51 pages • 1 hour read
Freida McFaddenThe Boyfriend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Navigating Misogyny and Safety Risks in the Dating World
Throughout The Boyfriend, Freida McFadden depicts the dating world as a dangerous place for heterosexual women. Although the novel’s killer is ultimately revealed to be a woman, nearly all of the men in the novel are a threat to the women who date them. The novel explores the idea that dating in an online landscape creates a unique set of risks for women who date men, often leaving them vulnerable to violence and misogyny. McFadden begins the novel’s opening chapter with a date between Sydney and Kevin, a man she met on a dating app who attempts to sexually assault her by the end of the date. McFadden opens the scene by emphasizing the stark differences between Kevin’s profile pictures and his appearance in person, underscoring the opportunity for deceit in online dating. Kevin embodies a misogynistic worldview in which men feel entitled to women’s bodies, telling Sydney that she’s “never going to land a husband if [she] won’t even kiss a guy on a date” (14). Even after Sydney explicitly threatens to report him to police, Kevin continues to stalk her, claiming that “it’s not right that [he] only get to see [her] through a window” (263). Kevin’s use of social media, dating apps, and professional connections to contact Sydney reflects his misogynistic belief that he is entitled to her time, body, and attention.
The character of Randy, the superintendent in Sydney’s building and Gretchen’s boyfriend, also offers an example of the violence and misogyny women are exposed to in the dating world. Although an ex-girlfriend “accused him of stalking her” and a different ex-girlfriend filed an “assault charge” (248), Randy is not removed from the dating app Cynch. Gretchen later reveals that Randy used his power as a superintendent to “go into female tenants’ apartments while they were at work and go through their underwear drawers and rub his face all over their panties” (340). Like Kevin, Randy acts as a manifestation of the violent impulses and misogyny women encounter while dating men.
McFadden uses Tom’s internal thoughts as a point-of-view character to explore the psyche of a man fascinated by violence—particularly sexualized violence. Tom actively fascinates about murdering his high school girlfriend Daisy. Although Tom has loved Daisy since they were children, he admits that “three or four times a week [he has] a dream in which [he is] stabbing or strangling [his] beautiful girlfriend” (104). Tom’s specific use of the words “beautiful girlfriend” to describe Daisy suggest that this violence is sexualized. Tom’s admission that he wants “to kiss her, but [he] also want[s] to do a lot of other things to her, bad things” further links his desire to hurt Daisy with sexual desire (309). Ultimately, Tom is forced to admit to himself that being with Daisy “could very well put her life in danger” (144). Tom’s relationship with Daisy—in which his love for her manifests as a desire to harm her—acts as a dramatized representation of the fetishization of violence against women.
Cycles of Violence and Neglect in Families
The novel’s depiction of cycles of violence and neglect in families suggests that exposure to violence in childhood and lack of parental care have adverse effects that last into adulthood. McFadden’s depictions of these cycles of abuse indicate the ingrained effects of violence on children and teens. Tom’s father is a violent alcoholic, and the novel suggests that the violence Tom is exposed to at home enables his own violent tendencies. Tom is used to waking up “in the middle of the night to sounds of [his] parents screaming at each other and dishes shattering as they hit the wall” (28). He admits that although his father “beat [him] with his belt buckle a handful of times […] [his] mother was always the one who took the brunt of his abuse” (159). These passages suggest that Tom was raised implicitly linking romantic relationships with violence. Although Tom insists that he and his father are “nothing alike” (52), he fantasizes about harming his romantic partner. The fact that Tom describes watching his father die as “one of the best moments of [his] life” exemplifies his own complicated relationship to violence—something he finds both repulsive and exhilarating (197).
Tom spends the majority of the novel attempting to suppress his violent tendencies, but ultimately finds freedom in embracing them. the novel’s final pages, Gretchen/Daisy tells Tom wants “to have a family” with him, offering an ominous warning that the cycle of violence in the Brewer family will continue (351). In pairing the reveal of Gretchen/Daisy as a serial murderer with her desire to have children with Tom, McFadden suggests an ongoing cycle of violence, perpetuated by Gretchen and Tom’s mutual attraction to and hunger for it. Tom repeats the words “a family” in amazement, signaling an embrace of the impulses he’s long tried to suppress.
