By Rosalina Valentine, Junior Reporter
The fashion, beauty coverage, and celebrity style magazine VOGUE, published an article on October 29, 2025, titled “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” by Chanté Joseph. This piece quickly made headlines and sparked controversies all around social media platforms. But is it true? Is having a boyfriend embarrassing, nowadays? And if women are embarrassed of men, did these feelings cause the so-called “lonely men epidemic?”
Women are not embarrassed of dating men. However, a relationship with a man, nowadays, often entails performing emotional labour, tolerance, and even sacrifice of personal goals for a relationship that feels one-sided. In her article, Joseph highlights this largely unspoken shift in straight relationships. Joseph’s article focused on her perspective of the relationships within heterosexual relationships, and how women are beginning to take control of this situation. Women have raised their standards faster than men were able to adapt. The resulting male loneliness is not an accident or a mystery, but is the result of women choosing independence over relationships that demand more emotional, physical and mental labour than they return.
It's no secret that women prefer to be in the comfort of themselves, or other women, rather than the environment of a man. Women are no longer willing to absorb emotional neglect, immaturity, or entitlement in the so-called name of ‘love’. This cultural frustration has become visible, and is reflected in music, film, and television. Artists such as Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande, and TWICE, spread the awareness around relationship imbalance, and emotional inequality.
The VOGUE article takes this a step further, and notes that social media behaviour has changed alongside this shift. Straight women still signal relationships, but subtly: a hand on a steering wheel, wearing a larger size of a coat/sweater, or the back of someone’s head, rather than showcasing their partner or full pictures of their partner. The boyfriend exists, but off-stage. Visibly has become selective. Joseph explains, women want to “straddle two worlds; one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner but also not appear so boyfriend obsessed...”
Women are not embarrassed by love or being in a relationship. They are being more cautious of what intimacy now costs. For centuries, women have been pressured by society to prioritize relationships as markers of success, while those who remained single were shamed. That expectation is slowly crumbling. As Joseph observes, women are being forced to “reevaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.” Many have simply outgrown roles that require caretaking rather than mutual partnership. This has given women an opportunity to focus on themselves, and the freedom to follow a new path in their lives.
This is where the so-called “lonely men epidemic” enters the conversation. As women withdraw from the unequal dynamics, men often experience the absence not as feedback, but as isolation. What women are describing as boundaries, men are referring it as “abandonment.” In response, male loneliness has increasingly been popular through social media platforms, while framing women's actions as “mistreatment” rather than a consequence.
Joseph's article captures this cultural moment with precision. It has sharpened women’s approach to new relationships and even exposes how heterosexual relationships require to defend dynamics they no longer accept. The bare minimum is no longer accepted and instead, it is shamed. The thought of doing something does not equal the action of doing it. The embarrassment Joseph describes is not about men themselves, but what women are expected to tolerate in order to love them. As she concludes, “Obviously, there’s no shame in falling in love. But there’s also no shame in trying and failing to find it — or not trying at all.”
Chanté Joseph’s article does not ridicule love, instead it shares women’s withdrawal of relationships, and the precautions they take when it comes to dating. Women are not rejecting intimacy; they are rejecting the men’s bare minimum. As women disengage from relationships that no longer serve them, men are left confronting a loneliness they were never used to. Until intimacy becomes mutual rather than one-sided, independence will continue to feel safer than partnership, and silence will continue be chosen.