A new reality show asks: can women ‘train’ their BFs to be better? Should they?
I was instantly intrigued when I heard about Olivia Attwood’s new ITV2 reality show Bad Boyfriends. The premise sounded simple but fresh: eight unsuspecting ‘bad’ boyfriends are shipped off to a Greek island under the premise of filming a series to find ‘Britain’s manliest man’ (LOL), but before long Love Island alum Attwood shows up to inform them that they’ve actually been roped into a bootcamp-style process designed to mould them into husband material.
It sounded like good, old-fashioned reality TV in the vein of ‘makeover’ shows like The Swan or Snog Marry Avoid, minus the sexism, fatphobia, and general unpleasantness, plus a progressive twist. Most straight women have a litany of harrowing stories under their belts about their firsthand experiences from within the trenches of modern dating, and so a show which sought to reform (and, OK, punish) some terrible men seemed like a particularly zeitgeisty format.
But my hopes soon curdled. In the show’s opening episode, we’re introduced to some of the eponymous so-called bad boyfriends. Some are bad in mundane, recognisable ways. Take Tom T, who is pathologically incapable of washing his own laundry and cooking a single meal for his girlfriend Lana. But others are bad in ways which are more concerning.
Bayley is a serial cheater who, it’s revealed, once went as far as going on holiday with another woman. Ryan — who is quite the flirt — is currently trying for a baby through IVF with his fiancée Sapphia, while routinely cracking unfunny ‘jokes’ about how he could be persuaded to cheat on her one day. Perhaps the worst of all is 43-year-old Eli, boyfriend to 24-year-old Anna and walking red flag. Eli lambasts Anna for speaking candidly about the number of people she’s had sex with and thinks it’s OK to tell her to dress more modestly. Right off the bat, there’s an alarming lack of nuance, with man-children who don’t know how to butter toast treated as equally problematic as what are arguably fully-fledged gaslighters and manipulators.
Attwood, as our host, harbours a reluctance to grill contestants on their more conservative beliefs, which is strange given that the show is tacitly billed as feminist. When Tom T states that he agrees with the statement ‘women should prioritise raising children over their career’, Attwood brazenly replies: “I’m not going to end up in another feminist debate, I ain’t got the energy. Let’s move on.”
During the same challenge, both Eli and Anna agree with the statement ‘women should dress to impress their partner’, while Dublin-based couple Ruben and Liily both say they believe that ‘jealousy is a sign of love’. In each instance, the couples are praised for agreeing with one another instead of being gently probed on why they hold these questionable beliefs.
Of course, Bad Boyfriends is a reality show. And in reality, many people do harbour conservative views — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rise of the tradwife movement which promotes embracing ‘traditional’ gender roles in heterosexual relationships. But is it really helpful to have such harmful views going unchallenged on mainstream television? Is it responsible to give airtime to sexist ideas when misogynistic figures like Andrew Tate are already poisoning the minds of so many young men?
The show’s generally lighthearted tone is ultimately at odds with how disturbing some of the men’s behaviour is. In another episode, Anya — cheater Bayley’s partner — explains that she’s so used to being betrayed and hurt by her boyfriend that she feels “numb” to his behaviour and is unable to muster up the energy to even care about his philandering anymore. This isn’t sun-soaked TV gold — it’s just sad. I don’t want to see Bayley ‘punished’ by being forced to sleep on a dirty mattress (all the men are initially banished to living away from the girls’ palatial villa in ‘Brozone’, AKA a bunch of grubby caravans). I don’t even want him to ‘improve’ for Anya. He doesn’t deserve her — I just want Anya to leave him.
Investing in a person’s supposed potential rather than accepting the reality in front of you is always a slippery slope; you save yourself a lot of heartache if you take people as they are, rather than fixating on how you would like them to be. And I say this in the knowledge that there are a lot of bad boyfriends out there, but it’s worth stressing that it is also possible to find a partner who is kind to you from the get go. These men might seem rare, granted. But they do exist.
I’m incredibly doubtful that these ‘bad boyfriends’ will leave the process genuinely reformed — more attuned to what their girlfriends want perhaps, and conscious of all the ‘right’ things to say and do. But will they truly understand why they need to change their ways, and foster genuine empathy and respect for their partners? I’m sceptical.
And in any case, I’m not sure that regarding shitty men as ‘projects’ is really the healthiest way to approach love and relationships. Attwood explains that she wants to help “fed-up girls wanting to know how to train their boyfriends” — but why are we still so attached to the idea that it’s a woman’s responsibility to ‘train’ their partners? While the show clearly has good intentions, it ends up reinforcing archaic gender roles which put the onus on women to be the managers of domestic and emotional life.
I would have loved to see the women exercise their agency instead, and recognise that leaving is an option too. This is the show’s Achilles’ heel. It’s difficult to root for any of these couples when the men seem so beyond redemption and the women so reluctant to consider dumping them. The possibility that some of these couples just might not be compatible is pretty much never acknowledged, nor is the fact that ending a relationship doesn’t mean you’ve ‘failed’ to reform your partner.
Ironically, in the show’s opening episode, Attwood explains that she used to have her own ‘bad boyfriend’: footballer Bradley Dack, who cheated on her with his ex in the early days of their relationship. Of course, Attwood ultimately went on to marry him in 2023, but she didn’t waste her time trying to ‘fix’ him after the affair. Instead, she walked away from the relationship, let him sit with the consequences of his own actions, and the pair rekindled things after they both had matured independently.
Part of me is hoping that the show’s finale will see the girls spectacularly dump their boyfriends en-masse but unfortunately, I’m doubtful that’ll happen. If only, instead of encouraging the show’s girlfriends to try and ‘fix’ their cheating, lazy, or disrespectful boyfriends, Atwood could have taught the women of Bad Boyfriends to follow her lead, to have enough courage to remove yourself from situations where you’re repeatedly disrespected, to resist viewing yourself as a passive victim and exercise your agency. Now that’s a show I’d like to watch.
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