Say a little prayer for every person whose grid has become a graveyard of their past relationships. Oh, the woe and shame of your friend or acquaintance in many iterations of a once happy couple—grinning at a wedding with a redhead in one pic, bowling with a brunette in another, with the now ironic caption “Striking out.” Each square a tombstone memorializing a promising partnership.
This was the hard launch—the social media announcement of a romantic relationship in which people debuted on each other’s pages with full face and body shots, only to one day cease to be posted without explanation. The hard launch evolved out of early social media relationship announcements, in which couples simultaneously updated their Facebook profiles to “in a relationship,” sometimes even tagging the other person with a sly smiley face. This era was like watching two people play catch with a Chihuly glass vase—you didn’t know when the relationship would shatter, you just knew it would, and that it would be visually thrilling.
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The hard launch has fallen out of fashion, for obvious reason. In its place, the relationship soft launch. The Urban Dictionary defines a “soft launch” as “a photo preview of a talking stage before it becomes an official relationship on social media, i.e., taking photos of their dinner plate and their hands, half their face or their shoes as to allude there’s someone special in your life.” Suddenly we are all Taylor Swift promoting our new album, hinting and teasing a new era and new aesthetic through Easter eggs and oblique references.
The problem is that this delicate rollout style has now become a cliché. It is the subject of countless mocking tweets and TikTok takedowns. To post the toned elbow of your lover is to know that you are being dissected mercilessly in the group chats of your enemies.
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In its place, a new modality of communicating your non-single-ness. Creator Jack Appleby articulated it in a video this week. “For the first time in a long time, there’s a new way to soft launch,” he announced. “Here’s the new procedure: You do an Instagram carousel photo dump, but, like, the seventh of 10 photos has some person you’ve never posted with ever.”
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Slide one: You’re making a face with a mixed drink. Slide two: You and the mixed drink are surrounded by close friends. Slide three: a totally rAndOm shot—who cares what it is?—a seagull or something! Slide four: your friend looking hot, so people know you are gracious and merciful, like the Lord. Slide five: a plate of food that cost over $28 dollars. Slide six: you and the person you’re dating, radiant with like for each other! Caption the whole thing “foto dump” or “spring has sprung” and you are good to go.
Eye-rolling Luddites, calm down: Wanting your community to know about your dating status is not somehow indicative of a collapsing society. Social media is a performance, and so is socializing, generally. It’s not any stranger to publicize a relationship status than a big move, a graduation, or a job change. People who don’t have social media, or whose feeds are just seven unfocused posts of national parks: YOU’RE NOT BETTER THAN US.
Just know this: If you are posting a picture of yourself standing anywhere near to any person who I think might fit within the spectrum of your sexuality, I am screen-shotting that picture and sending it to the lab for analysis, and by “lab,” I mean my sister or my friend Katrina. You can delete the post, you can scrub your grid, you can deactivate, but you will be in our files forever. Amateur body language experts will be pulling up your new soft launches for side-by-side comparisons with the originals.
If you can live with that—and I pray that you can—post away.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
