The New Must in Wedding Prep? Overhauling Your Fiancé's Instagram.
You start dating someone perfectly nice. Great personality, killer smile—a mensch to bring home to Mom and Dad. There’s just one problem: Your significant other isn’t embarrassing, but his Instagram is.
It’s not just the decade-old selfies or the blurred concert pics; there’s no shame in having only a few dozen followers or overindexing on latte art. But is this the kind of partner who can hold his own in an eventual engagement collab post? Will what friends and relatives see suggest someone with a good job, platinum airline status, and a taste for Bode chore coats? In an era in which a relationship progresses as much on social media as it does IRL, what happens when a partner’s digital presence lags behind his real world person?
For the writer and photographer Hannah Yoest, it was obvious from the beginning that her fiancé Alec Dent had potential. Both worked in journalism at the time, and she followed him on Twitter, taking note of his sharp commentary. But when the two got serious, she put her foot down. While some women want their partners to delete an ex’s phone number, Yoest, 30, was interested in putting in motion a different kind of life change. She had noticed that Dent’s handle on Instagram was @thealecdent, and she had to insist. “He’s not the kind of guy who’s like, ‘I’m the person,’ ” she says. “He’s much more tasteful than that. And I thought his page should reflect it.” Yoest has almost 30,000 followers on the platform. Dent, 26, has just over 250. He deferred to the expert.
One New York finance exec knew that she wouldn’t be able to persuade her successful fiancé to level up his Instagram, where he “hasn’t posted since 2018,” she says. Instead she asked him to spruce up his company’s website to reflect his accomplishments. His photo was out of date, and his bio didn’t do justice to his genuine achievements. If her friends Googled him, she worried that they might be left with an inaccurate impression. (It was easier for Jane Austen. The Bennet sisters’ prospects didn’t have to update their LinkedIn profiles.) The exec’s soon-to-be husband didn’t necessarily share her concerns, but he wisely acted on them. “When you would search him before, you couldn’t find his company, you couldn’t find his bio,” she says. “Now you search and see all the right links. I’d like to take credit for his next fund.”
Not all partners are so compliant. The author and speaker Chelsey Goodan has been begging her husband to revamp his social presence since the two met. His Facebook profile photo features him in a white tank top, holding a beer. He claims to have chosen it as a joke. But it has been up for so long that in the time it’s been live he has stopped drinking. “I’m like, ‘What is happening?’ ” Goodan says. Instagram is no better. His handle there is @666food—a riff on “devil’s food” that she knows he “thinks is so clever.” Goodan blames a generational divide (she’s basically a millennial; he’s a firm gen X) and the fact that he doesn’t seem to grasp that social media is a kind of alternative résumé. “This man is a supercool music producer,” she says. “He has a Grammy, for heaven’s sake.” Goodan says that he can do what he likes with his feeds, but when the two appear in photos together, she hesitates to tag them.
“We live at a time when every aspect of our lives is curated online, and I think a relationship is a big piece of that curation. If you’re not on the same page with your partner, that can lead to other issues in real life,” says Madeline Hill, a social media strategist. Her advice to the aggrieved party in a couple is to frame a conversation around how it makes you feel. “You’re so cringe,” for example, is not an ideal conversation starter. Instead she recommends probing the deeper issues with a gentle opener: “Is there a reason your presence is really chaotic?”
In the end Dent cut the dreaded “the” from his handle and added a sleek middle initial. He has since archived several of his old posts and repopulated his feed with photos Yoest has taken. She didn’t ask him to do it. He came to the realization all on his own.
This story appears in the April 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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