Maybe it was just a summer romance. After all those public appearances together back in July, physicists are now getting bored with the Higgs boson.

This week we’ve had the first announcement of new results since that “we’re madly in love” moment. The relationship between physics and the Higgs looked “nearly perfect” according to Scientific American. The Higgs was “exciting”, according to the Guardian. There were even hints of "exotic" goings on.

However, close friends of the couple, who gathered this week at the Hadron Collider Physics symposium in Kyoto, Japan, say that physics is just not that into the Higgs boson any more. New Scientist says the particle is no fun: it’s “maddeningly well-behaved”.

The Guardian goes further, reporting that physics is finding its former sweetheart the “most boring” a Higgs particle could be. Clearly, physics was hoping for a kooky, Zooey Deschanel kind of a boson. But, as the Guardian puts it, “there is nothing peculiar about the particle's behaviour.”

It turns out the Higgs doesn’t have any hidden depths. There are no tantalising secrets to tease out. The boson has nothing to say about the universe that physics didn’t already know. Spending time together is turning out to be a chore for physics.

The relationship won’t have been helped by physics tomcatting around looking for something new. Physics now claims other particles were always going to be far more interesting than the “plain-old” Higgs (Scientific American again).

The big hope was for a hook-up with “supersymmetric” particles. These, though, have been playing hard to get. Searches for supersymmetry have drawn a blank, leaving physics with no prospects other than enduring a long-term relationship with the Higgs boson. As physicist Jon Butterworth observes, it’s “a bit disappointing”.

The one ray of hope comes from the Daily Mail, which somehow interpreted the supersymmetry results as “dramatic particle reshaping that could push back the frontiers of physics”. In Mail World, there’s clearly no relationship so broken that radical surgery can’t fix it.