National Girlfriend Day

I see people posting pictures with their girlfriends on digital hell scape Instagram and feel compelled not to press the heart button on their posts. I mentally simulate posting a picture with my own girlfriend to assess its “like” -ability. The thoughts I waste my life thinking. I decide that there’s no point in contributing to what amounts to another pointless exercise in herd mentality — ahem — “social media trend.” 

And then, literally in the 11th hour, like at 11:06 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday August 1st, the night before we would fly to Hawaii where I will entertain her and my parents for 5 days, she reaches out over text to investigate. 

She doesn’t exactly come out and say: I want you to post a picture of me on your social media account today, but that’s what her lighthearted self-deprecating text message implies. I know that if I pressed her about it, she would contend that no, I don’t actually care, I was just, like, joking, trust me, it’s fine. 

But I know her better than she knows her. I know everything. I know that she’s starting to notice that we’ve been dating for almost a year and I haven’t posted a picture of her on my Instagram. In my defense, I haven’t posted a picture of anything on Instagram in over a year. Like most of my friends after college, I grew out of it.

But her “normie coworker" got in her head, she said, probably reciting some message from some well-liked TikTok that said something like this: 

ladies if your man does not post pictures of you on social media, he is effectively single. it’s so they seem single so they can cheat. do not trust men. they will cheat every time if given the chance. my man cheated on me (not because i’m personally repulsive, men are just evil) and now it is my life goal to warn other poor innocent angels like me about the horrors of men and what it means if they don’t post pictures of you on instagram.

And she has dreams about me cheating, she told me. I’ll spend all day with her and not so much as pick up my phone in her presence and look her lovingly in the eyes for hours at a time and then she’ll close her eyes and have vivid visions of me cheating. you just cant win.

I look into the future and decide that now is probably a good time to post a picture with her on instagram. Not now like at this very moment, because it’s far past peak-algorithm-posting hours, what kind of idiot posts at 11 PM, I think to myself, but now as in like tomorrow. 

My first girlfriend asked me, frequently, what exactly I "liked about her." I became so sick of answering this question. it’s like write me something original and beautiful and satisfying, from scratch, right now. on the spot. hope you’ve got something good saved up.  something i haven't heard before. hope you’re generating more reasons that you love me all the time or I’m going to be really upset. One of my first answers was this: you don’t post pictures of yourself on instagram. 

She remembered this and brought it up to ‘win’ ‘arguments’ many times throughout our troubled romance. 

Instagram is a dating app. I knew this even as an idiot 19 year old. It used to be about photography. Now it’s about You. It’s pink facebook. It's the young social climbers gooning away on the pink scrolling human face posting app. Needing more followers. More attention. More likes. More love. ❤️