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Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man · Never Post

0:10
Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
0:13
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
0:15
Ragnetta, and we have a lovely show for you this week. In this
0:20
episode, Georgia returns both to and from the dating scene to
0:28
confront a question plaguing millions of people. Is having a
0:33
boyfriend embarrassing? She talks with Carolina Bandinelli,
0:37
associate professor at the University of Warwick, whose
0:40
work investigates digital technologies of love and how
0:44
they shape cultural tropes around romance, sexuality, and
0:48
intimacy.
0:50
But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna
0:52
listen to some ads unless you are on the member feed. And when
0:55
we return, Georgia finally returned from war.
1:12
Georgia Hampton: On October 25, Vogue came out with an article
1:17
that has become the bane of my existence. It asks a simple,
1:22
provocative provocative question. Is having a boyfriend
1:25
embarrassing now? And writer Shante Joseph's answer to that
1:29
question was basically yes. The reason for this doesn't really
1:35
have to do with being a woman with a boyfriend in the physical
1:38
physical world.
1:39
You can be visibly in a relationship in your offline
1:42
life, holding hands, even kissing, and do so without the
1:47
fear of judgment of your peers. But once you cross the digital
1:51
threshold onto the social Internet, that's where your
1:55
problems start. Your greatest sin comes in the form of
1:59
posting. Gone are the days of the hard launch, where you post
2:03
a photo of your boyfriend, his face fully visible for all to
2:07
see. Now instead, women are softening their approach,
2:12
posting a picture of their boyfriend's hand or his leg.
2:16
And the soft launch comes as a result, according to this
2:20
article, of shame. A shame that is directed at you by others and
2:26
internalized in the way you choose to post. Other women
2:31
don't want to see the boyfriend on their feeds at all, or so
2:36
Joseph claims. She writes, quote, there is nothing I hate
2:40
more than following someone for fun only for their content to
2:44
become my boyfriend ified suddenly. When a woman is too
2:49
effusive about her partner online, it launches this
2:53
avalanche of questions and assumptions and judgments that
2:57
all affirm each other.
2:59
Is the boyfriend posting pictures of her on his feed?
3:03
Probably not. Right? What does that mean? Well, it probably
3:08
means he kind of sucks.
3:10
And if he sucks, he's just gonna end up breaking up with her. So
3:15
why is she wasting her time celebrating some schmuck who's
3:18
just gonna ruin her life? It doesn't really matter how true
3:23
any of these assumptions are. What matters is the feeling
3:28
behind them, a mix of weariness, judgment, and predestined
3:33
failure. And if I'm being very generous, I could understand
3:38
some part of where this thought spiral comes from.
3:41
Telling anyone, let alone everyone, about a new romance is
3:46
very, very vulnerable. And I guess there is a world where
3:52
this presumption of inevitable disaster is a kind of protective
3:56
device. If you don't post, you will avoid an element of the
4:01
misery that comes with a post breakup digital cleanse. And the
4:05
last thing anyone wants to do after they get dumped is to have
4:08
to scrub through and remove a bunch of posts of themselves
4:12
with their ex, smiling at the camera with the caption, so glad
4:16
I found my person. Posting about a partner does feel like a very
4:23
public show of trust in the relationship, of turning back to
4:27
them and going, you're not gonna embarrass me.
4:30
Right? But in the perspective of a lot of the people interviewed
4:34
for this piece, the die has already been cast. A posted
4:39
boyfriend is just a future ex waiting to happen. This article
4:44
was extremely popular on my side of the Internet. People seem to
4:49
really like it.
4:51
And maybe for some folks, the idea of just naming the disaster
4:55
of dating men brought a kind of comfort. To throw up one's hands
4:59
and be like, we're all screwed. But when I read, is having a
5:05
boyfriend embarrassing now, I didn't leave feeling good or
5:10
freed or seen. I found no comfort in this article at all.
5:15
The digital landscape that this article explored didn't seem
5:19
like a commiserative place to approach the perils of dating.
5:23
It felt punitive and mean and familiar. The dating scene has
5:34
been especially bad for years, and the Internet is bursting
5:38
with proof of it. Bad date videos, breakup videos, why,
5:43
god, why am I still single videos. For the women who post
5:48
and countless others who don't, dating is a miserable slog. But
5:53
now, even if you do claw your way out of the existential
5:57
minefield of being single, you just find yourself in another
6:01
circle of hell.
6:03
Relationships are the next ticking time bomb waiting to
6:06
destroy your life. Romance is cast as a closed loop of misery,
6:12
never to be escaped from. And if you choose to do it anyway, the
6:16
inevitable heartbreak you feel is nobody's fault but your own.
