"Seems like a lot of twentysomething women, including me, have felt bad? strange? uncomfortable? guilty? childish? about wanting a boyfriend..."

"... but we hardly talk about it."

But if you did? talk? about it? would there be question marks? all over everything? you were saying? to each other?

The link goes to a Slate dialogue with lots of female participants, all much younger than I am. I'm not sure if any of them says exactly this, but it seems to me that the shame of admitting to wanting a boyfriend is the concession that you don't have a boyfriend. Pride leads you to act as though what you are doing you are doing intentionally. And if you really do want a boyfriend, you probably also think that revealing that you want what you don't have only makes it harder to get get what you want.

Maybe women are so good at standing proud that men have stopped believing women must really want men.

Late in the conversation, from a participant other than the one quoted above:

What strikes me as weird about this conversation, and why this shift in priorities doesn't seem like a complete feminist victory, is that it discounts the idea that a relationship can be an incredible source of support for career and life goals. Having someone who, say, helps with chores to give you more time to study or work, or who encourages you when you're discouraged, or works in a similar field and helps you with ideas, who backs you publicly, etc? All this stuff can make it much easier to work harder and in a more productive way or to work through difficult challenges. I'm not sure we should get psyched by the idea that young women don't want relationships but rather by the idea that women want more from their relationships or that we view relationships as part of a larger matrix of things that can work well together.

Jeez! It's all so much work. The point of love is so you can do even more work. The stereotypical traditional male works so that a woman would have him and he could have love. Love was the end, not the means. If, for the woman, love is the means and the end is career advancement... then what? And why?