The ‘boy sober’ movement and why women are sick of dating
It was a visit to her grandmother at the end of last year that made Hope Woodard, 26, from New York, realise that it was time to quit dating. During the visit, Hope’s grandma, who has dementia, lent over to her and showed her the messages she’d been sending to her late husband.
At the time, Hope was obsessing about a guy from Hinge who she’d gone on a few dates with. “I was just on standby all the time and checking my phone like a crazy person,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “And I was just so aware of the fact that he couldn’t have cared less if I lived or died.”
Seeing her grandmother sending texts into the ether was a sharp reminder of her own love life. “I come from a long line of women who have never been able to live without men,” says Hope. “It just made me think: this is going to be me. I’m getting ghosted by a guy, and my grandma’s getting ghosted by her literal dead husband. I was like, we have to stop the cycle.”
Shortly after the visit, Hope deleted all her dating apps, and made a rule with herself: no more dates for a year. Then, armed with a catchy new term coined by her sister, Hope started documenting her ‘boy sober’ journey to her half a million TikTok followers. The caption for the first video, which she shared in November, read: “Should we start a CULT.” In a later video, Hope laid out the rules of going boy sober, among them “no dating apps”, “no dates, no exes”, “no situationships”, and “no hugs and kisses – etcetera”.
The term quickly took off, and soon enough others were boarding the boy sober train. Among them is Carly Galluzo, aged 28 and also from New York, who went boy sober earlier this year, citing similar behaviours to Hope as the reason for her decision. The pattern is a familiar one: she’d fall for someone quickly, find herself totally consumed with thinking about them, and then become bitterly disappointed when they didn’t live up to her expectations.
The last time this happened was in January, when Carly met a guy off an app and fell for him in a short space of time. “I was just having these obsessive thoughts; I wasn’t really sleeping. I was just thinking, ‘What are our lives going to look like? What is our wedding going to look like?’” says Carly. “I’d only been speaking to him for one week.”
When it didn’t work out, she was once again left feeling “angry and upset”. “I’ve been single, but whenever I’ve been single, I’ve been searching,” Carly continues. “It made me think that maybe I should just stop this whole thing, press the reset button, and really reflect on how I’ve been dating my whole life.” In January, Carly deleted her dating apps and hasn’t been on a date since. Even when she’s had people reach out to ask her on a date – some who she could picture herself with romantically – she’ll tell them that she “isn’t dating at the moment”. Unlike Hope, Carly hasn’t set an end date for her boy sobriety.
While Carly and Hope’s decision to cut out all romantic encounters may sound drastic, wanting to take a step back from dating is a feeling many will be familiar with. Dating app fatigue is steadily on the rise, as people tire of the endless swiping and expensive dates that go nowhere. “If you’re feeling burned out by dating, it might be time to have a little bit of a break. Focus on what you love doing, and on the people in your life who matter,” says Natasha Silverman, a relationship counsellor with Relate. “When you’re feeling more confident and secure, it tends to be that you come to dating from a really different place. You know who you are, and what you’re willing to tolerate.”
Silverman adds that people often use dating and sex “compulsively, or to numb negative feelings or low self-esteem.” These tendencies, she says, “could be a sign that it’s time to focus on you, and how you can look after yourself”.
The desire to quit dating – even if it’s just temporarily – also reflects changing attitudes to love and relationships. Marriage and the concept of a soulmate are increasingly considered outdated, while self-development and building stronger friendships are taking on greater importance. According to research by Bumble, almost half (47%) of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK say that platonic friendships are more important to them than romantic ones.
Both Hope and Carly say that forgoing romantic relationships has led them to form deeper platonic friendships, which has helped them to feel less worried about meeting certain milestones, like marriage. “I don’t feel lonely, whereas I did in relationships,” says Carly. “I’m not scared of being alone anymore. I know that won’t happen, because I’ve established so many good friendships.”
While ditching dating can help people to gain more perspective about what their priorities are, re-entering the dating world post-boy sobriety isn’t always easy. Stephanie Fabry, age 27 from Los Angeles, quit dating when she was 24 after a series of sexual encounters that made her self-worth “crumble”. “I really wanted to start attracting men who were actually going to treat me right and with respect,” she says. After struggling initially – she had sex with someone not long after resolving to stop hooking up with people – Stephanie went completely “cold turkey”, giving up all romantic interactions for a year.
When Stephanie did start dating again, it wasn’t how she imagined it would be. “I was still attracting the same kind of guy – people who wanted casual sex over getting to know me – and I was finding it really frustrating,” she reflects. “My standards were now super high, so I started to think, I’m okay being single forever.” Although she’s now in a secure relationship, it took Stephanie a while to open up to people again, and to lose the “shield” she had put up after not dating for so long.
Stephanie now wishes she’d taken a less puritanical approach. “I'm really grateful for the year that I took off dating, but I didn’t have to become so hyper-independent,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “I could still have made guy friends and started to form connections in a way that’s healthy. If I could go back and do it differently, I would focus more on what I wanted to feel in my next relationship.”
Silverman stresses that abandoning dating entirely isn’t necessarily going to solve the negative emotions or behaviours dating might give rise to. “You don’t know what’s going to come up until you’re with someone else,” she says. “We only learn who we are when we’re with others.” Besides, the value of flirting shouldn’t be overlooked. “It’s good for our emotional wellbeing and our sexual self; to cut that out altogether might potentially get you out of practice.”
Hope is still grappling with what it means to be truly boy sober. When we speak, she admits to having fallen off the wagon and slept with someone a week ago – or what she terms a “boy lapse”. “Initially when it happened, I felt like such a hypocrite. I was being so hard on myself,” she says. “But then I started thinking about what the point of boy sobriety really is, which is to try to rewire my brain and my old habits.”
She’s now pushing for a more expansive view of what it means to be boy sober to her followers, stressing that it does not have to equal celibate. “One thing that I don’t want this word to reinforce is making any woman feel like she can’t or shouldn’t have sex if she wants to,” she says. “I feel like we’re all still learning how to have sex in healthier ways, and I want women to feel empowered when they’re dating and having sex.”
For Hope, total independence from sex and relationships “isn’t the goal”. Understanding why she feels the way she does in romantic situations, and how it relates to things like past traumas, is what she’s looking to figure out now. “Maybe that’s what the word means,” she concludes. “Taking a very sober look at your dating life.”
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