While scrolling through TikTok and seeing the app’s perpetual outburst of trivial trends, I stumbled across a particularly interesting online fad: “girlfriend air.” The trend is quite sweet, and for those unfamiliar, it looks a little something like this: A girlfriend will post a few pictures of her boyfriend before they started dating. The pictures are always quite bad, featuring a shy, poorly dressed, badly photographed guy. Then, she shares a few pictures of the boyfriend since the couple has gotten together. The boy has a snappy new haircut, stylish clothes, and suave pose. The comments are flooded with “OMG! What would he do without you!?” and “You changed his life!”
TikTok loves the trend! Dozens of young (heterosexual) couples have shared their before/afters, and the videos have gotten to be incredibly popular. Interestingly, a few weeks after “girlfriend air” circulated, the trend inverted itself to show “boyfriend air.” These videos are formatted the same as the “girlfriend air,” but with the script flipped. The images from before the couple got together show a beautifully dressed, sexy young woman in artful poses. After she enters a relationship, she wears sweatpants with messy hair and is depicted taking a nap or eating a snack. The comments on these videos are full of “LOL, me too sister,” and “He really gets the worst pictures of me haha.”
These couples seem happy and healthy, and both parties involved crack loving jokes at their partners in the captions. But these trends beg the question: Why does this inversion occur?
When the “boyfriend air” trend originated, I thought back to recent headlines I had been seeing on my news apps. The headlines looked a little something like, “The Boys Are Sad” or “Why So Many Men Aren’t Having Sex.”
The contents of these articles are intuitive but fascinating. Over the past few decades, there has been an immense decline in intimacy and connection on the part of young men. BBC’s Science Focus reported record-breaking loneliness in men, juxtaposing this with the scientific necessity of friendship, love, and connection. Psychology Today contextualized this in terms of the pandemic, which exacerbated social isolation.
All of this is to say that lots of men are very lonely. If we place the TikTok trends in the larger context of traditional Western social norms, it’s easy to see what a deadly combination the pandemic, changing demographic interests, and a predominant social norm toward silence about men’s emotions can produce.
Isolation and lack of social and emotional nourishment is abstract, and it might be hard to characterize what this really looks like. But when I see the “before the girlfriend air” pictures, I have to imagine it looks something like that. The boys are often covering their face, never smiling towards the camera or confidently posing. They wear clothes that don’t draw attention to them, refusing to show any part of themselves off. To me, the boys look very alone.
Compare this to the “after girlfriend air” pictures, and you see something incredibly different. There is confidence, happiness, and pride on the faces of the boys. They seem happier with what they are wearing and how they look, and they are almost always smiling. What the TikTok trend dismissively characterizes as “girlfriend air” is really girlfriend love, girlfriend intimacy, and girlfriend connection. These boys, like so many young men under emotionally restrictive gender norms and a near-apocalyptic era of technology and disease, are lonely and lack self-confidence. So, when they get into happy and loving relationships, they find refuge from this problem. They seem happy in their skin, glowing in their photos.
Perhaps this is annoyingly intuitive: Young men are sad, and when they enter loving relationships, they become happy, confident, and well-dressed. However, I want to extend this investigation to “boyfriend air,” and how this trend applies to the young women in these relationships.
The social backdrop for women is different. Women typically have more, stronger, and closer friendships that give them intimacy and support. However, an ever-oppressive patriarchy acts on young women with unbearable intensity. Young women grow up under the constant pressure to look dazzling. Female celebrities and politicians are perpetually scrutinized for their appearance, and many of us came of age reading headlines and hearing conversations about the size, beauty, sexuality, and style of every woman we can think of. This was exponentially exacerbated by social media, where images of skinny bodies and smooth faces were crammed into every corner of the internet we occupied. So, when I see the “before boyfriend air” images of young women, dolled up and posing, it’s not necessarily a reflection of confidence, but rather a very well-honed image of perfection—one that could very well have come at the cost of immense suffering for the girl in the picture. Posing for a picture or smiling isn’t always a clear indicator of happiness or confidence, but maybe the sign of a painful compliance with a patriarchal system that uses beauty as a currency.
I will take this chance to acknowledge that feminist scholars and academics have spent decades in fierce debate about whether dressing up is an act of oppression or empowerment, and I certainly don’t have an answer (especially given the incredibly well-dressed student body at Wesleyan). There are tons of people who find makeup and beautiful outfits empowering and expressive. But I think it’s worth honestly reflecting on what these trends seem to reveal about a larger and more collective yearning.
Through the trend, it’s evident that for young boys, in the midst of loneliness, finding love means finding confidence. But for the young women in these happy relationships, perhaps love means something else. Perhaps it means freedom from the perpetual pressure to be seen. Maybe in these matted hairdos and puffy faces, girls are expressing the safety and comfort that comes from getting a break from the loud and demanding world outside, and finding solace in a significant other’s appreciation for their personality or silliness. The assurance and happiness that it takes for a young woman to laugh at—and share a post of—an unflattering image can’t be undersold. To post a picture of yourself looking bad and be happy about it is evidence that these women are able to appreciate the less beautiful parts of themselves in the comfort of a loving relationship, which is something different, but equally as crucial as a young man’s newfound appreciation for his beauty.
The undercurrents of this silly trend can remind us what love looks like. For some, it might be the confidence and support to get that haircut, strike a pose, and smile wide. For others, it might be the peace to finally stop putting in effort into their appearance and curl up on the couch for a good, unattractive nap. It just depends on what air you’re breathing!
Julia Schroers can be reached at jschroers@wesleyan.edu.