Breakupstagram
I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the key
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Breakupstagram: 99 Reasons — Friday 3rd Jul ‘26
Instagram is a funny place. A month or so ago, I was flooded with a lot of breakup content on my feed, and try as I might to say “I DO NOT WANT THIS” Instagram is smart enough to know that I’ll still watch the entire video before pressing the little “give me less of this” button.
There is one advantage to saying “NO NO NO” to Instagram all the time though, it tries different strategies to please you.
At first, I got a load of reels talking about how avoidants are basically the devil and have DISCARDED you without a care. In these reels, the watcher (me) is just a poor little field mouse, trampled by the combine harvester of a relationship, with no recourse and no ability to change what happened.
It’s depressing. There seems to be a whole world of these reels and a lot of them suffer from a total abdication of agency! Maybe I had squashed myself down to maintain the connection. Maybe I had pretended to not need things I very much did need.
BUT THAT’S NOT OKAY!!
That’s just lying. It’s lying to yourself and it’s lying to the other. You lie about not needing things you very much DO need, and you present a version of a relationship that doesn’t exist even in your own mind. I know, it’s not “lying” in the normal sense of the word. It’s often protective, and almost entirely unconscious.
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But the other isn’t stupid, they deserve a partner who is honest just as much as you do. Pretending everything is fine when it very obviously isn’t is not some noble pursuit. It slowly eats away at the thing you’re apparently desperate to maintain.
It’s easy to tell yourself a great story about how you’re the patient one, the one who is accepting of the other’s space, big yourself up as if you’re the best thing to happen to relationships but it’s all just a story. You’re human and you’re going to feel shit if your other isn’t meeting your needs, and that’s OKAY!!! But to shove it all down inside yourself, however unconsciously, is to engage in a relationship with very little respect for both yourself and the other.
Ultimately, I wasn’t the poor little field mouse, I had a hand on the controls of the combine harvester. Admitting that means admitting what I needed, accepting the possibility of rejection, and crucially, accepting that honesty might have required me to leave something I desperately wanted to keep.
Eventually, Instagram decided I had said “NO” to these reels enough and showed me the other side of the coin. Now I was the avoidant, I’d ended a relationship with someone that was too much, didn’t respect my space and made me feel unsafe. These reels were much more intellectual seeming; Lots of talk about knowing yourself, your needs and your boundaries.
Again though, the viewer (me) is robbed of agency.
There was very little talk of what I was doing to create safety in the relationship. Very little about what concrete steps I had taken to enable the other to engage safely with me. No mention of whether I could tolerate the other’s distress without turning it into proof I needed to eject.
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It was as though this unsafe relationship had just fallen into my lap. I had agency over whether I left, apparently, but none in how the relationship had came to feel unsafe in the first place.
There is a self-reflection in some of them yes, but it always ends at the same point, the relationship must end. It feels pre-ordained.
There is nothing wrong with standards, obviously. We should all have enough self-respect, in the Didionic (lol that can’t be it) sense, to advocate for ourselves and our needs. BUT, the source of these standards requires scrutiny. Do they reflect what I genuinely need to participate honestly in a relationship, or are some of them also convenient ways of keeping another at a safe distance?
Annoying, I guess both can be true at once. I can know myself, love myself, and still use my standards to make sure I’m never properly exposed and therefore, never hurt.
On one day I was the abandoned field mouse, on another I was the enlightened person protecting my peace. Both stories flattered a different part of me, and neither required me to sit with the whole relationship.
I suppose the strangest thing about these two apparently opposing kinds of reels is the way they both smuggle in their most important conclusion before the video has even started.
The anxious reels assume that the relationship should have continued. The avoidant reels assume that the relationship should’ve ended.
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They seem like they’re completely different stories, but I don’t think they are. Both flatter a different bias towards self-protection. For one, protection means maintaining the relationship at all costs. For another, protection means ridding themselves of the connection before it can hurt them any further.
Neither asks whether the instinct to stay or to leave is itself the thing that requires examination. Instagram probably cannot give you that because it is not a neutral platform. It is, by its nature, a mirror.
You are watching the feed, but the feed is watching you; It knows whether you finished the reel, whether you skipped it, whether you watched it 3 times and then pressed “give me less of this” as though that fooled anybody.
If your instinct is to flee, it will show you why leaving was an act of wisdom. If your instinct is to stay, it will show you why the relationship should’ve survived. What it’s much less likely to do is ask whether that instinct deserves to be trusted, or critically, whether that instinct is serving you.
For the record, there is thoughtful and nuanced relationship content on Instagram but on the whole, the platform is not well designed for the sort of self-reflection that leaves you LESS certain of your own story than when you began. The medium is the message and all that.
And I think that’s the thing I want to take from all of this. Not that I should’ve tried harder, walked away, or that I or anyone else should’ve acted differently, but that I don’t want to tell myself a story in which I had no part in what happened. Whatever else is true, I had agency and I want to remain curious about how I used it.
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Mercifully, Instagram finally heeded my pressing of the “SHOW ME LESS OF THIS” button and stopped showing me breakup content. I seem to be on “girlboss” Instagram now, where manifesting and building the #LifeOfYourDreams is the topic de jour.
Long may it continue