6:21
Speaker 3: The reason why having a boyfriend is embarrassing is
6:23
because y'all came on social media and showed us that it was.
6:26
Georgia Hampton: If you have a man, tell him I said shut up.
6:29
Speaker 4: Having a boyfriend as a girl is embarrassing because
6:31
the girl is embarrassing.
6:32
Speaker 3: If everyone would have kept their low standards to
6:34
themselves, people wouldn't think it was embarrassing. Here,
6:39
Georgia Hampton: love is a shameful act that is better
6:42
dealt with offline or not at all. But when did we get so
6:47
embarrassed by the idea of love? Where did this mindset come
6:52
from? Is it a new thing?
6:55
Carolina Bandinelli: The sense of impossibility or then or the
6:59
experience of impossibility has always been part of love, at the
7:05
center of love. But what has changed is the specific
7:14
impossibility that is involved and that we perceive.
7:18
Georgia Hampton: Carolina Bandinelli is an associate
7:20
professor at the University of Warwick. Her research is
7:24
concerned with love and sexuality in the digital age. If
7:28
you listen to my dating apps episode from 2024, you've heard
7:31
me mention her work about this exact topic. And she explained
7:35
to me that to better understand the modern cynicism around
7:39
dating and how it plays out online, we have to trace the
7:42
history of our relationship to the idea of love and what stood
7:47
in the way of it.
7:47
Carolina Bandinelli: In western tradition, western canon, love
7:51
was invented by poets, by male poets chasing fictional female
7:59
characters. So the first loving characters that we have are
8:05
knights fighting to save their princess or something like that.
8:11
Or poets that suffer because they are not loved back. So love
8:18
is if not impossible, is definitely very painful and very
8:22
difficult. Romantic love was transgressive vis a vis the
8:27
social order.
8:29
And there is there are always obstacles. Well you can think
8:33
about Shakespeare, right? So there is an impossibility there.
8:37
Romeo and Juliet, they cannot love each other freely. Society
8:42
makes it impossible.
8:44
If it is if it is not God, then it becomes society. If it is not
8:50
the devil, then our evil parents. For centuries really
8:55
love was romantic love was supposed to be impossible. Then
8:59
what was possible was marriage and reproduction and kinship
9:03
perhaps. But definitely not romantic love.
9:06
Georgia Hampton: You as a person could not readily expect to
9:10
experience love. Real, passionate, romantic love unless
9:16
you got very lucky. And that's how things stayed for centuries
9:21
until around the nineteen sixties.
9:24
Carolina Bandinelli: In the aftermath of the sexual
9:26
revolution, we are left with a series of very important legal,
9:34
social and cultural innovation that liberate individuals and
9:40
liberate individuals desires and make possible make legally,
9:46
practically possible to pursue one's romantic and sexual
9:51
pleasures with a diminished risk of being marginalized,
9:59
persecuted,
10:01
Georgia Hampton: arrested, and so on. Specifically for
10:04
heterosexual people's romantic and sexual pleasures, it's worth
10:08
saying. But following the sexual revolution, a shift took place
10:12
that made the notion of agency in seeking out romance and sex
10:16
less taboo. Roe v Wade happened. Birth control became more
10:21
readily available.
10:22
The 1974 law that made it possible for women to have their
10:26
own credit cards, independent of their husband's permission. All
10:30
of this and countless other events compiled to make it more
10:34
possible than ever before to consider what you, as an
10:38
individual, desired in your love life and to go out looking for
10:43
it.
10:43
Carolina Bandinelli: So say as a woman, you can hook up with as
10:46
many men as you want and, you know, without being as
10:51
stigmatized as your mother would have been. Like, I could have
10:55
many more men than my grandmother. And of course, they
10:59
would call me a slut, but also kind of who cared. The freedom
11:03
that came out of
11:04
Georgia Hampton: the sexual revolution was a freedom of
11:06
choice, of having infinite avenues to explore, pursue,
11:11
exit, and return to. But out of that freedom emerged a
11:16
responsibility to take advantage of all these options that are
11:20
now available to you in, as Carolina describes it, the
11:23
marketplace of love. I probably don't need to explain the series
11:46
of events that got us from this idea to dating apps. They
11:51
basically follow the same steps as everything else that has been
11:54
coerced, for better or worse, into a marketplace. Efficiency
11:59
and volume become the name of the game.
