🆕 Never Post! Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man

Georgia speaks to writer, researcher, and academic Carolina Bandinelli about embarrassing boyfriends and the online culture of cynicism, shame, and blame that has spread throughout the modern dating scene.

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• Vogue — Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?

Find Carolina

• Her website
• Her study on dating apps and marketized love

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

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Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Ragnetta, and we have a lovely show for you this week. In this episode, Georgia returns both to and from the dating scene to confront a question plaguing millions of people. Is having a boyfriend embarrassing? She talks with Carolina Bandinelli, associate professor at the University of Warwick, whose work investigates digital technologies of love and how they shape cultural tropes around romance, sexuality, and intimacy.

But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you are on the member feed. And when we return, Georgia finally returned from war.

On October 25, Vogue came out with an article that has become the bane of my existence. It asks a simple, provocative provocative question. Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? And writer Shante Joseph's answer to that question was basically yes. The reason for this doesn't really have to do with being a woman with a boyfriend in the physical physical world.

You can be visibly in a relationship in your offline life, holding hands, even kissing, and do so without the fear of judgment of your peers. But once you cross the digital threshold onto the social Internet, that's where your problems start. Your greatest sin comes in the form of posting. Gone are the days of the hard launch, where you post a photo of your boyfriend, his face fully visible for all to see. Now instead, women are softening their approach, posting a picture of their boyfriend's hand or his leg.

And the soft launch comes as a result, according to this article, of shame. A shame that is directed at you by others and internalized in the way you choose to post. Other women don't want to see the boyfriend on their feeds at all, or so Joseph claims. She writes, quote, there is nothing I hate more than following someone for fun only for their content to become my boyfriend ified suddenly. When a woman is too effusive about her partner online, it launches this avalanche of questions and assumptions and judgments that all affirm each other.

Is the boyfriend posting pictures of her on his feed? Probably not. Right? What does that mean? Well, it probably means he kind of sucks.

And if he sucks, he's just gonna end up breaking up with her. So why is she wasting her time celebrating some schmuck who's just gonna ruin her life? It doesn't really matter how true any of these assumptions are. What matters is the feeling behind them, a mix of weariness, judgment, and predestined failure. And if I'm being very generous, I could understand some part of where this thought spiral comes from.

Telling anyone, let alone everyone, about a new romance is very, very vulnerable. And I guess there is a world where this presumption of inevitable disaster is a kind of protective device. If you don't post, you will avoid an element of the misery that comes with a post breakup digital cleanse. And the last thing anyone wants to do after they get dumped is to have to scrub through and remove a bunch of posts of themselves with their ex, smiling at the camera with the caption, so glad I found my person. Posting about a partner does feel like a very public show of trust in the relationship, of turning back to them and going, you're not gonna embarrass me.

Right? But in the perspective of a lot of the people interviewed for this piece, the die has already been cast. A posted boyfriend is just a future ex waiting to happen. This article was extremely popular on my side of the Internet. People seem to really like it.

And maybe for some folks, the idea of just naming the disaster of dating men brought a kind of comfort. To throw up one's hands and be like, we're all screwed. But when I read, is having a boyfriend embarrassing now, I didn't leave feeling good or freed or seen. I found no comfort in this article at all. The digital landscape that this article explored didn't seem like a commiserative place to approach the perils of dating.

It felt punitive and mean and familiar. The dating scene has been especially bad for years, and the Internet is bursting with proof of it. Bad date videos, breakup videos, why, god, why am I still single videos. For the women who post and countless others who don't, dating is a miserable slog. But now, even if you do claw your way out of the existential minefield of being single, you just find yourself in another circle of hell.

Relationships are the next ticking time bomb waiting to destroy your life. Romance is cast as a closed loop of misery, never to be escaped from. And if you choose to do it anyway, the inevitable heartbreak you feel is nobody's fault but your own.

The reason why having a boyfriend is embarrassing is because y'all came on social media and showed us that it was.

If you have a man, tell him I said shut up.

Having a boyfriend as a girl is embarrassing because the girl is embarrassing.

If everyone would have kept their low standards to themselves, people wouldn't think it was embarrassing. Here,

love is a shameful act that is better dealt with offline or not at all. But when did we get so embarrassed by the idea of love? Where did this mindset come from? Is it a new thing?

The sense of impossibility or then or the experience of impossibility has always been part of love, at the center of love. But what has changed is the specific impossibility that is involved and that we perceive.

