My boyfriend is the least interesting thing about me

Writer  Chanté Joseph makes a good point: there’s nothing quite as annoying as scrolling through your TikTok feed and being flooded by endless 'boyfriend' content.

And I’ll admit, when one of my favourite creators gets into a relationship, I also can’t help but let out a little sigh.

But why is that? Why do we deem women with boyfriends less interesting? Is there such a thing as 'boyfriend fatigue'?

For generations, we’ve been living in 'Boyfriend Land', a world where a woman's identity, status, and even financial security were so connected to her partner. Thankfully, we’ve outgrown that.

Women today don’t need a man to validate or elevate them, and our identities are no longer centred around the men in our lives. Thank god for that.

This sense of female independence is now more pronounced than ever. It not only changes how we want to be perceived by others in real life, but it has also reshaped how we navigate our relationships online. 

Take one scroll through Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll notice that gone are the days of proudly flaunting your beau. Now, it’s become more of a competition of 'how soft can I possibly launch' my boyfriend. 

I’m guilty of joining the trend myself. Just the other weekend, I asked my boyfriend, "Can I soft-launch you on Instagram?" to which he replied, "Soft launch? We’ve been dating for a year." Fair point.

So it got me thinking, is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? Is embarrassment the reason women refrain from posting their partners online, obscuring their faces, or sneakily leaving out their tag?

To be honest, I don’t think it’s about embarrassment at all. It’s just that having a boyfriend might be the least interesting thing about me. 

Being in a relationship, posting about it, or talking about it isn’t embarrassing, but allowing it to become your entire personality is.

Maybe part of this stems from the cultural narrative that straight relationships are inherently dull. As heteropessimism and heterofatalism increasingly dominate our feeds, we grow more afraid of being perceived as boring or labelled 'vanilla'.

It might also come from a sense of solidarity with other women still navigating the dating scene, an environment that, right now, feels less like a safe space to find your boo and more like being stuck in the trenches.

The internet tends to glorify women embracing their singlehood. However, a healthy relationship should not come at the expense of your own individuality or freedom. 

On The Delusional Diaries podcast, New York influencers Halley and Jaz recently discussed whether having a boyfriend is 'lame'. The comments were full of women agreeing that dating men inevitably leads to humiliation.

And while I’ll admit that being romantically involved with men can, at times, be humbling, the claim that "having a boyfriend takes away from a woman’s aura", one of the top comments, just doesn’t seem like the right narrative to back.

Women choosing not to post or talk about their partners shouldn’t be seen as being ashamed or hiding; it should be perceived as women wanting to be recognised for their own merits, ambitions, and identity, separate from their relationship status. 

Don’t get me wrong, we should continuously rethink and reevaluate heteronormativity, but at the end of the day, we are so much more than our partners.

And as much as single women are learning to romanticise their independence, there’s now an equally refreshing wave of women in relationships doing the same, and nothing is embarrassing about it. 

So no, having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing. Forgetting to see the woman behind the boyfriend, that’s what is.