Whether it’s your long-term ex from high school, an old situationship, or the same old Hinge talking stages, there is a cultural tendency for people to use the breaks from school (whether one goes home or not) as an opportunity to reach out to old romantic partners. This is a noted and understood psychological phenomenon, one I have also noticed circulating within McGill’s student community. Some of you may know where the break is heading before you even leave Montreal.

Despite my teasingly cautionary tone, this article is in no way meant to dissuade or pass judgment on using breaks to get back in contact with old partners. Rather, it is meant to serve as a social observation. I am a firm advocate for second chances and trusting your intuition. However, as a writer and a student, I feel forced to confront the question of why exactly we do this. There is no one cause for the upward trend of rekindling relationships over breaks, which is rather borne from a combination of factors: equal parts timing, boredom, nostalgia, and a loss of identity.

For some, being at school and tasting independence has allowed them to discover a new sense of self distinct from family, childhood friends, and the environment in which they were raised. Subsequently, returning home after having been away for an extended period of time can feel like reverting to this old identity, which is in turn connected to the people of their pasts. Supporting my personal irritations, I noted a large amount of online discourse describing the feeling of reverting to your 16-year-old self the moment you step through your front door. This phenomenon explains the revisiting of a failed relationship as well — making decisions the younger, more immature version of you would, even if your current self would not. You may never catch yourself thinking about a past partner, but suddenly, when found in an environment you once shared, your mindset is transported back to your common past. Moreover, if you are in close physical proximity to this person once more, rekindling a dead spark becomes much more plausible. People often use the very foolproof guise of seeking closure in person over these breaks to test the waters once more.

Boredom and nostalgia also play a crucial role in facilitating this dynamic. Winter break is a time when life slows down — when we have time to think, reflect, and feel. At the same time, we enter an extremely nostalgic environment. The emotionally dangerous combination of boredom and sentimentality push you towards that risky text, no matter whether you’re the one receiving or sending it.

However, routines return eventually, and normal life resumes. Are these rekindled flames able to withstand that, or will they fade out? Are these circumstantial and fleeting opportunities the second chance every relationship deserves or simply false potential? The evidence, the pattern, the trend, leads one to believe that it’s not about the partner but about the conditions. I may not be great with statistics, but based on the experiences of my me and my friends, there is no way so many people have amazing past romantic interests that they’re somehow destined to reunite with.

That’s not to say that the choices one makes to communicate with their old partners over break are dissociative choices you have no control over or responsibility for. However, that’s also not to say these choices are not an accurate reflection of what people truly want. We must all be held accountable for our own actions. Simply because it is a social trend with clear causes does not mean that we lack agency, and the fact that this is a shared experience does not mean it’s necessarily a wrong (or right) choice. It is merely worth taking note of the seasonal patterns that affect so many of us, so that we can all think critically about our personal decisions. This would enable us to closely examine our actions and the influence of emotion on them with curiosity and openness rather than judgment, and give us room for personal growth and self-awareness.

If you sought out this article for guidance or moral direction regarding your post-winter break romantic predicament, I apologize for my more critical approach. If I had to conclude this article with some concrete wisdom, I would advise you not to listen to made-up TikTok dating rules (that is an article for another day) and to trust your gut. That being said, if your friends are saying it’s a terrible idea, then maybe, just maybe — they might have a good point.

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You didn’t have to spend the summer in Montreal to notice this latest fad. The average Instagram user or TikTok watcher has most likely become aware of the term after it blew up this past summer. However, we McGillians are lucky enough to go to school in Montreal. The “performative male” goes beyond the memes for us, as our city is full of them. We are cursed with living among the legends, getting to see them (or match with them on Hinge) up close and personally.

For those of you who have never seen one in the wild, or those of you offline enough this past summer to have missed the term altogether (props to you), a “performative male” is a newly defined male archetype, rooted specifically in their aesthetic signaling. This aesthetic consists of a moustache, a mullet, wearing workwear, drinking matcha, using exclusively string headphones (through which they listen to “Bags” by Clairo on repeat), always having a carabiner and a tote bag on hand, and having a pierced nose and painted nails. Despite its deep roots in aesthetics and taste, this surface level phenomenon has a deeper necessary quality.

