Many months ago, I wrote a piece that asked what felt, at the time, like a deliberately provocative question: boyfriends are cringe. But is the boysober trend a feminist reclamation or a neoconservative tilt?
It landed at a particular cultural moment – one that didn’t arrive overnight, but had been gathering momentum for years. From the rise of #boysober on TikTok to the Vogue headline that briefly broke the internet, it was clear something had shifted. Increasingly, women were stepping back from heterosexual dating not out of bitterness, but out of fatigue. What we were witnessing was not a rejection of love, but a growing weariness with the conditions under which love was being offered.
The response to that piece was intense and, in many ways, predictable. Some readers accused me of heralding the end of the family unit. Others framed it as another example of feminist “man-hating” or moral panic dressed up as cultural critique. But these reactions missed a crucial point. My work (then and now) is not anti-love. It is, fundamentally, about love. Specifically, it is about radical self-love, ethical love, and love that does not require women to diminish themselves to participate in it.
We are living in a historically unprecedented moment. For the first time in most societies, large numbers of women no longer need to marry to secure basic survival. Marriage is no longer the primary gateway to economic stability, social legitimacy, housing, or physical safety; at least not in the way it once was. This structural shift matters. When marriage and partnership move from necessity to choice, their meaning changes. And when choice enters the equation, many women are looking at heterosexual relationships and deciding, quite rationally, that they don’t add enough to justify the cost.
This is where terms like heteropessimism and heterofatalism come in. These concepts capture a growing sense that heterosexual relationships are, by default, unequal; that women are expected to perform emotional labour, manage risk, absorb disappointment, and still present the relationship as a personal success. The pessimism isn’t about intimacy itself; it’s about the asymmetry baked into the structure of straight romance. It’s about the sense that no matter how much effort women put in, the emotional maths rarely adds up.
Crucially, this shift cannot be understood outside the context of digital culture. Social media and dating apps have not just changed how we meet, they have co-opted love itself. They offer us a script: milestones to hit, aesthetics to perform, timelines to follow. The soft launch. The hard launch. The engagement ring. The house. The baby. Love becomes something to be demonstrated publicly, validated algorithmically, and often monetised through consumption. Romance is no longer just lived; it is branded.
This mirrors what happened to feminism. What began as a collective political project was gradually, reframed as individual empowerment through choice, beauty, and ultimately, purchasing power. Love has undergone a similar transformation. Dating apps promise connection but operate on logics of churn, abundance, and disposability. Social media sells us intimacy while extracting attention, data, and emotional labour. In both cases, the deeper ethical questions, about care, justice, reciprocity, are flattened into lifestyle aesthetics.
The backlash to my earlier piece revealed just how threatening it feels to question this script. To suggest that a woman might centre herself, rather than a partner, is still read as antisocial or dangerous. But what if this moment isn’t about rejecting relationships at all? What if it’s about refusing relationships that demand self-erasure?
Radical self-love, as I understand it, is not bubble baths or Instagram affirmations. It is not individualism masquerading as empowerment. Radical self-love is relational. It is about recognising your own worth enough to demand fairness, safety, and reciprocity in your intimate life. It resists being packaged or sold because it often looks quiet, unproductive, and unperformative. It might look like choosing solitude over constant compromise. It might look like friendship over romance, or community over coupledom. It might look like staying single not because you’ve “given up,” but because you refuse to accept less than justice in love.
This is where love becomes political again. bell hooks famously wrote that love cannot exist without justice. When women withdraw from dating, when they question the centrality of heterosexual romance, they are not rejecting intimacy: they are demanding better terms for it. Love, in this framing, is expansive. It includes romantic love, yes, but also friendship, chosen family, creative fulfilment, care networks, and self-trust. It refuses the idea that one form of love must dominate all others to give life meaning.
As we move into 2026, this feels like a call to live differently. Not to abandon love, but to de-centre the scripts that have narrowed it. To allow people to write their own love stories without milestones, without consumption, without apology. Love does not have to follow rules to be real. It does not need to be posted, launched, or validated to count.
If that makes the old romance plot wobble, perhaps that’s not a loss. Perhaps it’s an opening. Not the end of love but the beginning of something more honest and more just.