12:02
More dates, more sex, and more opportunities to do both. Dating
12:07
apps, if nothing else, are great at compiling an endless number
12:12
of people for you to choose from. It is a simple,
12:16
streamlined way to participate in the marketplace. And here,
12:21
your relationship to sex and romance becomes entrepreneurial.
12:26
Romance becomes as much of a self driven imperative as going
12:30
to the grocery store.
12:32
You gotta eat. You gotta date. And in order to do so, you have
12:37
to post to make the hinge profile and present yourself as
12:41
a worthy partner in whatever it is you wanna do. And in this
12:45
framework, your romantic or sexual experiences become a
12:50
social capital to accumulate.
12:53
Carolina Bandinelli: Because there is an internalized sense
12:56
of a hierarchy of value in which the access to romantic sexual
13:02
experiences depends on your sexiness, which means your
13:08
sexual capital. So there is a sense that you have to
13:11
accumulate your sexual capital, which means dressing in a
13:16
certain way, which means, I don't know, having a haircut in
13:20
a certain way, purchasing some accessories, behaving in a
13:24
certain way. The implicit belief is that the more experience I
13:28
make, I have, the more my sexual capital increase, the more the
13:35
options I have, the better I can choose the person with whom I
13:41
can finally spend my life with.
13:43
Georgia Hampton: In the past, the impossibility of love was
13:47
something you could easily tack on to external forces. Society,
13:52
your family, even God. But from the sixties well into the twenty
13:56
first century, the marketplace of love told a very different
14:00
story. Here, any difficulties around your experiences have
14:05
been placed squarely on your individual shoulders. If your
14:10
dating life is bad, that's your fault and your job to change it.
14:15
And maybe that idea can feel exciting, even fun. You're in
14:21
charge of your sexual and romantic happiness. You can do
14:25
everything, but eventually, the shine starts to wear off the
14:30
proverbial apple. With each failed date, with each Tinder
14:37
message left hanging with no reply, that imperative to
14:41
participate starts to weigh heavier and heavier. Wasn't this
14:46
supposed to be liberating?
14:48
Why do I feel kind of bad?
14:52
Carolina Bandinelli: It's the syndrome of New Year's Eve. It's
14:55
very difficult to have fun in New Year's Eve because you are
14:58
supposed to have fun because if you don't have fun, maybe
15:00
there's something wrong with you or your friends. And the same
15:03
applies to sex and love. The imperative to enjoy applies to
15:07
the dimension of sex and love. If you don't have a good sex, if
15:10
you don't love well enough, maybe there's something wrong
15:14
with you.
15:15
So the sense of impossibility is no more related to the tragedy
15:19
of the hero. The pain is no more the pain of the hero or the
15:25
heroine who experienced the resistance of the world, but
15:29
rather it is the pain of the one who's frustrated and angry and
15:37
and sad because they haven't been good enough.
15:42
Georgia Hampton: The shame starts to creep in. If I'm the
15:45
sole person responsible for the success of my sexual and
15:48
romantic experiences, then I have no one else to blame but
15:52
myself for their failures. And on my feeds, that's the
15:58
sentiment I've been seeing everywhere. The online component
16:02
of modern dating really lends itself to posting through your
16:07
experiences. And not only can you share with others, but you
16:11
can broadcast your feelings through the loudest, most far
16:14
reaching loudspeaker possible.
16:17
And people are miserable.
16:21
Speaker 6: I've been single my entire life. My entire life. I'm
16:24
gonna be turning 42 in August, and I've never had anybody love
16:29
me or desire me or want to be with me.
16:32
Speaker 4: I did not think that I was gonna be alone at this
16:35
age.
16:36
Speaker 6: I have so much love that I feel like that is inside
16:39
of me with nowhere to go.
16:42
Speaker 4: I am fine, but some days I'm just, like, hyper aware
16:46
that not that no one cares about me, but I'm, like, no one's
16:49
number one priority, and sometimes I just wanna feel
16:52
cared for.
16:53
Georgia Hampton: A lot of women complain about the apps, but the
16:55
apps aren't really the problem. The real problem that virtually
16:59
every heterosexual woman lands on has nothing to do with
17:03
technology. It's men. They lie. They cheat.
17:07
They ghost. All things that are made easier by the apps. But
17:13
something like Tinder is just a tool. And the more that women
17:16
talk about this on social media, the more that this marketplace
17:20
of dating, this hookup culture that we are all expected to
17:23
participate in, starts to be shown in stark relief. Online,
17:29
heterosexual women aren't just sad.
