The Internet allows the private to become easily public. Young people have drawn a new line to keep their love lives separate.

When Danica Manuel ended her two-and-a-half-year relationship at 23, she thought: What am I going to do now that my relationship is over? She wanted to get married, but her ex-boyfriend didn’t. That was a dealbreaker. Going through a breakup, social media wasn’t at the front of Danica’s mind, but it was for her ex. In the middle of their breakup, he said: “What am I going to do with my Instagram now? My Instagram is going to look weird when I delete all the posts that you’re in.”

“I definitely think that that struck such a chord with me,” says Danica. 

“Moving forward, I was thinking a lot of different things, but definitely, I don’t want someone who’s posting their every move on Instagram.”

Danica, now 25, eventually met her current partner Nico and the couple got married last year. The pair run an espresso bar together and her husband maintains an account for the business. Although he has a personal Instagram account, it’s inactive. She hard launched their marriage on Instagram with their engagement and wedding photos, but that was the extent of it. 

“I think why I like hard launching so much, and why so many people choose to do it, is that you can sidestep some of the judgment of your peers and maintain some privacy in an era where people are posting every meal that they have,” Danica says. 

Since hard launching is a relatively new, internet-specific term, there is no singular definition. Generally, it is when someone publicly reveals their relationship in a clear, unmistakable way. This could be a couple photo, a relationship announcement or a caption confirming the partner’s identity on social media. Some people may consider merely posting a photo with their partner’s face in it, whether it be a boyfriend, girlfriend or even a situationship – a casual, unofficial form of coupling. Danica was intentional with hers: she posted her engagement and wedding photos after the fact, and had only posted her husband once before she married him.

“I also hard launched having a baby. I didn’t post a single thing that I was pregnant,” she says. “I didn’t post any pregnancy pictures until the baby was already born. So, you know, I’ve hard-launched a lot of things, a lot of big milestones.”

In her viral Vogue article from last year,  “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?,” Chanté Joseph writes that more straight women are shying away from the hard launch, however, and opting for a soft launch of their partners on social media. Some refrain from posting them altogether. some do this because they are worried about being branded as conservative. Others are embarrased or worried they will break up and be stuck with the photos. 

Evidently, not all straight women are shying away from a hard launch. And it’s also not just straight women engaging with these concepts. Kenneth, a 23-year-old MA candidate at a University of London college, regularly posts his girlfriend on social media, although she was the first to hard-launch their relationship.

“She unilaterally took a photo and uploaded it,” he says. “It was something that I would have gotten around to asking, but her doing that made it a lot easier.”

The pair have been together for nine months, and after five months, she decided to take the bull by the horns and hard launch him on social media. “We’d been dating for long enough at that point where it was kind of okay,” says Kenneth.

Like Joseph, who classifies a soft-launch as subtle, Kenneth says: “I think a soft launch leaves some guessing to the viewer. There’s room for speculation, right?”

He adds: “It’s the kind of thing that your friends would crowd around your phone and start asking questions, get a little giddy about, whereas a hard launch doesn’t have that ambiguity.”

As far as seeing other people’s soft or hard launches online, he says: “In truth, I think my reaction as a viewer matters far less, and it doesn’t really mean anything.” He’s happier for the person being comfortable to post the relationship than he is to react to it. 

Kenneth jokes that he’s become the kind of person that he used to hate by posting his partner, though he has warmed to it. “I think it is very sweet that someone wants other people to see ‘look: mine,’” he says, before adding, “Not, of course, in a possessive way.” 

He mentions that in a past relationship, with someone who didn’t have social media, he once asked her permission to post a photo he took in a museum featuring the back of her head. This fits into the concept of a soft launch. Joseph includes this in her list of subtler signs. “A hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head” all fall under this category according to her Vogue article.

“I would define a soft launch as something where you don’t show super defining characteristics of that person, like their face,” says Danica. “I know people like to soft launch by posting pictures of holding hands, or two coffees on the table. It’s more subtle, more like innuendo.”

“I like it. I think it’s cute, rather than the ‘it’s official’ post,” she says.

These aren’t the only guidelines on the internet, though. On Instagram and TikTok, users can scroll through countless how-to videos tailored to the ways in which they can post their partners.

Influencer Amaya Harvey posted a video of ideas for a soft launch. Her main example is a picture of the person and their partner’s shoes. “People are going to be wondering ‘who is that? Is that your man? Is that your friend?’ They’ll never know.” Like Kenneth said, a soft launch allows room for speculation.

Amaya tells her viewers that many of these ideas are for girls only, and not to tag the person they soft-launch in these posts. She also says many of them can only be posted as Instagram stories, or as part of a photo dump, but never alone in the feed. It’s a subtle push to decentre men without completely cutting them out of the picture. 

In the digital era, anyone can be an influencer. Whether a person has 20 or 200,000 followers on social media, the expectation is that every one of them cares about that person’s real life. Whether it be a soft or hard launch, posting a relationship is a surefire way to satisfy followers’ emotional investment. It’s digital PDA, but in this case, everybody does want to see it, even if they judge it.