Dear Emily,
I’ve been dating my boyfriend for two years and we live together. He has fully embraced being the zaddy to my (now our) cat and makes our house a home. He’s loyal, makes me laugh, and is kind to my family. We talk about getting married and having babies in the near future. But while I know he loves me deeply, I also know he isn’t amazing at showing me his love. I have asked him to improve on his words of affirmation and to take more of an active role in planning fun things for us to do. He has definitely improved a bit, but not by much.
I have also expressed to him that it would mean a lot to me if he posted about me on his Instagram. Trust me, I was embarrassed to ask and 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. In the many times I have brought up the IG post, he says that he “doesn’t do that” on his Instagram and that his page is purely about showing his work (he is a photographer). I have then pointed out that he (1) has many beautiful photos of me taken on his fancy camera, (2) has posted multiple tributes to his best friend, (3) posted photos of his exes when he was dating them. He’s also set up his account so that he approves which photos he’s tagged in, so if you look at his tagged photos, you won’t see the multiple times I have posted photos of him.
When I look at his Instagram, I see photos of so many things he loves, but I am invisible. And no matter how maturely I try to talk to him about how this makes me feel, he turns it on me and says “I can’t believe you care this much about social media” and makes me feel crazy for having brought it up. He then goes on to say that he shares how much he loves me with all the people in his life, and while I know this to be true, I also know that it is something I feel so vulnerable even asking and caring about, but I do care. I care a lot.
To me, it would be a romantic gesture. It would show him loving me in a way I want to be loved, out loud. I have now expressed this want to him many times, and I am left feeling stuck, like I am in some way not good enough for him to post about. Help?
— Hate That I Care About IG But I Do
Dear Hate That I Care,
Wow, I can absolutely relate to not wanting to care about Instagram but caring about it anyway. I think that’s how most people feel about Instagram in 2024. We have all had some kind of relationship with the app for the past 14 years or so, and like all relationships, this one has shifted over time. In the beginning, I used it to post photos of my meals, cat, and kids, but more recently I decided I only wanted to use it for work (mostly) and made the account private. I still can’t resist slipping in the occasional photo of my kids, but I tuck these pix randomly into my stories or, more often, share them with my hundred or so “close friends.” I’m not saying this is a healthy way to use the app! Even to me it seems contradictory, but it’s where I’ve landed, for now.
One thing that never occurred to me was giving it up completely. We may not like or trust this app, but it’s a part of our lives. Instagram matters, unfortunately! You can control how you use the app, but other people —including those you barely know — are inevitably going to turn to it first for information about what’s going on in your life. It’s normal to care about how you’re being publicly perceived, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of acknowledging that social media is important to you. Your boyfriend is in denial about its relevance in the greater scheme of things. And refusing to post about you or be tagged in your posts about him, especially since he’s posted about his exes and friends, seems on the surface like uncaring and or even suspicious behavior. Who in his life does he not want to share you with?
But my experience also helps me see things from his point of view. On a recent vacation, my husband jokingly chided me for not posting enough on Instagram about the great time we were having as a family, and I surprised myself by blowing up at him. I explained my incoherent philosophy about using it for work, but when I thought about it later I realized I was mostly chafed by the idea that anybody else could tell me what to do with my own social media. I’m not my family’s publicist, and I don’t want to be! I’m not a momfluencer looking to do spon for supportive underwear or yogurt or something; I’m just trying to live and be a person with some kind of online identity!
Think of how you’d feel if someone told you how to post on IG, then use that newfound empathy to have one final conversation with your boyfriend about what’s bothering you. I know, I know, you’ve tried before and it hasn’t worked. But maybe if you approach him with a kind of radical openness to hearing what he has to say about what Instagram means to him and how that might have shifted over the years, you could come to some kind of new understanding. In this conversation, it’s important that you and your boyfriend both acknowledge that Instagram isn’t a meaningless frivolity in either of your lives, even though we’d all prefer to think of it that way. Maybe you’ll find out something like: In the past he used it to document his life more — hence the photos of his exes and tributes to his best friend — but now he’s shifting to using it only as a professional portfolio, and a photo of you in all your glory might seem out of place in that context. Or maybe he’ll be more open to your point of view if you get really clear with him and with yourself about why his being public about your relationship in this specific way is meaningful to you.
Either way, after you’ve had it out with him about Instagram one final time, you’ll have the information you need to decide whether you can stick it out in this relationship, which sounds mostly great except for the differences in how you and your boyfriend express love. If he still refuses to post you, maybe you can accept that and move on from it. Or, even better, he’ll relent and go ahead and post you — because he really wants to, not because you’ve given him an ultimatum. And if neither of those options pan out, you are of course free to find a new zaddy for your cat — though hopefully you won’t have to.
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