“What do you want?”, a friend of mine spat as she answered the phone to an unidentified caller. We were in the park at the hottest point of the day, with friends old and new. “Who is she on the phone with?”, I asked the girls beside me. “Her boyfriend, obviously”, they said, laughing in unison. “Who else would she speak to like that?” 

I obviously don’t know the ins and outs of my friend’s relationship with her boyfriend – she could be rightfully pissed off at him for something – and the girls I had just met might know more about their dynamic than I do. However, I was struck by how much they all revelled in my friend’s interaction with her boyfriend. It was as if there was a shared understanding among these young women, brought up under a certain kind of pop feminism, that this is how one not only speaks to their boyfriend in front of others, but also maintains and demonstrates that they are in a “successful” relationship. 

“The key to a successful relationship is a mean girlfriend,” influencers Osh and Akela declare on a 2024 episode of their podcast Cue The Commentary. “The thing about men is they love a challenge, and they love what they can’t have; if you give them everything, they get bored,” they exclaim. The video may be old, but this rhetoric is currently rife in online dating discourse (and has started worming its way into my real-life conversations I’m having too). On TikTok, young women are explaining why they are happy to be a “mean” girlfriend. Influencer Beth explains that she acts this way because she’s seen the women in her life put their own hopes and dreams aside to make themselves nice, agreeable and small to attain and keep their husbands – behaviour she does not want to repeat.

Another popular TikTok trend sees couples (mostly heterosexual) arguing, with the men telling their girlfriends that they “yell”, “hit” and are “always mean” to them. The girlfriend then tells their partners to leave them if they’re so unhappy, to which the man scrunches his face in disbelief, questioning why she’d even suggest that. A comment that stood out to me on one of these videos reads: “He was telling you what he likes about you, Queen”. 

Now let me make this clear: I am not here to defend men who are mostly being playfully berated by their girlfriends. If they are seriously being berated, there‘s a decent chance they deserve it. Women in heterosexual relationships have always suffered under male domination, and today is no different. When I was at university, for example, I remember learning a particularly horrifying fact about the history of violence against women in the UK: In 1895, the city of London made it illegal to hit your wife between 10 pm and 7 am, not because abusing women is wrong, but because the noise kept people awake. Most recently, this year’s World Cup saw the highest ever number of domestic abuse reports, with 384 reported incidents across the tournament. I could go on about the horrible things women have been subjected to in their relationships with men, and have no interest in criticising women for standing their ground in what can still be an unequal dynamic. Rather, I’m curious about the rise in popularity of this rhetoric, and if it has any real impact on how we interact and love the men in our lives. 

“I’m sometimes mean to and about my boyfriend in front of my friends, not because he’s necessarily done anything to me, but to prove that I’m not too obsessed with him and that I still value my female friendships over anything,” 26-year-old Shakira* tells Dazed. “I think women are trying to find power while we’re in the midst of something that feels so archaic, like a long-term relationship with a man.” For Shakira, being mean to her boyfriend is partly a performance for others – to demonstrate that she has not been swept away in having a boyfriend, which, as Chanté Joseph pointed out in her viral British Vogue essay, is now seen as “embarrassing”. Shakira doesn’t want her friends to think differently of her, or question their place in her life, now that she’s in a relationship. At the same time, the meanness also comes from a truth. After several years in a heterosexual relationship, you can find yourself enacting gender roles you promised yourself you’d never repeat – in the performance of domestic labour, for example – and resenting your partner for putting you in that position: “I find myself rebelling when I’m falling into what I believe are classic tropes of heterosexual relationships”, Shakira confesses. “Meanness” in this regard is her way of reasserting the power she believes she sometimes loses in her romantic relationship. 

Like Shakira, 26-year-old Mia* also admits that she has previously performed a type of meanness about her boyfriend to friends – but attributes this to women feeling the need to establish some distance from their male partners, in the event that they will one day embarass them. “I think that women, like myself, are sometimes overcorrecting when they are being mean to or about their boyfriends because we know that somehow we will be made to answer for a man, even if their behaviour has nothing to do with you,” she explains. “Because of this, I want my friends to know that I will put him in his place, that he doesn’t define me.” 

When you first start dating, what you’re looking for in a partner is someone who makes you laugh, who you can have fun with and who makes your life better. But the reality of trying to date or being in a relationship is that it can be a massive mind-fuck. Relationships can be sites of domination and embarrassment as much as intimacy and pleasure. In her hit debut novel, I’m A Fan, which follows a young woman obsessed with her lover’s mistress, Sheena Patel succinctly describes what modern dating can feel like: “Relationships are sites of winning – not connection and safety, but dominance and subjugation. Every gesture, word, act, opportunity, kind face, sexual advance, dismissal, rebuff, celebration, rejection, invitation, advancement, smile, look, step forward or step back and every offered fee has to be regarded first as an insult; a threat or as a potential act of violence… it is the only way to live, to regard anyone coming close as the enemy, as someone who is guaranteed to take from you.” 

This is an exhausting way to approach relationships, but many women feel it is necessary for their own safety. Letting one’s guard down with a man could cost you everything, up to and including your life. But performative meanness may be of limited use as a means of self-protection. When I asked Shakira and Mia whether it has had a positive effect on their relationships, as the discourse suggests it should, their answers revealed the opposite. “My behaviour in this regard has been a sore point in our relationship,” Mia reveals. “There have been times where I’ve been mean and made jokes at his expense in front of his friends or mine – and on those occasions, he has pulled me to the side and asked me why. I didn’t have a real response. Maybe I wanted to assert my dominance in front of other people, or maybe I was scared that he would embarrass me; I genuinely didn’t know. All I knew was that I felt this strong urge to do something.”

Shakira has also had to contend with why she engages in this behaviour after her boyfriend called her out on it: “On a few occasions my partner has noticed I’m not as affectionate or give much attention to them when friends are around. Honestly, I hate that it’s something I subconsciously do as it doesn’t necessarily make me feel good and I wouldn’t appreciate it vice versa.”

When I spoke to my friends about the rise of performative meanness, they couldn’t hide their frustration at the state of modern dating. But they also reminded me that this isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon: “When I was in lower school, the boys would always act like it was such a chore to hang out with their girlfriends, especially around their boy friends. Showing vulnerability is just hard for all of us,” one friend remarked. Another messaged me a few days later, still pondering on the topic: “I hope my friends know that showing their love for their partner in front of others is not something to be ashamed of – but rather embraced.”