Last week, I dove into the Call Her Daddy subreddit. Within its turbulent waters, you’ll find the occasional plea for advice on a fan’s personal dating issue. These are the treasures I seek, and this week we’ve got a doozy that centers around the age-old problem of a boyfriend following Instagram thots.
For the full thread with responses, click here. Otherwise come on in, the water’s fine:They say that if you go looking for something fishy, you’re going to find something. Our troubled advice-seeker went hunting and found that her 27-year-old boyfriend was following an 11k-follower Instagram “model.”
[He said] “She’s objectively good looking but just not my type, doesn’t do it for me”… I am thinking he only said what he said about her because I was there.
Nooo, surely that can’t be true. Knowing him as I do, if he were alone with his buddies, packing lips and playing Call of Duty and drinking orange gatorades, and someone passed around photos of a hot babe emerging from a pool with her underboob bulging like a herniated disc, he would stand up, face the nearest American flag, and stoically declare: “WHILST I RECOGNIZE HER OBJECTIVE ATTRACTIVENESS, SHE DOES NOT ADHERE TO MY SELECTED CRITERIA FOR AN IDEAL MATE. AND THUS, I OBSERVE THIS YOUNG WOMAN WITH TOTAL INDIFFERENCE. GOOD DAY.”
Yeah. He lied.
I don’t care whether he did find her hot or not, but now that he is following her it contradicts what he said?
First, you care, hence the six paragraphs of nervous rambling. Second, to your point, not necessarily. I follow plenty of people who are objectively attractive but not my type/don’t do it for me. Sometimes it’s a professional obligation because they followed you first and they’re in your field. Following someone on Instagram is not necessarily confirmation that you find them hot.
Unless they’re an IG model with 11k followers. In which case yes, he probably finds her hot. That’s too small of a fish to have caught the attention of a guy who doesn’t want to bang that fish.
I feel like the others are mature enough to appreciate her looks and just move on, but for my boyfriend to actually follow her, I find it a little disrespectful.
Here’s the thing: if your boyfriend wants to spend hours zooming in on the boner-conjuring bodyparts of some chick on instagram, he will find a way to do it whether or not he follows her. By that token, just because his buddies aren’t following her doesn’t mean they’re not thirsting over her posts. Heck, it could be that your boyfriend is the only Honest Abe among them. You might argue that him following her is the surest sign that he’s not doing anything weird. It’s too obvious! He followed her knowing you could see that. If anyone is out of line here, it’s all his scumbag friends who take their phones into dark, dank porta potties and pull her up, finish themselves, delete the evidence that they searched for her, and return to their “healthy” relationships.
(This is all presuming that she has a public profile. Which, given she has only 11k followers and is trying to climb from double-A minor league thotness to the 100k verified majors, is almost certainly the case.)
At what point do instagram models graduate to “not a threat” level? Is it 30k followers? 50k? 100k? Ladies, at what point do you simply laugh when you find out that your boyfriend is following an instagram model because she’s so far out of his league that you can sleep peacefully knowing your pathetic, peon boyfriend will never register on her radar?
If the roles were reversed, and my girlfriend were following some chiseled, damp dude who posts in black and white so the shadows accentuate his penile lines, the top tufts of his brittle pubes poking over a towel; a guy who has @Wilhelmina in his bio alongside an email for “booking” that isn’t his name but whose inbox he monitors himself… would that bother me?
I don’t think so. But then again, I’m 31. I’ve grown too old to care, fought too many wars to sweat the small stuff. I think, ideally, that he would be DMing her and she would be responding with single-word answers like “ha” and “fun!” I want them talking in a totally lopsided way. I want that conversation looking like a seesaw where she’s dangling her feet 10 feet in the air while he’s the fat kid on the ground, weighing them down. I want him firing off shot after shot that falls pathetically into some nameless ocean, like a North Korean weapons test. That’s my wet dream.
I have thought about how I will bring it up, if it is suggested I should, and I won’t do it in an aggressive way, I was just going to present my analogies above and ask him if he would think its okay if I did something similar?
There is no way to bring this up that won’t be taken as aggressive. You’re not feeling your boyfriend out on renewable energy and its impact on the coal industry; you’re asking why he follows a hot chick on Instagram.
His likely answers:
Once those fall flat and you start asking follow-up questions, he’ll get mad that you snooped through his following list. Then you’ll get mad that he’s mad, and it all unravels until you retire to separate quarters, slamming the doors behind you, marinading in your despair until he timidly taps at your door, enters, climbs into bed, spoons you the right way, kisses your neck gently, whispers those magic words—”she’s objectively good-looking but not my type”—and you both kick off your undies for a healing paddle to the shores of intercourse island.
Supplementary quantum physics reading for people with brains:
Are you guys familiar with the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment? I might cut some corners here, but the idea is that a cat is sealed in a box with a poison that may or may not have killed it. Without being able to see inside the box, we can consider that the cat is both alive and dead—that two realities can exist at once. It is only once we open the box and observe the cat that we create one reality.
The act of opening the box effectively seals the cat’s fate. If we were to leave the box alone, we could not know that the cat was alive, but nor could we know that the cat was dead. Thus, if we open the box to find the cat dead, our curiosity… killed the cat.
Similarly, if we don’t open our boyfriend’s following list, we’ll never know if he is or is not following the model. If we look and see that he is, then we have collapsed those two possibilities into one state of being. Our observation has perhaps caused that reality. And from a metaphysical standpoint, we are to blame.
If you don’t open the list, your boyfriend didn’t follow her. If you open the list, YOU created the reality that your boyfriend follows her.
Don’t open the list.
If you like podcasts and want to hear from the other side of the equation, check out Oops. We cover this stuff with gusto!
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