A Psychologist Explains Why 'Boyfriend Embarrassment' Is A Real Thing

If admitting you have a boyfriend feels like a reputation risk, you're not alone, and not irrational.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | December 3, 2025

In a fantastic British Vogue viewpoint article, writer and influencer Chanté Joseph posed a question that seemed to throw, quite unexpectedly, the entire internet for a loop: Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?

Based on the piece's runaway traction, as well as the enormity of the response it's received, the answer appears to be, at least culturally, yes. Yet if you look closely at how women responded to Joseph's argument, it's quite clear that she didn't just uncover a new insecurity so much as articulate a feeling that countless 21st-century women had already been harboring.

Evidently, something about the once highly-awaited "boyfriend reveal" has soured, despite it having been the pinnacle of social-media romance culture not too long ago. For women, hard-launching a relationship has inexplicably become a gauche thing to do; posting your partner too often is now an act of oversharing.

Clearly, it seems that many are rethinking what exactly partnership signals about a woman's identity, ambitions, autonomy and social value. Joseph touched on this poignantly when she explained that "being partnered doesn't affirm your womanhood anymore."

However, the reasons for this, as many women seemingly already know, stretch far beyond what we can visibly see. And this is precisely where this conversation truly has to start. Because if being someone's girlfriend is somehow, suddenly, a little embarrassing, the question isn't why women are hiding their boyfriends. It's what, exactly, do women risk revealing about themselves when they don't?

Here's what they could be, based on the opinion of a psychological researcher.

1. A Boyfriend Signals Lost Identity Capital

Both partnered and single women can feel the palpable loss of identity capital the moment they publicly tether themselves to a man. As Joseph noted, this is likely an extension of our current cultural moment of heteropessimism.

But, just as a 2022 article in Feminist Media Studies points out, none of this is new. This mood has drifted through popular culture for nearly a decade now, only under different labels: heteropessimism, heteromiserabilism and heterofatalism. Yet despite the linguistic variety, they all point to precisely the same underlying feeling: the embarrassment, regret and hopelessness women feel about "the straight experience."

What's most striking, however, is the juxtaposition between how pragmatically young women can now name this feeling, and how profoundly complex it actually is. Underneath all the memes and the knowing sighs, there are very real, very serious sociological patterns, psychological incentives and historically gendered expectations.

As a 2022 review in Current Opinion in Psychology explains, for the most part, modern heterosexuality tends to function in ways that fundamentally clashes with the preferences women have been evolutionarily shaped to value. In simple terms, this means straight relationships (even loving ones) still operate based on scripts that disadvantage women. The structural result of this is that women end up less satisfied, less supported and more burdened, on average, than their male partners.

And as brutal as this sounds, it's far from a shocking revelation. We've known for years that heterosexual marriage often leaves women overworked and underthanked. A brilliant 2023 study, titled "Who's Remembering to Buy the Eggs?", emphasizes that women continue to shoulder the vast majority of the managerial, cognitive and emotional labor required to make modern cohabitation function, or the so-called "invisible load."

Even in 2025, the research paints the same picture: women are still doing more of the planning, remembering, soothing, organising and anticipating that keeps a household running. Men benefit from the partnership; women upkeep it.

All of this comes together to create an unexpected tension for a woman sharing about her romantic partner, both online and offline, in single spaces. During a cultural moment when women are hyper-aware of the compromises, expectations and sacrifices that much of heterosexuality can demand of them, publicly (and enthusiastically) announcing that you're tethered to a man can feel, ironically, a little tone-deaf.

Posting your boyfriend, in this sense, becomes a signal. It tells the world you've traded in a sliver of your identity capital, stepped into a social script that so many women are increasingly becoming skeptical of, and willingly aligned yourself with a structure that is widely known to leave women holding the short end of the stick.

From this point of view, the embarrassment actually has little to do with the boyfriend himself at all. It's about what women fear they're communicating, knowingly or not, when they invite the world to bear witness to him.

2. A Boyfriend Stirs Post-Feminist Cognitive Dissonance

It would be almost insultingly reductive to say that this new strain of embarrassment is just a matter of optics. In reality, what many women are actually feeling is a clash between identity and ideology. It is the tangible tension between who women believe themselves to be, and what their romantic attachments could potentially signal. And this discomfort only nags at them further in today's day and age, where women's freedoms, labor and safety are still somehow contested.

A 2021 study published in Personality and Individual Differences makes sense of this through evolutionary theory. Women, specifically, have evolved over many centuries to prioritize partners capable of investment and protection. In modern society, however, feminist ideology often pushes women toward valuing independence, equality and self-sufficiency.

In other words, women are now sensing a fundamental clash between what they believe (that women should be autonomous, empowered and equal) and what they cannot always help but be attracted to (traits in men that are associated, whether fairly or unfairly, with conventional masculinity).

Once again, this cognitive dissonance also isn't new. It has been shaped by decades worth of cultural scripts, which so many of us have grown up with. These old, powerful and awfully sticky narratives that tell us men protect, while women nurture. Yet women also live in a world where the evidence, both personal and sociopolitical, contradicts those roles at every turn.

They see the imbalances in domestic labor; they feel the pressure of being both self-sufficient and thanklessly accommodating; they witness the ways violence and patriarchy are still actively shaping both men and women's lives and behaviors today.

So, even when a woman's personal relationship feels safe, egalitarian and loving, the broader context of men's behavior throughout society pushes against her individual experience. The love she knows, sees and absorbs daily is at odds with the broader female experience.

In this sense, yes, of course it can feel embarrassing to have a boyfriend. How could it not when so many gender based violence perpetrators are described in headlines as "boyfriends"? How could it not, when some "boyfriends" are at the centre of debates about control, bodily autonomy and the policing of women's lives?

Even if a woman has no reason whatsoever to distrust her partner — even if he is radically unlike those who do cause harm — there is still an unavoidable awareness that someone else's boyfriend is probably part of the problem.

A Final Note To Boyfriends

To the boyfriends and husbands reading this, wondering whether their girlfriends and wives are really embarrassed, it's worth saying this plainly: it's not actually about you. The newfound instinct to keep things a little more private than couples once did is not a referendum on your worth, nor on her love. It's a response to a far bigger cultural reckoning that both predates and exceeds you. It also isn't a reckoning that you alone can resolve.

Women are, collectively, coming to terms with centuries of romantic scripts that never truly served them. They are reconciling their desires with their politics. They are also learning, sometimes painfully, that loving a good man doesn't exempt them from the world that exists outside their front door. And they are trying to hold all of this while still making space for joy — while making space for you.

This means that the embarrassment isn't yours to carry, because it actually isn't hers either. It belongs to the culture we're all living in, which women are finally naming and rejecting.

Are you embarrassed to have a boyfriend? Take this science-backed test to uncover the psychological factors behind your reactions, without judgement: Relationship Satisfaction Scale

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.