A man walks into a cafe with wired earphones, a paperback novel tucked under his arm, a carefully grown moustache, curly hair that looks just messy enough, and a matcha latte in hand. Within seconds, someone on Instagram has a label for him: performative.
Gen Z And Their Love For Performance
It is one of Gen Z’s favourite relationship words right now. The accusation is usually that he is not simply existing; he is curating an identity. He wants to look intellectual, artistic, emotionally available, perhaps even like the kind of man who sends thoughtful voice notes and knows obscure indie bands. But the more I think about it, the harder it becomes to believe that this is a uniquely modern phenomenon. If anything, living itself is a performance.
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Let’s roll it back to childhood. A child cries loudly in a supermarket and gets scolded. The next time, the child learns that asking softly, saying ‘please,’ and behaving calmly increases the chances of getting the candy. That is not manipulation in some sinister sense; it is a human being learning that certain behaviours produce certain responses. We adjust ourselves according to the people around us from the very beginning. The same logic follows us into adulthood and, eventually, especially, into dating.
If I want to make a good impression on someone, I will probably choose clothes that I think look attractive. But what I think looks attractive is rarely born in a vacuum. It is influenced by trends, by friends, by celebrities, by social media, and by the endless stream of images that tell us what desirability currently looks like. Today, that image might include matcha, wired earphones, silver rings, tote bags, curly hair, and a moustache that looks suspiciously similar on every third man in a metro city. But that is precisely what trends do: they create a shared visual language.
Were There Performative Men Back In The Day?
In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet was not shaping men’s aesthetics in the same way, but movies were. When Amitabh Bachchan’s angry-young-man look became iconic, countless men copied the hairstyle, the sunglasses, the shirts, and even the swagger. When Shah Rukh Khan popularised the open-arms romantic hero, an entire generation borrowed his gestures, leather jackets, and soft-spoken charm. Nobody called those men ‘performative.’ They were simply inspired by what they saw on screen. The internet has replaced the cinema hall, but the mechanism is identical. What we see repeatedly, we become slowly.
That is why I find the idea of dismissing someone as “too performative to date” slightly twisted. If we reject every person whose appearance has been influenced by trends, culture, upbringing, or media, then what would authenticity even look like? Because be for real, person completely untouched by social influence would probably appear not authentic, but odd. The moment someone dresses in a way that falls entirely outside familiar cultural codes, we tend to label them ‘weird,’ ‘trying too hard,’ or ‘out of touch.’ Literally take the example of any influencer trying to do their own thing on Instagram, the comments are always full of hatred.
The truth is that human beings are always responding to an audience, even when that audience is imagined. We perform professionalism at work, politeness at family gatherings, confidence on first dates, and nonchalance when we desperately want someone to text back. So perhaps the wired-earphone boy is not evidence that modern men have become unusually artificial. He is simply the 2026 version of the golf-playing gentleman, the man adjusting his Cartier watch before dinner, the actor-inspired romantic hero, and every other carefully assembled masculine ideal that came before him. Attraction has always involved signals. The props change; the performance remains.
And maybe that is not something to fear. Maybe it is simply what happens when human beings, influenced by the world around them, try to be seen, liked, and chosen by one another.
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