There’s a strange comfort in a shadowy photo of two lattes; in the cropped frame of a dinner table, two plates just out of view, a hand half-seen. It’s a love story told in fragments, designed to say something without saying too much.
That’s the thrill of the soft launch: the delicate, deliberate art of suggesting intimacy without surrendering to it.
When British Vogue writer Chanté Joseph asked, “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?,” she was really asking something else: What happens to our sense of self when love becomes public property? Joseph describes the awkwardness of modern coupling and how being visibly attached to someone else can feel like losing a piece of oneself. While her framing centers heterosexual women, her point gestures toward a broader anxiety shared across identities — that love, when performed publicly, can make anyone feel reduced to a role.
“Being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore,” Joseph writes. “It is no longer considered an achievement.”
This statement captures a generational shift, though it also exposes how ideas of gender and relationships have long been filtered through a heteronormative lens. For many, this script feels limiting — not every partnership looks like “his” and “hers.” What was once a mark of social success now risks diluting one’s personal brand and hard-won autonomy.
That tension sits at the heart of modern love, especially for people my age. We were raised on the gospel of self-expression and individuality. We learned to craft personal aesthetics before we even learned to drive. Our social media pages aren’t scrapbooks but self-portraits, curated with the precision of mood boards. Each post is both proof of life and an act of authorship. To “hard launch” a boyfriend is to let someone else’s presence bleed into that portrait, to risk being seen not as a person, but as part of a pair.
So we soft launch instead.
The soft launch is a compromise between intimacy and independence, a gesture that alludes to maturity and self-control. It’s a visual dialect for a generation fluent in nuance — one that understands the power of implication, the intimacy of ambiguity. It is the careful framing of love in an age of digital permanence, where every image, tag and story becomes part of one’s digital footprint. In a world where screenshots never disappear and posts can be resurrected long after the moment has passed, the soft launch is both an armor and an expression.
On a college campus, this balancing act becomes almost theatrical. Relationships unfold in front of audiences: roommates, followers, mutual friends. Each post, story and tagged wrist is a tiny performance of connection. We share enough to signal closeness, but not enough to be consumed by it.
We want love, but we also want control — the ability to direct our own narrative even within someone else’s story. Our feeds become stages where intimacy is carefully framed, never improvised.
And maybe that’s why soft launching feels like art.
Like a painter working with chiaroscuro — the interplay of light and shadow — the soft launcher creates meaning through what’s left unseen: the cropped hand, the reflection in glass, the caption that reveals nothing but still feels intimate. The art lies in restraint, in knowing that what’s withheld can be more powerful than what’s revealed.
But behind that restraint is a quieter struggle: the fear of disappearing into someone else’s story. Joseph writes about how women are taught to see relationships as part of their identity — to become “someone’s person.” It’s sweet in theory, but it also means your autonomy starts to blur at the edges. That idea reflects a wider cultural habit of framing love through possession — often in heteronormative terms — where being claimed by someone is treated as the ultimate form of intimacy. To be “someone’s person” implies belonging, but it also implies loss.
The soft launch becomes our way of refusing that disappearance. It’s a declaration that we can love without losing form, without erasing the outlines of oneself. That we can be connected and still be singular.
And yet, in protecting oneself, one risks flattening love into a performance. The soft launch lets one control the narrative, but it also keeps one safely distant from the raw, messy parts of affection that can’t be edited into aesthetic coherence. Love becomes an extension of one’s brand, elegant, mysterious and controlled. It’s a kind of reality TV for the digital age: unscripted in theory but carefully edited in practice, designed to appear spontaneous while maintaining total control. We master the performance, but forget to let ourselves feel unscripted in the process.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re scared of what love might reveal about us when it’s unfiltered, when it’s loud, chaotic and real. The moments that feel the most exposing aren’t grand gestures, but the small, raw ones: the way our voices rise in frustration over something trivial, only to collapse into awkward laughter moments later; the silent worry that we’re asking too much or giving too little; the nights spent arguing over boundaries and the mornings spent making breakfast together like nothing happened. Maybe that’s the embarrassment Joseph writes about: It’s not about having a partner, but being vulnerable enough to be seen as someone who cares deeply, someone willing to fight, forgive and love fiercely, even when it means showing the parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden from view.
Still, I don’t think the soft launch is cynical. I think it’s tender. It’s the product of a generation learning to protect its sense of self in an era that demands constant exposure. But the protection comes at a cost. Living under digital surveillance — where everything shared can be screenshotted, saved or resurfaced — makes intimacy feel riskier than ever. The soft launch becomes a shield, a way to preserve privacy without rejecting connection. It’s our version of self-portraiture in the age of public intimacy, a method for negotiating how much of oneself is public and how much remains private. It’s how we remind ourselves that love doesn’t have to mean disappearance.
And yet, I wonder about the ways we perform love for the outside world — the curated glimpses we show, the soft launches that announce relationships without really revealing them. Are these inherently fake, or are they a necessary form of self-protection? We choose what to reveal, what to keep private, what to frame as joyous and what to hide as mundane or messy. In doing so, love becomes both real and performative — a delicate balance between being seen and guarding ourselves. Soft launches might feel like masks at times, but perhaps they are also practice, a way to ease someone into the full chaos of our hearts, a slow invitation to witness the unfiltered moments we’re still learning to hold.
The hard launch — the full reveal — might seem like its opposite, but, really, both are about control. One hides through aesthetics, the other declares through confidence. Both are attempts to define love in our own terms. The hard launch is bolder, riskier and a more willing to be fully public; the soft launch is quieter, careful and deliberate. Together, they map the spectrum of how one can negotiate vulnerability in the digital age. Because love, like art, is about balance — about knowing how to reveal and withhold, how to step back and lean in, how to arrange the messy, intimate moments so they can be seen without being fully exposed.
And maybe that’s the real art of the soft launch — not the hiding, but the careful placement. The ability to love someone while still leaving space for oneself in the portrait, like stepping back far enough that both figures now fit in the frame. Holding space for yourself in the light and shadow of the image so both people can exist in color and depth without either fading into the background.
Love was never meant to be curated; it was meant to be created with the intention, care and courage to remain your own person even in the company of another.
Daily Arts Contributor Ashanti Mirelez can be reached at amirelez@umich.edu.
