Should we hype our partners? Elle magazine’s celebration of the “hype boyfriend” has me wondering. These cheerleaders for their other halves are a wholesome flipside to “wife guys” (performatively uxorious men showing off their fidelity and general greatness). Travis Kelce is one, for his proud support for Taylor Swift; so is the actor Barry Keoghan, for the pop star and actor Sabrina Carpenter. Tom Holland, “the original hype boyfriend”, is singled out for several years’ worth of celebrating Zendaya’s ascent to global superstardom, accompanying her to events and posting a picture of her Met Gala outfit “captioned with love-heart-eye emojis”, says Elle. “A masterclass in hype from afar.”
I agree there is something “unashamedly joyful” about men not merely at ease with, but delighted by, their partners’ accomplishments. Having read the poet Maggie Smith on how her husband’s discomfort with her success contributed to their marriage ending, hype boyfriends are a heartening corrective.
The American writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton recently considered the hype co-parent, too, explaining how she realised her husband “has made it a habit to build me up in my children’s esteem”. Jezer-Morton felt ambivalent at first about “playing into a vaguely patriarchal form of mother-worship”, but realised it works: her kids started to treat her more considerately. Reciprocating for her male co-parent felt odd initially – “a loaded act in this era where domestic equality is contested on a granular daily basis” – but she wrote: “I wish I’d done it sooner.”
Bigging up the person you bicker with about bins doesn’t come naturally to many of us, I think. We are proud of our partners, but it’s not the British way to gush about them to others and even less to their faces; it feels over the top – a bit fake, even. Do we need to get over that? Because if I have learned one thing in all my years of getting relationships horribly wrong, it’s that people can’t read your mind. Sometimes, it’s transformative to say the stuff that feels bleeding obvious. I am planning to introduce a touch of spousal hype into my life (but, sorry, no love-heart-eye emoji for his orange cagoule).
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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