Boy meets girl, she posts him on her Instagram grid. Gen Z isn’t exactly known for their air of mystery when it comes to love lives. In fact, with overlapping dating pools, it’s safer to call dibs on your boyfriend on social media before anyone else can. Love in the 21st century is about tagging your partner in comment sections, reposting their work achievements and loudly crediting them under aesthetic side profiles clicked in fancy restaurants. How does shy or forbidden love hide in this chronically online, and oversharing climate of romance? That’s where cryptic captions, codenames, close friends’ lists and finstas come in.
My generation doesn’t even down a milkshake without documenting its frothy rim for the gram. You can’t imagine how much self-control it takes to not live-tweet a spicy one-night stand. But workplace embarrassment, fuzzy marital status of soulmates, jealous exes and many image-related issues push my lot to pipe down and get creative with the posting itch—think ‘feeling loved with 49 others’. Moreover, considering how modern love affairs deflate like helium balloons in WhatsApp chats in a month, it’s probably wise not to screw up a well-curated social profile by uploading and deleting every new situationship’s photo.
What makes matters a little more complicated is our own distrust of discreet love affairs. If you haven’t been shown off by your partner to his followers online, he probably isn’t that into you, or is just ashamed of you—not me, the internet says so. Depending on the situation, the 20-somethings can still keep relationships ‘private’ (everyone is sort of aware but nobody really knows what’s going on) but hiding it as a ‘secret’ (zero digital footprint) screams red flag behaviour. For example, Kylie Jenner and Timothee Chalamet are often mentioned in the same sentence on tabloids, but hardly seen together in paparazzi pictures. The key is to neither deny nor confirm the existence of your paired-up status.
Also read: It’s cuffing season. Gen Z is chasing winter romance, premarital handholding
Private affairs on public instas
There’s much to learn from couples who date in private and only hard launch each other by posting ambitious pre-wedding photo shoots. The sheer shock value of those airbrushed videos is enough to send the mutual friends’ group chat into absolute overdrive.
I have nothing to say to women who post their partner’s picture with huge evil eye emojis hiding his face. Relax much? Nobody else wants him anyway. I’m all for my collegemate who posted her engagement photos on her finsta account—when the wedding was called off due to “undisclosed reasons”, she only had to break the news to the 50 close friends following her there. That’s a VIP press conference, less embarrassing than a public statement. A junior in Delhi is maintaining a single-girl image online as she completes six months of being a girlfriend in real life—she says he’s too ugly for mainstream media. Another friend documented her very private affair with an inter-religion Bumble match on all her socials by simply cropping him out of the pictures. Was it necessary? No. Did she successfully declare herself ‘off the market’? Yes.
One way is to block trouble elements from the friend list before starting the relationship spam. But that’s not very leak-proof. It didn’t work for my colleague who tried her best to keep her cheesy teenage love story safe from parents in school. A family member snitched and all the public displays of affection were immediately archived. The young couple even stopped commenting on each other’s posts. Enter her finsta, a safe space for years to share visuals of her boyfriend braiding her hair, posing with flowers and other aww-inspiring acts. They also started referring to each other on public online forums using two very NSFW emojis—banana and peach. As if that’s subtle at all.
Not that there’s anything stopping me from publicly fawning over my dates, imaginary husbands and potential boyfriends, I restrict myself for trivial reasons of dignity, self-respect etc. But who am I kidding? They all think these columns are about them. Men are so vain.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)