reveal where our wounds still lead and where our hearts still hide.
If we want the next generation to love better, we have to stop teaching them to curate connection and start teaching them to feel.
Being single isn’t liberation.
Being in love isn’t submission.
Both are invitations to grow.
A grown man isn’t defined by status energy. He’s defined by integrity, by the courage to feel, to repair, and to lead with presence instead of performance. His role is to create the kind of safety where a woman can soften, knowing she’s free to rest, not to rescue.
And a grown woman doesn’t hide her love to protect her brand. She knows her power doesn’t shrink when she stands beside a good man.
Maybe love isn’t what’s embarrassing.
Maybe pretending we don’t need it is.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
