The internet is popping off this week with news that the social media showdown of boyfriends is dead. Many women are cheering. Women with chronic illness or disability may be cheering loudest. Here’s why.
When you’re sick or disabled, dating hits different. The searching and explaining is hard – but nothing prepared me for what happened after I found my partner. Strangers framed him as heroic for dating me at all. The subtext was brutal: “Isn’t he nice.” “What an amazing guy to be with you.” The pity stuck to me through him.
When the public expects visible proof of partnership, women like us get pushed down two bad corridors. In one, you are unchosen and that becomes a moral verdict. In the other, you are chosen and it turns into a romance about a good man overcoming the inconvenience of you. Keeping him offline for six months felt less like secrecy and more like self-defence. It gave the relationship air without a jury.
So when British Vogue asks whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing now, the better frame is this: who gets centred when we tell women’s stories?
More women are choosing not to showcase partners, to crop them out, or to keep relationships quiet. That isn’t anti-love – despite hot takes about “keeping options open.” It is pro-autonomy. For women with chronic illness or disability, it also resists the old pity script that turns a partner into the protagonist and us into a lesson in gratitude. The trend reads like a small cultural correction. We are not a subplot in a man’s good deed. We are the main character, full stop.
The glare is not just social. It is economic. In Australia, the Disability Support Pension is means-tested and includes a partner’s income, which can reduce or remove your payment if you couple up. Romance becomes a spreadsheet. That policy drags intimacy into dependency and can shift power inside a relationship long before anyone argues about bins. Advocates continue to question the partner income test for the risks of financial control and the way it punishes people with disability for forming relationships. Keeping romance off the grid can be a quiet refusal to let your autonomy be folded into someone else’s payslip.
The problem with sainted carer syndrome
Then there’s sainted-carer syndrome. Post a partner and he risks becoming “the carer,” no matter how much you both hate the word. Keep him offstage and people ask what you’re hiding, as if privacy equals shame. The problem sits with a public that still measures a woman’s stability by her relationship status.
Media often understands the nuance with dating and children. Dating with illness rarely gets the same care. Our relationships get flattened into two tones: tragic burden or inspirational triumph. Neither feels like our reality – but both shape it.
Real life looks like this instead. You plan sex around meds, pain spikes, and side effects no leaflet prepared you for. You keep a running list for specialists who rotate like a carousel, and you practise the speech for the receptionist who can only “fit you in next month.” Some days you carry the house. Other days you ask for help and wonder if someone will suggest he deserves an easier life. We share some of this, but we also fear that an audience will hand him the exit script.
Refusing to put a partner on display stops the algorithm recoding ordinary intimacy into debate bait. It protects your energy when you don’t have bandwidth to moderate strangers who wonder if he will cope long term. And it keeps your story yours, which matters when your body already feels public enough. The shift away from showcasing boyfriends simply recognises that many women don’t want men centred in their personal narrative, online or off.
Here’s the somewhat useful lesson for me. The Vogue piece has sparked a flurry of takes about whether it is uncool to have a boyfriend. Cool is not the point. Power is. If a woman’s perceived legitimacy still rises or falls on whether a man chooses her, then opting out of the showcase becomes a tiny strike for selfhood. And if pity keeps sticking to you through him, then privacy isn’t prudish. It’s dignified.
None of this argues that love is suspect, or that posting is wrong. Plenty of sick and disabled women are in joyful, equitable relationships that deserve celebration. The point is that celebration is not the same as performance. The audience does not get a right of entry. For us, we can love someone and still refuse to feed the pity machine. You can care about a person and refuse the carer-ification plotline. You can be partnered and still be the main character. It isn’t embarrassment and it isn’t hiding – it’s knowing the world can be even more cruel to people whose love looks different.
Should feminism make room for women who are whole on their own. Yes. Your version may vary. For women with illness and disability, that room feels like power.