Not everybody talks about their relationship with friends, family, therapists, strangers, colleagues, or 500+ followers on Instagram. They don’t even want to contribute to this column’s gossip collection. Call them the anti-kiss-and-tell bloc. They believe in gatekeeping a relationship from everyone until it gets solidified—marriage proposals—and then they shock the masses on social media.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has a line on it: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” In Gen Z theatre, the eventual thunderbolt of a reveal looks like a candid picture taken at the mandap, soft focus on teary eyes, raising hands in victory with the fiancé. It’s not a complete gag order, because couples also drop hints in soft-launch pictures. Think photos with a mystery someone who is only revealing his hand. Pictures from a ‘solo’ trip with two champagne flutes on the table. Or a mirror selfie of two people, where one face is carefully censored with a white heart emoji.
It’s giving Deepika Padukone on the way to her secret Lake Como wedding, or Anushka Sharma to hers. A journalist friend said that Smriti Mandhana had to face the unfortunate cancellation of her wedding because she shared about it too much, too soon. She didn’t control the narrative before the internet got to it.
Nobody likes deleting their ex’s presence from the online grid. That’s why Kylie Jenner—even after several public appearances with Timothée Chalamet—isn’t posting his picture on her ’gram. Zendaya hasn’t even shared the news of her wedding. And Rashmika Mandhana was also keeping it all under wraps until recently. Not sharing the news is the last remaining form of control.
Shalini from Pune is aware that nobody’s invested in knowing who she is dating to marry. She just doesn’t want to jinx it: the superstition that saying good news out loud—or posting it publicly—will somehow cause it to fall apart.
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Emotional minimalists
A popular influencer is dropping one reel after another, from her wedding proposal hike to her wedding day get-ready video. In all the posts, you can see she isn’t tagging her partner, who has made headlines for allegedly sexually abusing a woman. Once tagged, everyone will know who she is marrying.
This is a different kind of gatekeeping—famously advised by dating gurus, mamis and chachis—where all the problems of the relationship are supposed to be kept private between the couple. No friend or family gets to hear of it, only the therapist—or ChatGPT, now. That too, more of the latter than the former because of cost constraints and general aversion to hard pills.
The followers of the anti-kiss-and-tell school believe that talking about issues colours it with irrelevant people’s feelings and comprehension of the situation. Plus, once you tell your friends that your partner cheated on you, posting anniversary pictures captioned “through ups and downs” starts to look a bit pathetic. We have all been told not to air out dirty laundry in public. But what if the stench of dirty laundry becomes unbearable within four walls? The internet suggests journaling about it in private.
The kids these days (older than 25 years of age) reject TMI—too much information. To be fair, how you are managing your polycule dynamics doesn’t have to be a tweet unless you put #polyamoryawareness in it. This is the era of emotional minimalism, countering against oversharing millennials. Share less, reveal slowly, and only when it’s cooked enough for public scrutiny.
This isn’t just social media etiquette. Even in real life, the fewer people who know, the better. It means fewer uncomfortable follow-up questions when things go south. And things do go south with remarkable regularity. My friend doesn’t like her girl gang talking about her broken picker when it comes to picking a partner, so she doesn’t talk about her current horrible one. All this gatekeeping will go out of the window after her break-up, when she will have nothing to repair or protect, only expose and denounce publicly.
This article is part of a series of columns on modern dating in India—the good, the bad and the cuddly.
The author tweets @ratanpriya4. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)