I Broke Up With My Boyfriend Because He Wouldn’t Follow Me On Social Media

I find it shady if the guy I’m dating won’t make our relationship Facebook official, and I don’t like it if he doesn’t follow me on social media. I dated a guy who refused to do the latter and it made me doubt the entire relationship to the point that I broke up with him over it.

  1. What was he hiding? We’d been dating for about three months and I was starting to feel uncomfortable about the fact that he hadn’t added me on social media yet. I’d checked that he had active profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—and he did. This made it worse. Did he want to hide his social media accounts from me? Why? What did he have to hide? 
  2. I took the initiative by adding him first but he totally ignored me. I figured it wasn’t such a big deal to make the first move online by following him on Twitter and adding him on Facebook. I mean, we’d been dating for so long already! I sent out the invites and waited… and waited… My BF didn’t add me as a Facebook friend and he didn’t follow me back on Twitter. When we chatted, he never brought it up. He just acted like he hadn’t seen my invites. What the hell was going on?
  3. It started messing with my head. I found myself battling with trying to have a good time in my relationship because my BF wasn’t adding me on social media. One part of me thought it was a bit petty to be making a big deal out of something so small, but I just couldn’t deny that it was important to me and I had to back myself up on this issue.
  4. Social media means something. If the guy I’m in a relationship with won’t add me on social media, something’s wrong. I want my boyfriend to want to declare that he’s dating me to the world and to accept me in real life and virtual life. It feels shady AF when a dude has no relationship presence on social media at all. Is he trying to be seen as a single guy? Is he using it to pick up other women?
  5. I don’t even ask for a lot, man! I’m not the type of person who expects the guy I’m dating to post loads of couple selfies of us on his Instagram every week. I don’t give AF about that stuff, but I do want to feel that I’m a part of his virtual life. It’s about including me in all of his life. Is that so much to ask?
  6. It’s just a weird thing to do. Wouldn’t it be weird if a guy I was dating gave me his email address but not his phone number? It totally would, and that’s how I feel when a guy doesn’t follow me on social media. It’s like he’s preventing us from staying in touch online. It feels so weird, especially because so many people use social media to communicate on an hourly basis. Everyone’s on there all the time, so why shouldn’t we be?
  7. I want to know what he’s doing. OK, communicating is just one part of the pie. I’ll admit that I also want to know what my BF is doing online. If his Facebook account is set to “private” and he’s not adding me as a friend, I have no idea what’s going on with him. He could already be listed as “in a relationship,” he could be flirting with lots of women, or he could be exchanging childish or prejudiced posts with his lame-ass friends.
  8. People can be very different online. I’ve experienced getting to know someone and thinking they were the greatest person only to take a walk through their social media profiles and learn that they were actually really weird, shady, or just not my type. Based on that, I want to know as much as I can about the person I’m dating ASAP.
  9. We talked it out but he wasn’t having it. I tried to tell the guy I was dating why I was so insistent that we followed and added each other on social media, but he said that he didn’t see it as a big deal and he liked having something that was private in a relationship. For him, that privacy was about having his social media accounts all to himself and not following his romantic partner. I didn’t really know what to say!
  10. Am I alone in thinking this is suspicious? I totally get that people need to have some things that remain private, like hobbies and passions, but I don’t think it should be their social media profiles. If a guy can accept strangers, colleagues, and friends on his social media but not his girlfriend, something’s wrong. This was a huge relationship deal breaker for me because I couldn’t shake the feeling that my BF was either doing something bad or was going to. I had to let him go.
Giulia Simolo is a writer from Johannesburg, South Africa with a degree in English Language and Literature. She has been working as a journalist for more than a decade, writing for sites including AskMen, Native Interiors, and Live Eco. You can find out more about her on Facebook and LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter @GiuliaSimolo.
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