UrbanUpdate

If you were a kid in the dial-up era, you probably lived with the near-constant barrage of stranger-danger warnings adults attached to the early Internet. As an impressionable child, I took those warnings to heart, only to have them amplified in recent years by the proliferation of misogynist rhetoric in online spaces: How am I supposed to trust a faceless Twitter avatar not to be a secret incel, or a men’s rights activist, or some similarly frightening web creature? So when a man recently asked for access to my Instagram in the middle of a first date, I quietly jumped out of my skin and left it sitting on my bar stool. Opening that window into my personal life to a person I’ve known for a drink’s worth of time strikes me as unnecessarily risky. I need time to decide if a new person gets to know my last name, or where I hang out, or roughly where I live, and Instagram paints a detailed portrait of all that.

Unfortunately for me, diving straight into an endless scroll of a stranger's daily activity is a fairly common practice now. A few weeks after the aforementioned date debacle, a different dude blindsided me with an unsettling news bulletin: We exchange Instagram handles instead of numbers now, didn’t you know? I was nothing short of horrified to hear this, preemptively anticipating the fuckboy nonsense it could encourage by heading even the specter of possible commitment.

Asking for a number feels old-fashioned, Pieter* explained when I went back and asked him what the deal is. Your interest in the other party is unambiguous.“Getting the Instagram handle, it’s safer. It’s a less invasive way of pursuing someone,” he said. “You know more about someone before you text with them and call them.” Looking at what someone deems shareable, you can quickly and discreetly glean a rough sketch of your potential compatibility, plotting your next steps (or your retreat) from there—theoretically, a cleaner and more efficient approach to romance, streamlined for our modern times.

But that’s exactly what made me feel so queasy about this practice in the first place. I can understand the appeal of finding out early that your bar makeout exclusively spends their social media time staging thirsty pics of their own face, or their flexed muscles in a gym mirror. But gauging a possible fit based on the way a person presents themselves online, taking one meticulously-curated part for the whole human, is precarious ground on which to build a judgment. And that’s before you factor in Instagram’s forced transparency: the read receipts that you can’t disable in your direct messages; the confirmation when someone does (or doesn’t) watch your stories; the public log of each user’s recent activity and location.

Asking a stranger for their Instagram strikes me as an intimate way to avoid the appearance of Doing Too Much, in that it announces an intention to stalk without overtly communicating romantic interest. It removes all the pressure from the asker, and instead places pressure on the askee. Ultimately, it’s an extension of our evergreen desire to seem coolly unconcerned when checking one another out.

Flirting has always been a “dance of self-exposure, but also self-protection,” according to Moira Weigel, a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. It’s the precarious balance between “being open about desire, but then also preserving ambiguity or plausible deniability, that’s really at the core of all those usually exciting, horrible feelings that force us to interact.” Doing that dance on Instagram rather than just asking for someone’s phone number “feels like yet another example of protecting oneself from outright rejection, overexposure, or vulnerability,” she says.

“If I’m trying not to be creepy, Instagram’s not a bad way to go,” Ryan King, 43, of Ottawa, Canada, told me. King explained that, these days, he rarely solicits strangers’ contact info, but in the past, he has appreciated the subtlety of getting a handle. “It’s just kind of a lighter touch.” You can chat—or not! Like one another’s pictures—or not! The digital inconspicuousness sucks pressure out of the situation, whereas digits impose an agenda.

If you ask someone for their number, “now you have to text them,” says Ludovic Nkoth, a 24-year-old painter I met when he stopped me at a deafening party and asked for my IG. “If I meet you in a casual setting, and I’m interested in you, and I want to maybe get to know you and have something with you, I want to know who you are,” Nkoth said. “Instagram is just a blueprint for all that: you just know more about the person before you even start talking to them.”

Not only does that blueprint hand you a bunch of ready-made icebreakers if you do end up meeting in real life, it also helps you decide whether you might want to spend time with this human, or fade into the digital mists before feelings get involved. But that’s easier said than done: At least until you quietly unfollow one another, you get to scroll past one another’s content when you check your respective feeds. Activity leaves a very clear footprint on Instagram: You might disable the feature that shows your followers when you last went online, but your circle still sees when you share a story or like a post.

To my mind, Instagram’s “seen” feature raises the conversational stakes, but for people who prefer the platform, it’s the opposite. In fact, Jeremy Birnholtz—an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, whose research focuses on human interaction online—told me, the level of urgency we read into different chat formats depends more on our perceptions of the platforms themselves.

“Once you have somebody as a contact in your phone,” Birnholtz said, “that’s going to give the person license to interrupt you in a lot of different contexts.” Even if you haven’t disabled push notifications for Instagram—if you experience the same level of real-time interruption —you probably don’t feel compelled to answer a DM as quickly as you do a text, Birnholtz says. An unread message doesn’t carry the same weight on Instagram as it might when left to gather dust in your text queue: “There’s a normative freedom, if you want, that comes from just adding somebody on Instagram and not having them as a contact. It’s sort of, right away, easier to block.”

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Everyone I talked to agreed with that idea—for better or worse. “I don’t want an unknown number calling me because they think they’re entitled to my time, when I literally barely have time to answer my incoming client texts,” Melissa Vitale, a 26-year-old publicist, said. Rather than exchanging numbers, corralling prospective dates onto Instagram, she explained, “is just another way for me to keep it organized.”

“I turned off notifications on my Instagram a while ago,” King told me. “I don’t see direct messages as quickly, it’s become more of an email thing where I don’t get it right away.”

“Text is more immediate,” Pieter added. “If I don’t respond to your text in four hours, something’s up. But if I don’t respond to your DM in four hours, then it’s just like, I didn’t go on Instagram. And that’s reasonable and acceptable.” More alluring, even, not to spend 24 hours a day lurking on an app.

Granted, I have the social media sensibility of a near-nonagenarian, or maybe it’s the prospect of being judged by my feed full of pet pics that makes me extra prickly. Still, I always feel relief when people clarify their intentions upfront, even when those goals don’t align with mine. Also: I’m pretty sure we should just talk in person, go get a drink or something, and see how we vibe when we’re sitting in front of one another. I will be sending my future romantic invitations by carrier pigeon, thanks; please make sure you’re home to receive them.

*Name has been changed at subject’s request.

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