UrbanUpdate

Six months into our relationship, my girlfriend announced that she has never, and will never, scroll through my Twitter likes. I didn't know whether to process that as a courtesy or a threat.

We met on Hinge and both have careers that force us to spend a disgusting amount of time online. Our courtship relied on that shared cyberspace context; we bonded over the various ways that social media has permanently deteriorated our brains. My girlfriend was aware of how much ambient flirting happens through double-taps and red hearts—and how much she could obsess over those interactions if she chose to. But rather than putting all of my internet idling through a forensics lab, she had opted out of the detective work entirely. She denied Twitter any more leverage over her well-being than it already commands, with the hope that we would be happier and healthier and less inclined to suspicion if we kept this one social media sector off-limits.

I wholeheartedly agreed. Since this summer, I haven't scrolled through her Twitter likes either. It gives us both a little bit of private digital real estate, which aligns us with some of the newer ways social media companies have, for one reason or another, attempted to save us from ourselves. Recently, the death of Instagram's Following tab has made it more difficult for couples to stalk each other's taste in celebrities, presumably after Facebook HQ realized the entirely avoidable strife that information was causing. But I think fundamentally, we're still untangling what it means to be a good couple on the internet. I've heard of lovers who exchange phone passwords once they officially get serious. That always sounded a little... extreme to me, but as young people who didn't get the chance to understand what love could be without the web's involvement, no wonder we're struggling to establish a rulebook.

I asked Jordan Gray, a relationship coach who's been working for 10 years, if my girlfriend's mandate was unusual. He confirmed my hunch: dozens of people come through his office looking to establish some concrete rules about interacting with the internet as a couple.

"There is a whole spectrum of issues that can come up for people regarding their significant other’s internet presence," says Gray. "From things like, ‘Why are you always liking this model’s photographs?’ or ‘Why haven’t you been liking my posts lately?’ all the way to ‘I would really prefer if you didn’t scroll through your feed while we are eating together.'"

Clearly, some of Gray's clients misunderstand the more innate laws of posting-while-dating. (You absolutely need to double-tap everything your partner puts on the grid, and you should ration yourself one horny engagement every three months or so.) This anxiety was most mythically explored by Ashley Carman in a story for The Verge titled "Why did my boyfriend like Emily Ratajkowski's butt on Instagram?" The embattled boyfriend responded at the end of the piece with a shrugged, "I didn't really think about it, I just liked it." In an interview, Carman told me she’s no longer in a relationship with the infamous butt-liker, and she now regards the moment as maybe a "more serious red flag."

"He did eventually unfollow basically every single celebrity, though, except for Radiohead fan accounts and like, Michael Phelps," continues Carman. "So the problem solved itself."

Every betrothed person with an Instagram account has navigated some version of this problem. I distinctly remember an incident where I liked a saucy Charli XCX post before making it to my girlfriend's fresh content, which is a mistake I will never make again. 28-year old Meredith Hirt never had an issue with who her boyfriend was looking at on Instagram. Her qualms were more direct: For the first seven months of Hirt's relationship, she had yet to make her debut on his grid. (Nobody wants to feel more like a rumor than a partner.) The root cause was simple; Hirt's boyfriend is a lot less online than she is, which is a relationship dynamic that can accidentally isolate those who are more accustomed to the social media serotonin drip.

"Finally he shared a photo of us on New Year's Eve, and the caption was even a joke about how long it took him," says Hirt. "He’s only posted a handful of photos this year and I’ve been in a couple of them, so my stats are pretty solid. I’ve accepted that I will always be the photo-sharer in our relationship and that’s okay—as long as he likes every picture I post."

Of course, other couples have developed even more stringent policies to regulate social media's negative side effects. Emy LaCroix, a writer in Los Angeles, has yet to follow her boyfriend of nearly four years on any platform. They met on a dating app, and as the weeks that followed slowly drifted towards the beatific monotony of love, she asked her boyfriend why he had yet to drop her a follow—and she asked herself whether she should follow him.

"We decided things were good the way they were, and we didn't want to add in the negative energy that social media can bring to some relationships," she says. "I've found I have none of the paranoia and jealousy I've felt in previous relationships, though a big part of that is probably because we're incredibly open and honest with each other in real life, so I've never felt the need to go digging."

LaCroix and her boyfriend aren't total anarchists. Neither of them sets their social media to private. She can stalk if she wants, which is the sort of liberty that neuters intrigue at its source. They also post photos of each other constantly, like a totally normal online relationship. LaCroix says this blackout doesn't affect her personal life, but she does occasionally come across an old friend who isn't aware she's in a relationship, due to the fact that they have never, nor will ever, be tagged-on-Instagram official. In general, LaCroix believes this rule insulates both of them from the brief spasms of hysteria that can briefly derail even the most supportive, ego-free union. "We met in L.A. and come from two different places. I'm not going to know the majority of people that might like and comment on his stuff and vice versa," continues LaCroix. "So why stress myself out looking and being like, 'Who is that girl liking his photo?' when it's probably a random classmate from fifth grade?"

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LaCroix's policy reminded me of the same anxiety that led to my relationship’s Twitter moratorium. I am a child of the information age, and as such, I've yet to be in a relationship where I didn't have a good idea of what my girlfriend was up to at any moment. In 2019, as we leave the internet fat with metadata, this sort of habitual relationship surveillance has become inescapable. The algorithms have correctly identified us as a couple, so hers will be the first tweet I see on my feed until further notice.

In LaCroix's opinion, there's something romantic about keeping the machines at bay. "If you know everything that's happening as it happens, what's there to talk about when you have quality time together," she says. "I'm losing an opportunity to tell my boyfriend about my day when I get home if he's seen every second on Instagram Stories, you know?"

Eden Rohatensky, a programmer and musician based in Montreal, takes an even more hardline cyberspace stance in their relationship. For two years now, their partner has existed on social media in the vaguest possible terms—no first names, no Instagram appearances, no emoji-laden anniversary tributes. This is a marked difference from Rohatensky’s last relationship, which was aggressively online. As they quickly learned, it's impossible to have much privacy after a breakup when you shared a YouTube channel with your significant other.

"[Social media] put a lot of weird pressure on us when we broke up," says Rohatensky, adding that now, they want to keep their romantic life off the internet.

Maybe it seems unnecessarily cynical to abstain from relationship posting so you can prime an easy transition into the often inevitable world where you are no longer dating the person inspiring your syrupy missives. But all of us have suffered the indignity of changing our Facebook relationship status back to single, and most of us have realized how stupid we were for allowing the Zuckerberg estate so much insight into our humiliating personal affairs in the first place. Rohatensky's policy is an extension of the same instinct; offering them a chance to love in peace, and grieve in peace if the time comes.

For my girlfriend and I, our solution was to seal Pandora's Box shut. Connecting all the dots in our Twitter likes would only lead our paranoid brains to see conspiracy and innuendo when there is none. The internet, in all its jealousy-inducing glory, rendered us powerless, and so we needed some rules to mitigate the damage. They say love means never having to say you're sorry. To me, love means never needing to think twice about a red heart on an LCD screen.

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