Are We Shrinking Our Joy?
On the embarrassing boyfriend and people-pleasing online
Two years ago, I wrote a piece about a Christmas tree I carried through London Fields all by myself. Why Do We Shrink Ourselves for Men? was a story about my first single Christmas after my relationship suddenly ended when I caught him cheating on dating apps. He hadn’t allowed us to get a tree when we lived together, and the story did terrifyingly well. I heard from too many women who’d lost their sparkle because of a man.
What followed was over a year of navigating the hard terrain of finding someone. It felt so bleak until one day it didn’t.
As I felt secure enough in my relationship to post it online, an article for Vogue by Chanté Joseph titled ‘Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?’ was going viral. Really viral.
Having a boyfriend in the real world isn’t embarrassing at all, so what interested me most was what the piece revealed about how we perform our lives online. One woman said she knew how hard the dating landscape is and so feared being boastful by posting her boyfriend. As I posted pictures of my new relationship, I wondered whether we’re finding new ways to shrink ourselves in the interests of pleasing people.
The pressure to perform correctly follows us online. We’re supposed to look hot and interesting, but not vain. Appear authentic, but not disgusting. Aspirational, but not privileged. Relatable, but never desperate. ‘It’s too hard. It’s too contradictory.’
It is literally impossible to be a woman… I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. — America Ferrera, Barbie
We must be liked everywhere, even by strangers on the internet. Losing followers is treated as a failure, as though we’re commodities and social media is our marketing channel. Posting stops being joyful and becomes an anxiety-riddled performance, because what’s the difference between celebrating love and showing off?
Similarly, there’s pressure on single women to showcase single life in this vibrant and colourful way. The Vogue piece used the word beige to describe how women’s content changed once they got a boyfriend. Being single is hard, and we don’t have to pretend it isn’t just because traditionally society made us feel bad about it.
Women with new boyfriends know this, and so can be hesitant to post them online. However, that same person may not think twice before posting a birthday party surrounded by friends, or a mother’s or father’s day celebration, or a jolly family Christmas.
Everything, everything we post online will be something we have and someone else doesn’t.
Christmas is a bit like an emotional magnifying glass. If you feel loved and happy, Christmas will make you feel even happier and more loved. But if you feel alone and unloved, the magnifier gets to work and makes all those bad things bigger and worse. — Richard Curtis, That Christmas
The virality of the Vogue piece rebranded the single experience as one of power rather than tragedy. Some readers dumped their boyfriends after reading it. Carrying a Christmas tree alone is more joyful than being in the wrong relationship. Finding the right person is a game of playing chicken with yourself.
This year, I scattered some baubles and fairy lights around one of my plants. It looks messy and imperfect, just like how I’ve allowed myself to look to someone this year.
Last week, as my head was spinning, I saw my boyfriend carrying a heavy bag of my vomit out of the room. Being violently sick was far better with someone there to carry the weight of it. But that’s not an image I’ll be posting on Instagram.
With love,
Tiff x
The paradox of needing to appear aspirational but relatable is real. Its almost like we've internalized the metrics that platforms use to rank content and turned them into personal performance anxieties. The shift from celebrating something to worrying if it reads as boastful happens so fast that most people dont even notice when they start self-censoring. I think thats why the beige observation landed, people recognized that flattening dynamic when stability enters the picture. The vomit bag moment is the counterpoint nobody wants to algorithmically optimize their vulnrability.