Performative men pride themselves on being feminists and caring about women. From empathizing with and idolizing Clairo, indie pop singer known for her confessional lyrics, to an annotated copy of Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks sitting on their side table, this is a crucial and key part of their identity. Winner of Montreal’s performative male contest, Shahzaib Sultan, even went on to say in his online acceptance speech: “Keep performing as long as you respect women, because this is all it’s about.”

Despite the term’s extreme popularity this summer and the great increase in performative men I’ve noticed walking around Montreal, the concept of the “performative male” is far from new or revolutionary. Judith Butler, one of the most prominent feminist philosophers, coined the term “Gender Performativity” in their renowned book, Gender Trouble (1990), and they famously expand upon this idea in their essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988). The premise of this theory is that one’s gender and associated gendered traits are in no way natural, but come from the “stylized repetition of acts” that we come to believe are innate. What she argues is that we are all actors who have forgotten we are on stage, who have performed in this play so many times that we believe it is our reality. Though Butler was imperative to the development of this foundational theory, they were not the first person to view gender this way. Simone de Beauvoir, renowned French existentialist philosopher and feminist thinker, famously wrote in her book The Second Sex (1949), “One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.”

A key part of gender performativity is that this performance has been happening since before we as individuals were born and will continue even alter we are gone. Butler states in Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: “But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.” We never have and never will encounter a body or person that exists before society gives it a meaning. However, these gendered characters we perform, because they are a social construct, are susceptible to change, evolution and revolution. The prime example of this is the “performative male,” our latest subversive gender performance.

If gender is a performance, then the “performative male” is only the newest character in our play. Their “stylized repetition of acts” consists of ordering matcha, reading Sally Rooney in a public park, and manipulating their current situationship. Repeat. Their “stylization of the body” includes (but is not limited to) growing a moustache, putting on rings, and adorning their jorts. Repeat.

The “performative male”’s subversion of gender norms forms an essential part of their identity. For the first time, an allowance for the deviation from heteronormativity to represent the modern masculine. However, we must ask ourselves, how subversive is the “performative male” from the stereotypical masculine male persona we’ve known all these years?

To answer that question, I present you with another.

Why do we all pursue our performance of gender so devoutly? This may seem like an obvious question, but in the journalistic pursuit to analyze the “performative male” and his significance to our society, it is a crucial one. There are many philosophical, anthropological, and scientific reasons to justify why we feel a need to perform our gender, one of which being the pursuit of sex.

At the core of the “performative male” is the quest for romantic attention. Our society has curated an entire aesthetic based on this. The “performative male” performs feminist fluency and emotional intelligence as a tactic in love. Their greatest performance of all is that they care about women, and that is not a gender or a personality trait — it’s the commodification and appropriation of feminism. Most men appearing to read feminist literature in a café do so not in the name of understanding women and their struggles, but in that of impressing them. This is why the “performative male” is so sinister.

However, the fact that performative men pretend to care about women is not revolutionary — it’s in the name! What is so interesting is why we as a society are so obsessed with this latest performance. For the first time, men are not trying to play the role of the masculine hero, but are attempting to emulate what they think women want. Historically, men have held the power in deciding their partner, and women have had to bend to these powers. However, the “performative male” phenomenon shows that women are no longer at the whims of men’s sexual preferences. Men are dipping their toes into “feminist” traits for the first time not in pursuit of identity or liberation from toxic masculinity, but for romantic and sexual leverage. Despite their newfound social popularity and deviation from gender norms, this “new male” is not evolving masculinity. It is simply repackaging it with the hope of being more likely to get some play.

Nonetheless, for once, this performance is not a “phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity” as Judith Butler once described. Modern men are dressing more diversely, exercising emotional intelligence, and entering the feminist sphere. Yes, it might just be a performance, and this is inadequate. That being said, they are consciously no longer emulating toxic masculine ideals. Culturally and socially, despite the jokes, this is a new, extremely important gendered act we have never seen before.

Simone de Beauvoir would not have imagined her books gallivanting through city streets in the tote bags of the twenty-something-year old men of 2025, and I’m not quite sure how it would make her feel. Would the disingenuity of it all dishearten her? Or would she be in awe at the mainstream way in which men are deviating from toxic masculinity? We’ll never know. What I do know is she would be turning in her grave if she knew we were falling for their vinyl collections and Hinge prompts about astrological compatibility – so this semester, keep your wits about you.

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