I walk around and I see these boyfriends at dinner with their girlfriends in little triple and quadruple dates. The women are always having a blast and controling the conversation while the men sit politely and sip their beer, looking forward to the food, to paying the bill, to finally getting home. The weird part of it is that the boyfriends will look identical in style and demographic to another group of single guys howling laughing at a table nearby. You get the sense that even if they're all strangers, unfamilair +1s of the girlfriends, they'd be having a good time if you just siloed them away, because then they'd be able to speak freely and be relieved of the sense that they are preforming acceptable manhood in the interest of their gfs status in the friend group. When you're out with other couples, as a guy, there's often a silent aknowledgement between you and the other husbands or boyfriends that you are both presenting completely hollow versions of yourself to each other, and there's a quiet fondness about this, a sense that in another life you might be doing key bumps together in a tijuana strip club, but in this life you're playing cards against humanity and drinking rosé
When I try to conceptualise what eternal hellish torment may look like, it’s something like being one of these guys.