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When someone scrolls through Val’s Instagram page, they can see a recent camping trip she took with friends, a batch of homemade chicken nuggets and a few of her favorite memes.
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But what they can’t see: Val, 22, got engaged nine months ago to her boyfriend of two years.
She never made a post about the proposal and she doesn’t plan to.
“We are happy and content as we are, living our lives together privately … no outsiders peering in through the windows, so to speak,” said Val, who lives with her fiance in San Marcos, Texas, and asked CNN not to use her last name for privacy reasons.
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Val is one of a growing number of young adults from Generation Z, the cohort from age 28 down to teenagers, who are opting for “quiet relationships,” in which their love lives the good and the bad remain offline and out of view from a larger audience of friends and family.
It’s a new turn back to the old way of doing things: date nights without selfies, small weddings without public photo galleries and conflict without a procession of passive-aggressive posts. On platforms such as TikTok, creators declaring this preference for “quiet” or “private” relationships rake in thousands of views, and on Pinterest, searches for “city hall elopement” surged over 190% from 2023 to 2024.
If your prefrontal cortex developed before the iPhone came along, you may be rolling your eyes. But for a generation raised on social media, rejecting the pressure to post is a novel development and one that experts say could redefine the future of intimacy.
How social media killed romance
Gen Z’s turn toward privacy partly stems from a growing discomfort with how social media shapes and distorts romantic relationships, said Rae Weiss, a Gen Z dating coach studying for her master’s degree in psychology at Columbia University in New York City.
A couple that appears to be #relationshipgoals may flaunt their luxury vacations together, picture-perfect date nights, matching outfits and grand romantic gestures. But Gen Z has been online long enough to know it’s all just a carefully curated ruse.
“It’s no longer a secret that on social media, you’re only posting the best moments of your life, the best angles, the best pictures, the filters,” Weiss said. “Young people are becoming more aware that it can create some level of dissonance and insecurity when your relationship doesn’t look like that all the time.”
Indeed, there are messy, complicated and outright mundane moments to every relationship but those aren’t algorithmically climbing the ranks (unless the tea is piping hot, of course). This can lead some to equate the value of their relationships with how “Instagrammable” they are, Weiss said.
Frequently broadcasting your relationship on social media has even been linked to lower levels of overall satisfaction and an anxious attachment style between partners, according to a 2023 study.
Embracing private relationships, then, is partly Gen Z’s way of rejecting the suffocating pressures of perfection and returning to the value of real-life displays of affection. |