Are 'quiet relationships' the way of the future?

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.

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 their preference for "quiet" or "private" relationships rake in thousands of views.

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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 favourite memes.

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 fiancé in San Marcos, Texas, and asked CNN not to use her last name for privacy reasons.

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.

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.

“There’s less incentive to ‘keep up’ with others’ posts,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Centre and professor emerita of media psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. “This can protect against relationship envy or distorted expectations, comparing the relationship to others’ public presentations.”

While Val said she has certainly felt the pressure to show off her love life in the past, she ultimately thinks a digital shrine to her fiancé would feel too false.

“It feels like I’m trying to prove something, to prove that we love each other, when the proof is all around us: our cats, our home and life that we’ve built together,” Val said. “He doesn’t need to see me posting about him to know that I love him.”

Jason, 21, who has been seeing his current girlfriend for nearly a year but isn’t posting any photos of the two of them together, admits the main reason he’s not oversharing is to avoid putting his relationship through the same scrutiny his friends apply to other couples.

“I don’t like the thought of being perceived and talked about,” said Jason, a student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who asked CNN to only use his first name for privacy reasons. “I’ve even stopped talking to a lot of my friends about (relationships) because I found that they’ll start to see your partner differently.”

For Jason, his reluctance to share about his love life is not so much a fear of being publicly shamed or bullied, but the imagined group chat discussions, private direct messages and Instagram investigations he may be subjected to.

Social anxiety is nothing new, but for a generation raised online, a new form of it has become endemic to our way of relating to one another, said Brooke Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Imagined surveillance,” as she calls it, is the feeling that your every move is being watched and scrutinised by an ambiguous audience, and she said it’s a product of how social media has normalised voyeurism.

“To broadcast your relationship means to open it up to a public audience and have people trawl through images and dissect the communication,” Duffy said of her research. “Of course, influencers are under a high-powered microscope, but we found this was an organising principle for how young people create content online.”

The fear is that others aren’t just looking at your relationship — they are staring at it, digging into it, and passing moral judgments on you and your partner. All of that noise, real or imagined, can cloud your own appraisal of the person you’re with, especially early on in a relationship, said 26-year-old Jillian St. Onge.

“I refrained from sharing my relationship with my followers for a while, and also from my family truthfully,” said St. Onge, who lives in New York and is now engaged to her partner. “Heartbreak is hard enough on its own, so when everybody knows everything too early, you feel like you owe others, even random people, an explanation as to what went awry. … Being intentionally private allowed me to form opinions for myself and really focus on building a deep connection.”

The days of posting moody, vague jabs at your partner during a period of conflict are over, St. Onge said. While it can feel vindicating to rally an audience around your perspective, the move is shortsighted and often stokes more drama than it’s worth, she said.

But despite being highly aware of their own surveillance, members of Gen Z still manage to invent new ways of indulging the desire to share. “Soft-launching,” for example, is one way someone can share the fact that they are in a relationship without giving away the identity of their partner, Duffy said.

Pinterest is flooded with soft-launch ideas: two plates on the dinner table, two silhouettes cast against a blank wall, two pairs of shoes sitting next to one another.

For St. Onge, who regularly posts videos of her day-to-day life, a soft launch on her socials after about five months of dating her now-fiancé was exactly the level of privacy she needed.

Jason also makes a distinction between what goes on the “grid,” where photos are permanent until deleted, and on the “story,” where posts disappear within 24 hours.

“A story doesn’t have to have the same communicative impact as something that’s on your grid,” Duffy explained. “It captures a fleeting moment, and I think because of that, people are more willing to step outside the boundaries of their personal profile or brand.”

From an outsider’s perspective, privacy and secrecy can look the same, said Lia Huynh, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in San Jose, California.

“However, the motive is different,” Huynh said in an email. “Privacy aims to protect, to be cautious and careful. Someone who wants privacy doesn’t want the relationship to be hidden, but feels it is necessary to protect the relationship.”

Secrecy, on the other hand, comes at the expense of the other person, and often has a more selfish motive, such as feelings of shame or embarrassment, Huynh said.

So how can couples tell the difference? First, Huynh recommends that private partners identify their own motives.

“It’s important for the person who wants privacy to make sure they communicate that they are not ashamed of their partner, nor are they doing it to keep their options open,” Huynh said. “Make sure you both agree on what this looks like.”

Weiss said communication can be tricky when dealing with a mismatch of expectations, in which one partner values the input of their wider social circle more than the other does.

It’s also important to have at least one or two people outside the relationship you feel comfortable talking to when you just need to vent or if the conflict becomes too difficult to manage on your own, Weiss said.

“I always say listen to your gut. … It comes down to identifying values. Whatever the relationship struggle you’re experiencing is, ask how (you can) come up with solutions in a way that aligns with your values,” Weiss said.

Overall, to Rutledge, who has studied social media since its inception, the “quiet relationship” is a wholly positive turn for how young people conduct their personal lives.

“We’ve seen more young people opting for digital detoxes, living in the moment,” Rutledge said. “It’s not necessary, but it can be very revealing. Anything that encourages people to be more (intentional) with their use of social media, rather than passive, is a good sign.”