Carolina Bandinelli is an associate professor at the University of Warwick. Her research is concerned with love and sexuality in the digital age. If you listen to my dating apps episode from 2024, you've heard me mention her work about this exact topic. And she explained to me that to better understand the modern cynicism around dating and how it plays out online, we have to trace the history of our relationship to the idea of love and what stood in the way of it.

In western tradition, western canon, love was invented by poets, by male poets chasing fictional female characters. So the first loving characters that we have are knights fighting to save their princess or something like that. Or poets that suffer because they are not loved back. So love is if not impossible, is definitely very painful and very difficult. Romantic love was transgressive vis a vis the social order.

And there is there are always obstacles. Well you can think about Shakespeare, right? So there is an impossibility there. Romeo and Juliet, they cannot love each other freely. Society makes it impossible.

If it is if it is not God, then it becomes society. If it is not the devil, then our evil parents. For centuries really love was romantic love was supposed to be impossible. Then what was possible was marriage and reproduction and kinship perhaps. But definitely not romantic love.

You as a person could not readily expect to experience love. Real, passionate, romantic love unless you got very lucky. And that's how things stayed for centuries until around the nineteen sixties.

In the aftermath of the sexual revolution, we are left with a series of very important legal, social and cultural innovation that liberate individuals and liberate individuals desires and make possible make legally, practically possible to pursue one's romantic and sexual pleasures with a diminished risk of being marginalized, persecuted,

arrested, and so on. Specifically for heterosexual people's romantic and sexual pleasures, it's worth saying. But following the sexual revolution, a shift took place that made the notion of agency in seeking out romance and sex less taboo. Roe v Wade happened. Birth control became more readily available.

The 1974 law that made it possible for women to have their own credit cards, independent of their husband's permission. All of this and countless other events compiled to make it more possible than ever before to consider what you, as an individual, desired in your love life and to go out looking for it.

So say as a woman, you can hook up with as many men as you want and, you know, without being as stigmatized as your mother would have been. Like, I could have many more men than my grandmother. And of course, they would call me a slut, but also kind of who cared. The freedom that came out of

the sexual revolution was a freedom of choice, of having infinite avenues to explore, pursue, exit, and return to. But out of that freedom emerged a responsibility to take advantage of all these options that are now available to you in, as Carolina describes it, the marketplace of love. I probably don't need to explain the series of events that got us from this idea to dating apps. They basically follow the same steps as everything else that has been coerced, for better or worse, into a marketplace. Efficiency and volume become the name of the game.

More dates, more sex, and more opportunities to do both. Dating apps, if nothing else, are great at compiling an endless number of people for you to choose from. It is a simple, streamlined way to participate in the marketplace. And here, your relationship to sex and romance becomes entrepreneurial. Romance becomes as much of a self driven imperative as going to the grocery store.

You gotta eat. You gotta date. And in order to do so, you have to post to make the hinge profile and present yourself as a worthy partner in whatever it is you wanna do. And in this framework, your romantic or sexual experiences become a social capital to accumulate.

Because there is an internalized sense of a hierarchy of value in which the access to romantic sexual experiences depends on your sexiness, which means your sexual capital. So there is a sense that you have to accumulate your sexual capital, which means dressing in a certain way, which means, I don't know, having a haircut in a certain way, purchasing some accessories, behaving in a certain way. The implicit belief is that the more experience I make, I have, the more my sexual capital increase, the more the options I have, the better I can choose the person with whom I can finally spend my life with.

In the past, the impossibility of love was something you could easily tack on to external forces. Society, your family, even God. But from the sixties well into the twenty first century, the marketplace of love told a very different story. Here, any difficulties around your experiences have been placed squarely on your individual shoulders. If your dating life is bad, that's your fault and your job to change it.

And maybe that idea can feel exciting, even fun. You're in charge of your sexual and romantic happiness. You can do everything, but eventually, the shine starts to wear off the proverbial apple. With each failed date, with each Tinder message left hanging with no reply, that imperative to participate starts to weigh heavier and heavier. Wasn't this supposed to be liberating?

Why do I feel kind of bad?

It's the syndrome of New Year's Eve. It's very difficult to have fun in New Year's Eve because you are supposed to have fun because if you don't have fun, maybe there's something wrong with you or your friends. And the same applies to sex and love. The imperative to enjoy applies to the dimension of sex and love. If you don't have a good sex, if you don't love well enough, maybe there's something wrong with you.

