Lupita Nyong’o is at the top of her game. It’s been a week since she won an Oscar for her role in 12 Years A Slave - a mindblowing achievement on anyone’s terms, but especially given it is her first ever feature film. She’s broken some seriously significant fashion ground - Prada does not have a good track record when it comes to dressing women of colour so the fact that the label was so desperate to dress her for the red carpet suggests she’s as progressive as she is gorgeous. She’s indisputably smart, studying film and theatre and embarking on a career in movie production, before doing her masters degree in acting at Yale. Hollywood does not have a good track record when it comes to honouring clever women in their thirties. It likes to perpetuate a culture of artificial youth and beauty, celebrating the babes, the Botoxed and the less than bright, from Marilyn Monroe’s little girl giggle to Jessica Simpson’s struggle to identify which animals are actually edible.
Lupita might be Hollywood royalty, but she’s not an archetype we recognise, so how do we make her relatable? We obsess over her boyfriends! In the last week, there has been much conjecture about a rumoured relationship with Jared Leto, and now gossips are suggesting she might be with rapper K’naan. It’s a vicious circle of Google doom - 'Lupita boyfriend' gets well over 72 million results. And the more we search for her, the more the celeb sites recognise she is Google gold, and wonder who they can link her to next. With the possible exception of her wardrobe, Lupita's potential love interests dominates every conversation we have about her.
So why is 'Lupita boyfriend' a much more popular search than 'Lupita degree'? My theory is that she’s so thrillingly atypical of the ingenue type that people are a bit threatened by her. For starters, there’s the age thing. As the New York Times Magazine pointed out last week, ingénues aren’t generally 31 when they’re discovered. But Lupita isn’t a young starlet barely in her twenties - she’s a fully-grown woman, and a single one at that. We just don’t know what to do with her.
We think we want her to have a happy ending, but the emphasis is really on the ending. Society is at best bewildered and at worst angered by women who are brilliant at their careers, and prioritise work, and have probably never uttered the phrase ‘biological clock.’ Your job is supposed to be something you fit around your relationship and your family. As soon as we see Lupita settled, we can start searching for the next big thing. But as long as she’s single, confident, clever and independent, she’s going to scare the establishment.
Some of the curiosity about Lupita’s relationship status could be connected with our need to find celebrity role models we can relate to. We’re constantly being encouraged to compare ourselves to other women, especially high profile women. When there are endless differences between our day to day reality and Lupita’s much more glamorous one, we’re going to try to find a similarity somewhere, and looking at her love life is a way in which we can engage. She's on the hunt for a boyfriend - and so are we! So we're the same! Or, when she's reported to be heartbroken over a split with one of her fictional boyfriends, we can revel in the fact that, like us, she's unlucky in love.
But maybe we should look at the differences and stretch ourselves to be as professionally well regarded as she is, rather than trying to work out why her love life makes us 'just like us.' After all, the sum of her parts is so much more than who she may or may not be dating. In fact, whether she's seeing Jared Leto or not has absolutely no bearing on her acting success or her general fabulousness - it's irrelevant. And that's part of what makes her so fantastic in the first place. By obsessing over who she may or may not be shagging, we risk forgetting this.
I’d love to be as successful as Lupita, and I don’t think we need to see her linked to some guy in order to be inspired by her. It’s great if she is in a relationship that makes her happy, but there’s so much more to her than that, and it shouldn’t be the end of her trajectory. She’s so much more interesting than her potential relationships - and we should aspire to be the same.
Follow Daisy on Twitter @NotRollerGirl
Pictures: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.