17:32
They are furious about their experiences dating men, being
17:37
disappointed by men, and by feeling like they have to prove
17:40
their desirability to men who will just ghost them in the end
17:44
anyway. And, of course, all this fury doesn't begin and end with
17:50
dating. Carolina explained to me that all of this is bolstered by
17:55
larger cultural conversations happening around men and their
17:59
abuses toward women. Specifically,
18:02
Carolina Bandinelli: the Me Too movement. The Me Too offered
18:06
some tools to critic and question the heterosexual codes
18:13
of intimacy, you know, that that in a way, they weren't really
18:19
questioned in the mainstream. If you think about the sexual
18:22
revolution and the feminist movement and the sexual
18:25
revolution, they were demanding big general changes. And I think
18:31
that the Me Too was more micro in its gaze. And so I think that
18:37
it had the power to say, well, maybe that sense of failure,
18:42
that sense of frustration is not entirely your fault.
18:49
That guy that didn't call you back, that sense of abandonment,
18:53
that sense of vulnerability that you experienced while you were
18:57
waiting the call was not love, it was patriarchy. You know
19:02
what? It's the actual romantic myth to be rotten and to be
19:09
toxic and a myth indeed.
19:15
Georgia Hampton: So now, the thing that stands in the way of
19:18
love isn't God or your own ability to prove your
19:21
desirability. It's the patriarchy. But once we
19:26
determine that the modern dating scene is patriarchal, what next?
19:32
How do women date in a landscape that is working against them?
19:36
The most popular answer to this question that I see is to opt
19:40
out of dating men completely.
19:42
Unpopular dating advice. Accept that you may be single for the
19:45
rest
19:46
Speaker 3: of your life. I've been single my whole life and
19:48
I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I might just be
19:50
single for forever. And that is something I truly am okay with,
19:53
I think.
19:54
Speaker 7: Don't date any men, and you will have no problems,
19:58
and you will be happier person.
20:01
Georgia Hampton: There's a cheery fatalism here. If the
20:04
marketplace of love offered you a freedom of endless choices,
20:09
then this new mindset offered freedom from choosing it all.
20:13
And Carolina explained to me that this ushered in a new kind
20:17
of dating landscape. Some refer to it as heterofatalism or
20:22
heteropessimism. But in our conversation, Carolina called it
20:27
post romanticism.
20:32
After the break, we'll explore more about what exactly post
20:36
romanticism is.
20:59
Carolina Bandinelli: This post romantic vibe or mood is
21:03
characterized by sort of a loss of faith in romanticism, of a
21:10
disbelief in romanticism or at least a performative disbelief
21:16
in the romantic plot, which is seen not only as a myth, but
21:22
also as a potentially danger of
21:24
Georgia Hampton: oppressive one. Post romanticism trades the
21:29
emotionally ruinous experience of situationships and ghosting
21:34
and gaslighting for a completely sanitized view of dating that
21:39
does not allow for any risk of getting hurt at all. The
21:44
simplest solution would be to never date men ever. But under
21:48
post romanticism, you can date. You can have sex.
21:53
You can have fun if you want to. But you do so with a kind of
21:57
intense vigilance that borders on the hypochondriac.
22:04
Carolina Bandinelli: And so the most important thing becomes
22:07
mistakes. And so not to make mistakes, you have to understand
22:12
in advance whether something can be a mistake and then hence, the
22:16
whole red flag thing. What is the red flag? The red flag is a
22:20
symptom that you should be able to see before.
22:24
Georgia Hampton: So what happens if you miss a red flag and
22:28
things don't work out? Well, it's your fault for missing it.
22:33
You should have seen the signs. You had all the clues. And
22:38
shame.
22:39
Shame on you for not catching it. But the shame isn't just an
22:48
internalized one. Not when you're posting your boyfriend on
22:51
Instagram. Now with the rise and fall of your relationship on
22:55
full display, anyone can see that you made the wrong call.
23:00
You spent your social capital on a loser who doesn't know how to
23:04
act.
23:05
You hard launched him for the world to see, only to later
23:09
reveal in a close friend story all the red flags that should
23:13
have been obvious to you from the start. And we all saw it
23:17
happen. And sure, he sucks, but he's just a man. He's expected
23:24
to fail. You, however, you should have known better.
23:30
Not that anyone would necessarily say that to you,
23:33
however. The judgment here is implied, and that is because of
23:38
articles like the Vogue piece and an abundance of content
23:43
online where strangers laugh and jeer and make fun of people you
23:47
will never meet. In the video you're about to hear, two women
23:52
are sitting on a couch and one is reading from her phone, while
23:56
text on the screen explains, quote, how we are reading all
24:00
your v day posts, by the way.
