Is It Embarrassing To Crave Connection Now?

Some of the millennial and Gen-Z women in my life are my pop-culture radars. Their latest missive from the world of what’s trending is a Vogue piece that everyone has been talking about, asking “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarassing Now?”. The Vogue piece opens with a kind of cultural bemusement: having a boyfriend is framed as quaint, annoying, or a reason not to have an audience in a moment that lionizes autonomy and treats romantic entanglement as a stylistic risk. That opening tone, suggesting that a partnership with a man marks you out as nostalgically out of step, sets the stage for a deeper unease. It’s not only that people are behaving badly in relationships; it’s that the very category of partnership is under suspicion.

This suspicion grows from converging currents. Rising social isolation, amplified by digital life, and a cultural premium on self-presentation make closeness feel both risky and performative. Attachment science offers a deeper explanation: insecure patterns formed in infancy, such as avoidant withdrawal or anxious hypervigilance, skew adults toward self-protection, turning potential partners into threats or props rather than collaborators. So the question shifts from “Is he bad?” to “Is partnership worth it?”, a far grimmer appraisal.

Concurrently, Jezebel and some social media users have turned on Taylor Swift. Once a shining example of the girl boss, she’s now derided as a burgeoning tradwife, with her album discussing her happy partnership and potential openness to motherhood being seen as a step backward for women’s rights. This discourse sheds light on how fraught contemporary desires for domesticity have become. The tradwife story exposes how longing for traditional roles can be co-opted by ideological narratives, and how women who embrace love, partnership, and motherhood are quickly shamed from both sides: criticized as retrograde by progressives and appropriated as symbols by conservatives.

That critique of Swift ties directly into the Vogue piece’s anxiety. When expressions of domestic desire are policed, whether as political betrayal or embarrassing sentimentality, it signals a deeper cultural issue: feminism as a prescriptive path rather than liberatory action. In truth, feminism should expand the range of legitimate desires, not invalidate those who choose partnership. Instead, we see a tendency to valorize autonomy as the only worthy emancipation, while any longing for interdependence becomes suspect.

Reclaiming partnership requires attending to both internal and external obstacles. Internally, many individuals bring insecure attachment legacies into relationships; healing these wounds requires emotional education, the capacity for repair, and a willingness to tolerate vulnerability. Externally, our economic and cultural systems often devalue caregiving and make sustained intimacy difficult. Without policies that support families and narratives that honor interdependence, partnership can seem impractical or embarrassing rather than desirable.

If we treat partnership as a practice, a discipline of reciprocity and repair rather than a static identity, we create room for varied expressions of love, including those who find meaning in domestic life and those who do not. Criticizing Taylor Swift over finding happiness or tearing into those who find partners worth involving in their world misses the point. The real question is whether our culture will cultivate the inner capacities and social conditions that make partnership possible, not whether choosing it proves you politically pure or culturally relevant. Only by restoring the value of connection can we make choosing each other an act of courage rather than a cultural misstep.