So the sense of impossibility is no more related to the tragedy of the hero. The pain is no more the pain of the hero or the heroine who experienced the resistance of the world, but rather it is the pain of the one who's frustrated and angry and and sad because they haven't been good enough.

The shame starts to creep in. If I'm the sole person responsible for the success of my sexual and romantic experiences, then I have no one else to blame but myself for their failures. And on my feeds, that's the sentiment I've been seeing everywhere. The online component of modern dating really lends itself to posting through your experiences. And not only can you share with others, but you can broadcast your feelings through the loudest, most far reaching loudspeaker possible.

And people are miserable.

I've been single my entire life. My entire life. I'm gonna be turning 42 in August, and I've never had anybody love me or desire me or want to be with me.

I did not think that I was gonna be alone at this age.

I have so much love that I feel like that is inside of me with nowhere to go.

I am fine, but some days I'm just, like, hyper aware that not that no one cares about me, but I'm, like, no one's number one priority, and sometimes I just wanna feel cared for.

A lot of women complain about the apps, but the apps aren't really the problem. The real problem that virtually every heterosexual woman lands on has nothing to do with technology. It's men. They lie. They cheat.

They ghost. All things that are made easier by the apps. But something like Tinder is just a tool. And the more that women talk about this on social media, the more that this marketplace of dating, this hookup culture that we are all expected to participate in, starts to be shown in stark relief. Online, heterosexual women aren't just sad.

They are furious about their experiences dating men, being disappointed by men, and by feeling like they have to prove their desirability to men who will just ghost them in the end anyway. And, of course, all this fury doesn't begin and end with dating. Carolina explained to me that all of this is bolstered by larger cultural conversations happening around men and their abuses toward women. Specifically,

the Me Too movement. The Me Too offered some tools to critic and question the heterosexual codes of intimacy, you know, that that in a way, they weren't really questioned in the mainstream. If you think about the sexual revolution and the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, they were demanding big general changes. And I think that the Me Too was more micro in its gaze. And so I think that it had the power to say, well, maybe that sense of failure, that sense of frustration is not entirely your fault.

That guy that didn't call you back, that sense of abandonment, that sense of vulnerability that you experienced while you were waiting the call was not love, it was patriarchy. You know what? It's the actual romantic myth to be rotten and to be toxic and a myth indeed.

So now, the thing that stands in the way of love isn't God or your own ability to prove your desirability. It's the patriarchy. But once we determine that the modern dating scene is patriarchal, what next? How do women date in a landscape that is working against them? The most popular answer to this question that I see is to opt out of dating men completely.

Unpopular dating advice. Accept that you may be single for the rest

of your life. I've been single my whole life and I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I might just be single for forever. And that is something I truly am okay with, I think.

Don't date any men, and you will have no problems, and you will be happier person.

There's a cheery fatalism here. If the marketplace of love offered you a freedom of endless choices, then this new mindset offered freedom from choosing it all. And Carolina explained to me that this ushered in a new kind of dating landscape. Some refer to it as heterofatalism or heteropessimism. But in our conversation, Carolina called it post romanticism.

After the break, we'll explore more about what exactly post romanticism is.

This post romantic vibe or mood is characterized by sort of a loss of faith in romanticism, of a disbelief in romanticism or at least a performative disbelief in the romantic plot, which is seen not only as a myth, but also as a potentially danger of

oppressive one. Post romanticism trades the emotionally ruinous experience of situationships and ghosting and gaslighting for a completely sanitized view of dating that does not allow for any risk of getting hurt at all. The simplest solution would be to never date men ever. But under post romanticism, you can date. You can have sex.

You can have fun if you want to. But you do so with a kind of intense vigilance that borders on the hypochondriac.

And so the most important thing becomes mistakes. And so not to make mistakes, you have to understand in advance whether something can be a mistake and then hence, the whole red flag thing. What is the red flag? The red flag is a symptom that you should be able to see before.

So what happens if you miss a red flag and things don't work out? Well, it's your fault for missing it. You should have seen the signs. You had all the clues. And shame.

Shame on you for not catching it. But the shame isn't just an internalized one. Not when you're posting your boyfriend on Instagram. Now with the rise and fall of your relationship on full display, anyone can see that you made the wrong call. You spent your social capital on a loser who doesn't know how to act.

