Posting Your Partner: A Sign of Love or Cry for Help?
Pro Posting Your Partner - Giselle Talavera
Giselle gives knows what makes that heart beat.
Love over time has been expressed in many different ways; from arranged marriages to holding up a speaker to your crush’s window. With the dominance of social media in our current culture, posting your partner on social media has become very popularized. Some may argue that the act of displaying your relationship online makes love performative when in reality it helps strengthen the relationship.
Posting your partner on social media is an acceptable way to show your love because it makes them feel confident and it brings them a sense of security.
Most teenage girls I've spoken with have expressed a desire to be posted by their partner on social media but why is that? To start, posting your partner matters because it provides a sense of emotional security.
When a car gets posted more often than his girlfriend, she has a right to feel insecure.
Especially if you are someone who is very active in posting but decide not to post your partner. Those who don’t agree with posting your partner online argue that it's harmful because it seeks validation from people outside of the relationship. However, for most couples posting your partner on social media is less about the validation of other people and more about the validation of your partner. It tells your partner that they are committed to you and are proud of being in a relationship. Within my own relationship my partner has asked me to change my profile photo to one of us together. Such a simple change can make your partner feel comforted.
Another reason your partner may express a desire to be posted is because it makes them feel confident within the relationship.
With the demands of beauty standards being highlighted with the help of social media, self esteem is important now more than ever. A simple post from your significant other can make you feel valued.
This is important in a relationship because good self esteem in relationships is often linked to a healthy relationship. Your partner should be your biggest supporter and vice versa. Posting a picture of the two of you together can help fuel the mutual pride within the relationship. These posts don’t need to be frequent for your partner to feel good. This is different from buying them flowers because rather than only showing them affection you are showing them that you are not afraid to love them loudly. Don’t mistake showing off your love for objectification but rather as appreciation.
Con Posting Your Partner - Davis Gruebel
Davis Gruebel is tired of this so called obligation.
Relationships in the digital age are ever evolving, there are many more things to worry about compared to older generations. While love letters and shared experiences were common forms of private intimacy, they are now less common. Now, we worry about snap streaks and posting our partner, valuing attention over emotion. We document our affection for a broader audience.
Digital intimacy is becoming more and more common, but taken to its extreme it feels like a performance rather than a real connection.
While posting your partner may seem like a way to show affection or pride for your significant other, it seems superficial. By repeatedly and frequently posting your partner, it's like you’re waving them around like an object, ensuring that everyone around you knows that you are in a relationship. To have that relationship be observed that frequently fuels your personal validation. A way to prove to the world that you are loved, that you deserve to be loved.
Frequently posting your partner aims to act as a source of outside validation.
While we may not realize it, many may subconsciously hold the belief that without someone witnessing our life, our relationships, they have no value. It's gotten to the point where not reposting your s/o’s posts is seen as a form of digital infidelity, further creating tension within a relationship. It’s as though love and affection is tied to social media. Having all of this publicized only adds fuel to the flame when/if your relationship fails. By posting so frequently you add more people to your relationship. By adding more, you create more room for rumors, errors, and speculation.
While trying to prove that we are loved online, we end up forgetting that relationships don’t need proof, they can be invisible to the public. While we certainly seek validation by posting our partners, it can also reveal potential insecurities within our relationships.
Another common argument is that individuals want to know their partner is taken. While this is completely valid, people should have faith in their partner. Constantly posting about your partner reveals a sense of insecurity within that relationship. You may feel the need to do so, because if you don’t post about them constantly, then someone else will try to take them. This again goes back to self worth. My theory is that we do this to sublimate our fear of losing that relationship. We want to be loved and cared for, and our way of protecting ourselves and our partner is by digitally marking them as our own. This would be similar to how adults wear a wedding ring. In society, it acts as a method to claim a partner, but as teenagers we don’t have that, so we post each other instead. However, relationships should be built on trust and actual human connection.
If you don’t trust your partner to not respond to some random Instagram DM, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
While posting your partner from time to time is a great way to show affection for them, obsessively doing it is not the move. There are better ways to show that you care for someone. We spend far too much time on our screens and not interacting with one another, we find ourselves digitally publicizing love rather than privately nourishing it.
