Boyfriends are out. I was surprised to learn this while scrolling through social media. No longer is even the practice of dating safe from the critical eye of those who champion the empowerment of women. British Vogue recently denounced partnership, designating singleness as a “desirable and coveted status,” citing its rise as “another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale.”
What is increasingly framed as liberation is, in practice, a growing suspicion of intimacy itself.
While inflammatory, this sentiment reflects how many young women are thinking about dating today. “Heterofatalism” is a freshly minted term denoting the belief that heterosexual relationships are inherently disappointing, frustrating, or doomed to fail. To engage in a heterosexual relationship, under this framework, is to anticipate its collapse. If you are not queer or alone, you are fooling yourself. This mindset does not merely critique relationships; it treats emotional risk as naïveté and commitment as self-betrayal.
Not only are women who choose loneliness or non-heterosexual relationships encouraged, but women who are happy with their boyfriends are increasingly criticized. One Substack writer, in a piece titled Boyfriendland, expressed discomfort with the sheer volume of content featuring boyfriends. This phenomenon was ultimately attributed to the patriarchal nature of social media and the belief that women in heterosexual relationships experience an erasure of their personal identity, replaced by their partner’s. Across elite media, online commentary, and cultural criticism, partnership itself is recast as evidence of false consciousness.
Not even generally beloved mainstream artists are spared from this critique. Olivia Dean, a recent Grammy Award winner, has been accused of promoting a “tradwife” message in her music and of “trying to restore our population to a once-heteronormative way of living.” Yet nowhere in her lyrics are women depicted as barefoot and pregnant or subjected to their husbands. Rather, Dean simply sings about the beauty of love and relationships—much like countless artists before her. Affection alone has become suspect, as though expressing joy in partnership were a political regression rather than a human experience.
This critique is lazy, though it is strengthened by a population of increasingly lonely and measurably dissatisfied women and by commercialized dating practices that reduce intimacy to consumption. Anything deemed “traditional” is quickly labeled heteronormative or patriarchal, and therefore inherently oppressive to women. The image of wifehood and motherhood that emerges looks less like reality and more like a “Mad Men” caricature, frozen in a mid-century past that bears little resemblance to modern family life. In rejecting an outdated fantasy, the culture has replaced it with a distorted view of what relationships are worth.
Under this framework, to be in a relationship is to have failed the single sisterhood of autonomy. If this were true, we would expect single women to be measurably happier. But they are not. In response to the anti-marriage and anti-relationship movement, the Institute for Family Studies notes that single, childless women are markedly less happy than their partnered or childbearing counterparts. Even considering clear material benefits—longer lives, higher earnings, and greater self-reported meaning—young, liberal single women remain skeptical of the institution of partnership. The ideology persists despite evidence to the contrary.
In a recent piece for The Point, Mana Afsari describes this cultural sense of disconnection among Americans considering marriage. Afsari argues that men and women are increasingly reduced to abstract archetypes, stripped of individuality in ways that undermine personal wellbeing. A woman may come to believe that men inherently impede her personal or professional success; men often mirror the same suspicion. Modern digital dating becomes a cycle of anxiety. When young Americans learn how to date through short-form videos offering “best practices,” formulas, and foolproof strategies, personal responsibility evaporates. Distrust replaces discernment, and dating becomes less relational and more existential.
Nothing seems immune to this existentialism. In one video I recently encountered, dating influencers were critiqued simply for being conventionally attractive. Their success was dismissed as a byproduct of hyper-Westernized beauty standards—slender bodies and symmetrical faces. When success itself is discredited, effort feels pointless and agency collapses. No wonder we no longer know how to date.
To counter this, society must turn away from hyper-anxious individualism. For marriage to be meaningfully reconsidered, one must reflect on what partnership actually entails, not absorb it through the fears and projections of others. A 2023 op-ed on love and mathematics captures this well: “To be in love is to be both singular and plural: you become one with the object of your love, but you are not the object of your love. Like two lines converging, we incline and form a unity far greater than our individual self could ever be.” Commitment is not self-erasure; it is the voluntary expansion of the self.
For women (and men alike) to find greater happiness and prosperity, they must reject systems that set them up to fail. This means choosing seriousness over cynicism, responsibility over irony, and community over perpetual self-optimization. Individuals must be willing to reenter the community of relationship and marriage as sources of purpose and meaning.
Boyfriends are out—and apparently, immense female loneliness is in.