You hard launched him for the world to see, only to later reveal in a close friend story all the red flags that should have been obvious to you from the start. And we all saw it happen. And sure, he sucks, but he's just a man. He's expected to fail. You, however, you should have known better.

Not that anyone would necessarily say that to you, however. The judgment here is implied, and that is because of articles like the Vogue piece and an abundance of content online where strangers laugh and jeer and make fun of people you will never meet. In the video you're about to hear, two women are sitting on a couch and one is reading from her phone, while text on the screen explains, quote, how we are reading all your v day posts, by the way.

Four years of never giving up on our love. Through thick and thick, through the highs and lows. God knows we're worth it. Horrible. I would cry if my spouse said that about me.

On Instagram too.

Breakups aren't the only place where the shame ritual resides. Active, current relationships are cannon fodder for the judgment of anyone with an Instagram profile. The post isn't just embarrassing. The boyfriend is embarrassing. From the perspective of the women in this video, this guy is embarrassing his girlfriend without even realizing it.

He's telling on himself with the post he wrote about her. But who will receive the brunt of the blame for all of this? She will. In this digital arena of romantic shame where having a boyfriend is embarrassing and posting about him is even worse, you'd be forgiven if you decided that it would be better to just keep your love life completely offline. But what are we left with then?

A world where the sheer concept of falling in love is something to be ashamed of?

I think what is at stake, it's a reversal of the romantic idea of love. Roland Barthes in the fragments of a lover's discourse says that the lover, the one who love wants to be loved back so that to become perfect. It is the love I receive that makes me perfect. Whereas in the post romantic discourse, you have to be perfect in order to deserve to be loved. In fact, what does it measure against?

And I think what it measures against, okay, it doesn't measure against against the fake myth of romantic love, fine, good. But also I think it does measure against another fake myth of the perfectly healthy or healed self. And it is as unattainable as the Romeo and Juliet kind of love. But this is the problem. Right?

I don't think there is ever a world where you will dine at the table of post romanticism and leave with your belly full. It's a crash diet of avoidance to vulnerability, a commitment to your own misery and the expected misery of others as if it's an intellectual win. But all it really does is make everything so much harder for everyone. So no. I don't think having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

I don't think posting about your boyfriend is embarrassing, even if it doesn't work out. Having a boyfriend or a partner of any kind who doesn't respect you or who hurts you is very painful. Posting can be a way to try to convince yourself those things aren't true. And going back and deleting those posts is its own kind of heartbreak. But I really believe that trying to find love and even sharing that online isn't something to be ashamed of because searching for companionship is a human thing that we all do.

For years, I have felt like I've had to beat back post romanticism with a baseball bat because dating is really hard. Breakups are really, really hard. There are photos that used to be on my Instagram that you will never ever see again. I have enough bad stories to fill countless TikTok story times. I even posted through some of it.

And you know what I learned when I did? That a lot of people I knew were out there going through the same thing, trying against the odds, maybe even against their better judgment, to prove their inner cynic wrong. And I think about those posts where I was heartbroken, where I was scared, where I was happy with the wrong person, and I don't regret them at all. It wasn't a waste of my time, and I am so, so sick of so many people pretending that it is. The conversation I had with Carolina Bandinelli was truly incredible and there was so much more I wanted to include in this piece that just didn't make the cut.

So thank you so much to Carolina for expanding, complicating, and frankly validating so much of what I've seen and experienced firsthand in this digital world of dating. I will include some links to her work and ways to reach her down in the show notes.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, April 30. Never Post exists only because of the generous support of our members. If you would like to help support the show so we can keep making it now is a great time to head on over to neverpo.st to toss us a paltry $4 a month. The first quarter of every year, gonna be totally honest, is a bloodbath as far as member attrition is concerned.

This is true not just for us, but basically all crowdfunded projects. But you are not currently listening to all crowdfunded projects. You are currently listening to your favorite Internet podcast, Never Post, which maybe, hopefully, you would like to give $4 a month. Neverpo.s t to become a member today. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name.

Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. One night, we walked across town under the blown stars with all the damage at our backs. It does not come well arranged. Dark houses piled up.

Try lust, pride, and covetousness. Try closing the door on that lot, domestic gardens alive with those animals. We saw the fox eyeing cars, staring into the moment of impact and then sauntering off the road to leave a fox shaped hole in the air for all the traffic in the world to drive through. Excerpt of Earth at Night by Kelvin Corcoran. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by Radiotopia.