flâneur

having a boyfriend isn't embarrassing. settling is.

isabelunhinged.substack.com · 1,353 words · saved by 1 readers

I came across the Vogue essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Right Now?” by Chanté Joseph on TikTok. As writers, that’s the dream—something you write slipping out of its little corner of the internet and into the algorithm, where it mutates into discourse. Millions of views. Hundreds of stitches. Girls in bathrooms arguing your thesis into the mirror. I’d already seen the clip she referenced, the one about how having a boyfriend had somehow become a humiliation ritual. The idea made sense to me. If anyone knows me online, they know me as the queen of man-hating Tok. I’ve built a career off that persona: mocking men, spiraling publicly, making heartbreak look like performance art. I was chronically single, and it was my brand. I’d always believed that having a boyfriend drained you of something essential. It dulled the edges. Made you slower, softer, less ambitious, less hot. Boyfriends, in my experience, were people who rearranged your energy until you could no longer recognize yo

I came across the Vogue essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Right Now?” by Chanté Joseph on TikTok. As writers, that’s the dream—something you write slipping out of its little corner of the internet and into the algorithm, where it mutates into discourse. Millions of views. Hundreds of stitches. Girls in bathrooms arguing your thesis into the mirror. I’d already seen the clip she referenced, the one about how having a boyfriend had somehow become a humiliation ritual. The idea made sense to me. If anyone knows me online, they know me as the queen of man-hating Tok. I’ve built a career…

related reading