How is the ideal heterosexual girlfriend supposed to behave? This played on my mind after I watched Companion, a film about a loutish millennial man named Josh with a robot girlfriend named Iris. Iris was designed to be the perfect girlfriend, and so she regards Josh with total devotion and admiration, and prioritises their relationship above all else. She has a head full of fake memories, such as the one of the day they met, when they were both in the same supermarket and he clumsily upended a display of oranges, sending them rolling across the floor. This caught her attention. She has been programmed to regard this as the best day of her life.
Like so many things you watch and read now, Companion is intended to reflect a familiar trope back at the viewer in an exaggerated but unchallenging fashion. It’s a pantomimed version of a wildly imbalanced heterosexual relationship, a portrayal that will be familiar to anyone who has come across “heteropessimist” discourse recently. Men, in this telling, are broadly akin to useless, unappealing Josh. Women feel deeply disappointed and embarrassed about dating them but are still committed to doing so, like a self-aware version of Iris. Crucially, heteropessimism shows no desire to reform the very real disparities between men and women, but the opposite: it takes as a given that women are sheepishly resigned to heterosexual relationships reflecting the worst of these inequities.
As a millennial woman with a phone, I have felt bombarded by social media content expressing this sentiment for a while, and it seems to be reaching a crescendo. In a recent thoughtful piece for the New York Times, Marie Solis analysed the growing popularity of heteropessimist declarations from relatively young women since 2019, when the term was coined, through to a fresh spike coinciding with Trump’s second election win. “In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps,” she wrote, along with female celebrities declaring vows of celibacy or identifying as “self-partnered” (the state of being happy and fulfilled alone); a rash of divorce memoirs that take a view of marriage as essentially barely altered since the 1970s; and TikTok trends like “boysober”, where women focus on self-improvement and friendships rather than men.
I have found the strident “boysober” and “self-partnered” iterations of this trend cheering. The shrugging passivity of heteropessimism always struck me as mystifying. What do women, in the 2020s, need relationships with men for? Financial stability? We don’t marry people for their salaries any more, but their inheritances, and these are spread across the genders. Sex? Babies? Companionship? These things may be more difficult to attain outside a committed relationship, but how much more so? If men truly are as loutish as Companion’s Josh, then avoiding relationships with them entirely seems prudent.
In the absence of a mass movement of women actually doing this, though, I’m not convinced that heterosexual relationships really are so irredeemably unsatisfying. Online communication is inherently performative. It is not a metric of how people truly feel, but more what they think they will be rewarded for saying. Heteropessimism mirrors other forms of progressive discourse over the past decade, which have placed a high premium on declaring self-awareness about participating in oppressive systems – capitalism, say – and describing their problematic elements without necessarily doing anything about them.
Strip away these progressive furnishings and the underlying sentiment of heteropessimism feels incredibly trad. The idea of women straining to be good girlfriends for men who won’t put their dirty socks in the washing basket is an amazingly conservative view of the kind of relationships we could be having. Companion does not send up these tropes or even play with them. Iris is the film’s hero, and we’re supposed to sympathise with her. She is beautiful, great in bed, always obedient to Josh. But she is an incredibly cloying and annoying construction, no more likable or relatable than Josh. I spent most of the film wishing someone would take her batteries out. In fact, even Josh is often visibly exasperated to the point that he switches her off. I left Companion feeling irked. Perhaps the only thing more annoying than Iris herself was the idea that I should see myself in this hopelessly committed robot. It came as no surprise to me that Companion was written by a man.
Happily, though, there are some small signs that this discourse is shifting. I was pleased to find, for example, that Shon Faye’s recently published memoir Love in Exile gracefully sidesteps this trend. The book feels like the start of the truly progressive mainstream conversation about heterosexuality that we could be having. Faye writes about resisting the temptation to see her partners as the only flawed or emotionally underdeveloped party in past relationships. And she offers an expansive view of heterosexuality as an institution under strain due to major social change.
In a recent interview Faye paraphrased the psychotherapist Esther Perel’s idea that we expect one partner to be many things: a confidant, a sexual partner, a coparent, someone to run finances by. Faye argued that millennial men have not been socialised to provide the emotional reciprocity that women are looking for. “But women are looking for that,” she said. I found myself wondering why this is. If it is true that men are not capable of relating to women in an emotionally sophisticated way, should we be asking why we need them to?
That question of what women, in the 2020s, need men for is not a facetious one. In my experience, the lives of those in my generation often take different shapes to those of our parents and their friends. We don’t invest almost all our time in one romantic relationship. If expecting one person to provide all the things Perel lists hopelessly strains a relationship (and I agree it does) or makes it impossible to find an appropriate person, do we need just one person to do everything? Can a relationship simply be having fun with someone kind, while deep, emotional conversations are had with your friends? Or do we instead want a profound intellectual connection with a boyfriend while our friends are fun? As increasing numbers of us decide we don’t want children, do we need monogamy? Maybe a romantic partner is someone to have great sex with, whom you could never live with.
We have more freedom to determine our own answers to these questions than we ever did. It may be true that the answer, for some women, is to be just like Iris: a good, obedient girlfriend to whichever man she ends up with. But even if we accept this, I would gently submit that the struggles of this particular type of person are overrepresented in the culture right now.
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Rachel Connolly is a writer and author of the novel Lazy City
