Give your feed five minutes and you will find her. The girlfriend filming her man carrying grocery bags like it is a scene from a movie. The one crying – actual tears – because he warmed up her car before she got in. Somewhere in the comments, someone’s typed “this is what princess treatment looks like” under a video of a man doing the wildest thing of all: Picking up the phone when she calls.
Somewhere in the last few years, “princess treatment” stopped meaning grand gestures and started meaning things men were always supposed to do anyway. Opening a door, remembering her coffee order, not leaving her on read for three days. These are not bonus points but they are the entry fee.
And yet the internet has turned them into a whole aesthetic!
Fairy Tale To Feed, Real Quick!
The term “princess treatment” used to conjure something specific – being spoiled, adored, treated like royalty in ways that felt a little over the top. Think surprise trips, handwritten notes, someone planning your entire birthday down to the flowers. However, now, it has been stretched to cover almost anything a man does that is not outright rude. He held the umbrella. He paid for dinner. He said “text me when you’re home.” Princess treatment, apparently!
The shift did not happen by accident. Relationship content performs well when it is simple, visual, and easy to react to. “He surprised me with a 3-day trip to Italy” is a nice story, but it is also expensive and not exactly relatable. “He carried my bag” is something almost every viewer has either experienced or wished for. It is cheap to film, easy to caption and guaranteed to get comments on. Platforms did not only invent the term, but they also figured out which version of it spreads fastest – and sadly, it is the version with the lowest bar.
Here is the part that should bother us more than it does: When basic respect gets rebranded as a bonus, we start expecting less.
A man remembering you don’t eat mushrooms is not really main character energy. It is called listening. A man not checking your phone is not a green flag worth throwing a parade for. It is called trust, and it should be the baseline! The real danger is not that these videos exist. But it is that they train an entire generation of women watching them to feel grateful for things that were never supposed to be optional. Somewhere in the comment section, there is always a woman writing “I wish my partner did this.”
What Eight Years Taught Me
I got married last year to the same man I started dating in my second year of college. Eight years together before we said yes to forever. So I have watched this “princess treatment” conversation unfold with a strange kind of distance, because most of what gets filmed as a grand gesture is just… Tuesday, for us.
He still gets up first on weekends because I hate mornings. That is not a moment I would post. It is just what happens when two people build a life together and pay attention.
But here is what eight years also taught me – the real stuff, the stuff that actually holds a marriage together, rarely looks good on camera. It is him sitting through my bad moods without taking them personally. It is both of us splitting bills without keeping score. It is fighting about something stupid and still choosing to fix it instead of walking out. None of that trends. None of that fits in fifteen seconds with a trending audio underneath it.
What I have realized watching these videos is that the women filming “princess treatment” content are not wrong to want to be treated well. They are just aiming too low and calling it a win. I would rather my marriage be built on the boring, unfilmable stuff – the showing up, the consistency, the being chosen on the hard days too – than on umbrella-holding moments that make for a good fifteen seconds online.
Raising The Bar, Not Lowering The Standard
The good news is the conversation is already shifting. More women online are starting to push back, asking a pretty fair question: If this is princess treatment, what do we even call the actual big stuff? What do we call the people who show up during a health scare, who split responsibilities without a fight, who choose you again on the days it is hard to be chosen?
Maybe we need new language. Let the small, decent things be called what they are – decency, basic effort, the minimum. And save “princess treatment” for what it actually used to mean: Being genuinely spoiled, adored, and prioritized in ways that go beyond what any partner owes you by default.
Also Read: Why Younger Men Are Dating Older Women And What They Find In These Relationships
Because if the bar is on the floor, everyone can step over it and call themselves a king. Women don’t need less romance content. They need better labels – and maybe, a little more nerve to expect more.