24:02
Speaker 3: Four years of never giving up on our love. Through
24:14
thick and thick, through the highs and lows. God knows we're
24:19
worth it. Horrible. I would cry if my spouse said that about me.
24:34
On Instagram too.
24:42
Georgia Hampton: Breakups aren't the only place where the shame
24:44
ritual resides. Active, current relationships are cannon fodder
24:50
for the judgment of anyone with an Instagram profile. The post
24:54
isn't just embarrassing. The boyfriend is embarrassing. From
24:58
the perspective of the women in this video, this guy is
25:02
embarrassing his girlfriend without even realizing it.
25:06
He's telling on himself with the post he wrote about her. But who
25:11
will receive the brunt of the blame for all of this? She will.
25:17
In this digital arena of romantic shame where having a
25:20
boyfriend is embarrassing and posting about him is even worse,
25:24
you'd be forgiven if you decided that it would be better to just
25:29
keep your love life completely offline. But what are we left
25:34
with then?
25:35
A world where the sheer concept of falling in love is something
25:39
to be ashamed of?
25:41
Carolina Bandinelli: I think what is at stake, it's a
25:43
reversal of the romantic idea of love. Roland Barthes in the
25:48
fragments of a lover's discourse says that the lover, the one who
25:53
love wants to be loved back so that to become perfect. It is
25:59
the love I receive that makes me perfect. Whereas in the post
26:05
romantic discourse, you have to be perfect in order to deserve
26:11
to be loved. In fact, what does it measure against?
26:15
And I think what it measures against, okay, it doesn't
26:19
measure against against the fake myth of romantic love, fine,
26:23
good. But also I think it does measure against another fake
26:28
myth of the perfectly healthy or healed self. And it is as
26:36
unattainable as the Romeo and Juliet kind of love. But this is
26:41
the problem. Right?
26:47
Georgia Hampton: I don't think there is ever a world where you
26:51
will dine at the table of post romanticism and leave with your
26:55
belly full. It's a crash diet of avoidance to vulnerability, a
27:01
commitment to your own misery and the expected misery of
27:05
others as if it's an intellectual win. But all it
27:10
really does is make everything so much harder for everyone. So
27:18
no. I don't think having a boyfriend is embarrassing.
27:22
I don't think posting about your boyfriend is embarrassing, even
27:27
if it doesn't work out. Having a boyfriend or a partner of any
27:32
kind who doesn't respect you or who hurts you is very painful.
27:39
Posting can be a way to try to convince yourself those things
27:43
aren't true. And going back and deleting those posts is its own
27:48
kind of heartbreak. But I really believe that trying to find love
27:54
and even sharing that online isn't something to be ashamed of
27:59
because searching for companionship is a human thing
28:03
that we all do.
28:08
For years, I have felt like I've had to beat back post
28:13
romanticism with a baseball bat because dating is really hard.
28:20
Breakups are really, really hard. There are photos that used
28:25
to be on my Instagram that you will never ever see again. I
28:31
have enough bad stories to fill countless TikTok story times. I
28:36
even posted through some of it.
28:38
And you know what I learned when I did? That a lot of people I
28:42
knew were out there going through the same thing, trying
28:46
against the odds, maybe even against their better judgment,
28:50
to prove their inner cynic wrong. And I think about those
28:54
posts where I was heartbroken, where I was scared, where I was
29:00
happy with the wrong person, and I don't regret them at all. It
29:05
wasn't a waste of my time, and I am so, so sick of so many people
29:13
pretending that it is. The conversation I had with Carolina
29:41
Bandinelli was truly incredible and there was so much more I
29:47
wanted to include in this piece that just didn't make the cut.
29:50
So thank you so much to Carolina for expanding, complicating, and
29:58
frankly validating so much of what I've seen and experienced
30:02
firsthand in this digital world of dating. I will include some
30:07
links to her work and ways to reach her down in the show
30:11
notes.
30:45
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
30:48
gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
30:52
April 30. Never Post exists only because of the generous support
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Rugnetta. One night, we walked across town under the blown
31:57
stars with all the damage at our backs. It does not come well
32:01
arranged. Dark houses piled up.
32:04
Try lust, pride, and covetousness. Try closing the
32:09
door on that lot, domestic gardens alive with those
32:12
animals. We saw the fox eyeing cars, staring into the moment of
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impact and then sauntering off the road to leave a fox shaped
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hole in the air for all the traffic in the world to drive
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through. Excerpt of Earth at Night by Kelvin Corcoran. Never
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Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed
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by Radiotopia.