"Why Won’t My Boyfriend Post Me on Instagram?"
It's not about Instagram
Original column: New York Magazine, Going Through It, August 21 2024
My take: AdviceObsessed has had harsh words before for Emily Gould, who writes New York Magazine’s Going Through It. We’d love to tell you today will be different, but it won’t.
Today’s column is about a letter from a woman who lives with her boyfriend of two years. She opens with a stream of tributes to him, including loyal, funny, kind, “loves me deeply,” and “zaddy” to their cat.
Yes, I had to google “zaddy.”
With this setup, you know the “but” is coming, and here it is…
“He isn’t amazing at showing me his love.” Very specifically, he never posts about her on Instagram. He’s a photographer and has great pictures of her, and he “posted photos of his exes when he was dating them,” but she’s nowhere to be seen.
His excuse is that Instagram is just to showcase his work. But she’s not buying, because he does post about other people. She writes: “I wonder why I care so much, but I think it all ties back to wanting him to be better at demonstrating his love for me.”
Most of her letter recounts the ins-and-outs of their various arguments about Instagram: why it does or doesn’t matter; the significance of posting or not posting certain things or people; his settings; etc. She’s clearly given this a lot of very granular thought. But these thoughts are wheel-spinning, and bring her no relief. It all leaves her feeling, she writes, “like I am in some way not good enough for him to post about.”
And now to Emily.
Emily responds that “Instagram matters, unfortunately!” Taking her cue from the LW, her response is almost entirely about Instagram (though mostly about her own history with it). Ultimately, she suggests the LW approach her boyfriend with “a kind of radical openness to hearing what he has to say about what Instagram means to him.” Both of them must “acknowledge that Instagram isn’t a meaningless frivolity” for either of them.
Emily and the LW are both so distracted by Instagram that neither can see the real problem, which isn’t about Instagram at all.
The LW’s real problem is hidden in plain sight, in her opening paragraph. Amid her tributes to her boyfriend’s zaddyness and general perfection, she writes: “We talk about getting married and having babies in the near future.”
So we see the situation. She’s ready for marriage and children, it’s been two years, and so far, he’s stopped at talk. That—not Instagram—is the real source of her anxiety and unhappiness.
She says an Instagram “would show him loving me in a way I want to be loved, out loud.” But the reason he isn’t taking this seemingly simple step is he’s not sure of all that. He doesn’t love her that way—not yet, and maybe not ever. That’s why he gaslights her about it, “and makes me feel crazy for having brought it up.”
AdviceObsessed believes that in her heart the LW knows all this, which is why she can’t relax.
So what should she do? Pace Emily, the LW doesn’t need to ask her boyfriend for a radically open conversation about social media. Instead, she needs to tell him it’s great having a zaddy for the cat, but what she really wants is a daddy and some kids.
Perfectly reasonable of her, too. And as it’s been two years, and the conversation seems to have stalled, she may need to issue an ultimatum.
Ultimatums are supposedly manipulative, so they have a bad reputation, but AdviceObsessed has never understood that. An ultimatum is a clear statement of the issuer’s needs, plus specific information about how long she’s prepared to wait to get them met. If she means what she says, and will stick to it, that’s not manipulation, it’s communication.
Emily writes that this relationship “sounds mostly great except for the differences in how you and your boyfriend express love.” She’s wrong. If she could get past the big distraction of Instagram, she’d see how very serious their differences are.