The final scene of the novel in which Sydney receives a lock of hair in the mail from Tom that indicates his murder of Kevin cements the notion that Tom has chosen to embrace his violent tendencies. However, his choice of Kevin as a victim echoes his murder of his father—an act of violence committed to protect his mother and his girlfriend from abuse. In murdering Kevin, Tom indulges his violent impulses while protecting Sydney from Kevin, suggesting a kind of moral logic to his violence. The fact that Sydney declines to tell Jake about it signals an acceptance of this logic. In contrast, McFadden frames Gretchen/Daisy’s murders as self-serving, motivated by love and obsession—each murder committed either to keep Tom from romantic involvement with anyone but her or to protect Tom from the consequences of his own violent actions. Although McFadden nuances her exploration of violence in the novel’s conclusion by contrasting Tom’s murders with Gretchen/Daisy’s, the fact that they ride off into the proverbial sunset together suggests that cycles of violence perpetuate regardless of motive or moral logic.
The Pressure of Social Expectations
Throughout the novel, Sydney and her single female friends struggle to deal with the pressures of social expectations for young women regarding romantic relationships and families. The novel suggests that the intense pressure that Sydney and Bonnie feel to date, marry, and have children causes them to act against their best interests. From the beginning of the story, Sydney makes her goal of marriage and family explicit, claiming that “Bonnie is picky, but I’m not” (39). She also jokes that Bonnie has “dated fifty percent of all the single men in New York City,” and that she believes “online dating is a numbers game” (32). The novel explicitly connects the women’s posture of intensity toward dating to their desire to get married: Sydney explains that Bonnie “didn’t enjoy going on dates every single night” but did it because “she was searching for love” (117). McFadden suggests that, despite their varied approaches to the same goal, the social pressure that Sydney and Bonnie feel perpetuates a sense of both urgency and scarcity in a dating landscape already rife with misogyny and danger.
McFadden uses the trope of the ticking biological clock to add further urgency to Sydney’s search for a partner, closely tying her search for love to the pressure she feels to have a baby. The novel is punctuated by phone calls from Sydney’s mother with news about increasingly older mothers. She first calls about a friend’s daughter who is “thirty-eight and […] still able to have children” (41), then escalates to a distant relative who “just had twins at forty-two years old” (215). Although Sydney is only 34, the specificity of these ages acts as a reminder of the social pressure women face to have children while they are young. In the novel’s final act, Sydney’s mother calls again to tell her the biblical story of Sarah, who “gave birth to Isaac when she was ninety years old” (284). The absurdity of this final example reflects the intense pressure being placed on Sydney to start a family of her own at any cost. In addition to her mother, Sydney also feels pressure to start a family from social media, as “every single one of [her] friends’ posts now seems to consist of babies upon babies” (62). The pressure Sydney feels to have a baby before she runs out of time incentivizes her to overlook warning signs in her romantic partners, heightening the dramatic tension of the plot.
Even in moments when Sydney recognizes and names signs of danger or misogyny in the novel’s male characters, she occasionally undermines that awareness in ways that reify traditional, gendered expectations about marriage and children. For example, Sydney has serious reservations about Randy, her building’s superintendent and Gretchen’s boyfriend—at one point in the story, she feels certain he’s a serial killer—yet she still asserts that marrying Randy would be a “happy ending” for Gretchen. Similarly, she is willing to ignore a “number of red flags” (242) in Tom’s behavior because she has convinced herself that “this could be something” and that Tom “could be the One” (276). McFadden frames Sydney’s desire to rationalize warning signs, problematic behavior, and, occasionally, overt violence in her friends’ and her own relationships with men as a reflection the pressures of social expectations for young women in the world of the novel.
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