the mysterious main character who romanticizes her life
why are we obsessed with seeming mysterious online? is it just another way to curate ourselves? is it all an illusion?
Last year, after a situationship1 ended, I cried about it for a couple of days and then made a decision to “romanticize my life.” I decided that I would take the time once or twice a week to go out and do something fun for myself because I needed the distraction. I made the effort to look cute for each excursion because it helped me feel better and because of the possibility of meeting the next boy I’d fall for–I surely wouldn’t catch his attention in sweatpants, now would I?
Naturally, since I was going out more and looking cute, I would post about it on my Instagram. Nothing crazy, just a little outfit photo accompanied by a review of the film I went to see or a pretty view of the park. Or more aesthetic photos if I was posting for the grid and not just stories. I was also just more active on my socials because scrolling provided another distraction and I started following more content creators who influenced me, so I began modeling some of my posts after theirs and I got more ideas for photos. My social media habits tend to fluctuate, so sometimes I’ll post more and other times I’ll post less, depending on my mood, what I’ve got going on, and what I see on my timeline. I’m always looking for what can make a good Instagram post. This was around the time I started making reels and Tiktoks too. After a few months of this near-constant posting, the guy I was in the situationship with unfollowed me (and removed me as a follower). I asked my friend what she thought about it, and she told me, “I can’t say what your Instagram looks like to someone who doesn’t know you, but to me, you started posting a lot more and it was like you were trying to prove something.”
When she told me that, I felt sick to my stomach. I started worrying about how I had been perceived by the guy and if my posting was the reason he unfollowed me. It has bothered me more than I’ll ever be able to publicly admit. Not going to lie, my heart skipped a beat knowing that he saw my posts and it did influence my posting habits a bit: fucking sue me. It’s not like he was the sole driving factor behind every post. But even so, my lingering feelings for him at the time added a layer to everything. I felt exposed and deeply embarrassed. I hardly ever look at my posts from that time period because it brings back all of those feelings, along with shame, anxiety, and questions that I’ll never have answered. That conversation with my friend prompted a 20-day social media break and constant rumination on why he unfollowed me, my own online behavior at the time, and social media in general. I made a plan to post less. I would only post the important stuff. The model-worthy selfies. The most aesthetic of aesthetic photos.
I eventually returned to social media and slowly but surely, I began posting more, way more than I had even before the break. I started having the same thoughts again: How am I being perceived? Does anyone actually care about this? Am I being annoying by posting so much? Maybe I should try being mysterious.
Recently, I’ve seen a trend of posts about being mysterious online. They range from serious how-to guides on “rebranding as hot and mysterious” to self-aware jokes about wanting to be the hot mysterious girl but not being able to shut the fuck up. I’ve posted a few of the jokey ones myself. But does mystery really exist online? Why do people want to be perceived as mysterious?
In short, I think it’s because as humans, we are more obsessed with ourselves and our images than we care to admit, and it’s only made worse with social media. Between the different aesthetics (that girl, cottage core, pink pilates princess, coquette, VSCO girls, ballet core, etc.) and trends (romanticize your life, main character energy, hot girl summer, etc.) we are bombarded with thousands of ways to curate ourselves every day. Posting a photo is no longer just posting a photo, it’s “content.” I could say more about this but I’m planning an essay on it.
All of this is to say that we think people are paying more attention to us than they really are. Wishing for a mysterious online presence is just repackaged Main Character Syndrome because we’re hoping that in our absence, people will think about us and wonder where we are. We still want that attention, just in a way that makes us seem cool and nonchalant. It’s with the hope that people will look at our profile and perceive us as someone who is private or too busy enjoying life to bother much with social media. And when we do post a photo, it’s with the hope that the viewer’s experience is akin to spotting a rare, marvelous creature in the wild. Back when I cared way too much about how many likes I got, I thought that if I started posting less, I would get more likes because of that idea of being rare and marvelous.
There’s a duality to being perceived online, where people simultaneously crave and fear it. We are social creatures and in the 21st century, online is how we communicate. Especially for someone like me who has social anxiety, I show my personality online a lot more than I do in real life. It can be easier to post a meme or a song or a selfie with a clever caption because it can say more about you in less time than it would take to communicate that in person and with none of the awkwardness. There are countless jokes online about stalking your own profiles several times a day to see how you’re being perceived, by strangers and specific people alike (we have ALL rewatched our own stories after seeing that our crushes saw it, don’t deny it!).
But perception can be a source of anxiety too. Stalking your own profiles to examine how you’re being perceived can become obsessive. After The Great Unfollowing, I spent a humiliating amount of time stalking my own story archives from when the guy was following me, obsessing over what he thought and examining my own motivations behind each post. I tend to get anxious over if people are getting the wrong impression of me from my posts, or even worse, if my posts are revealing something about me that I’m not aware of.
On a larger scale, TikTok’s features that allow you to see who has viewed your profile and videos feels way too invasive. Even though the features can be turned off, sometimes I’ll get a notification saying how many people have viewed my profile. I get uncomfortable just thinking about the number of people stalking me, let alone their names and faces. And that’s funny to me because I’ll get excited when a Tiktok of mine gets a lot of views and likes. Theoretically, I should enjoy knowing how many people viewed my profile because it’s not so different from seeing how many people viewed my video, and I’m the one who posted it in the first place so obviously I wanted it to be seen. But so many eyes on a person can wreak havoc if not handled properly and I think that’s why so many celebrities aren’t as active on social media. Their “mystery” comes from a place of self-preservation.
I see this phenomenon of online mystery and perception among women more than men. Nearly every post I see about wanting to seem mysterious online is made by a woman. Not saying there aren’t men who do this, but I feel that there’s more pressure put on women to have perfectly curated online identities. I think this is influenced by female archetypes in the media and the age-old sexist belief that women talk too much and should remain silent, or at the very least, tone down the “chatter” and “gossip.” Twenty or so years ago, women were concerned with whether or not we talked too much. Now that much of our social interaction has shifted to the online landscape, it’s only natural that women wonder if we post too much. We wonder if we’re being annoying, taking up too much space, or showing off. In a patriarchal world where women are expected to mold and diminish themselves to make themselves more palatable or to make others more comfortable, it’s no wonder we are always thinking of what others think of us.
This applies to attraction too. Wanting to seem mysterious online is synonymous with wanting to seem sexy and alluring. Not sharing too much about ourselves keeps up the intrigue and interest of our desired romantic partners. Once we reveal too much about ourselves, there’s the chance of rejection. But all of this relies on our vanity because once again, no one is really thinking about us as much as we are thinking about us. If we do manage to land our crush, the mystery goes away by design. So why bother with it in the first place?
Lastly, I think this trend of wanting to seem mysterious online goes hand in hand with oversharing. Millennials and Generation Z in particular, from what I’ve seen, have a habit of sharing a lot about themselves online, which isn’t always a bad thing but sometimes it leads to trauma dumping or information about their sex lives that no one needed to know (don’t get me wrong, I’m sex-positive and want to erase the stigma surrounding openly talking about sex, but maybe really think about it before letting thousands of people on Twitter.com know exactly how you like to get off). This is delightfully ironic considering we are the first generations to basically grow up being told that the Internet is forever and we should watch what we share online. Once again, we are social creatures and the Internet is how we socialize now. Our in-person social skills were already dwindling when the pandemic came along and shattered them completely, leaving us utterly inept once 2021 allowed us to emerge from our caves again. People never stopped posting online, in fact, they posted even more, and I think this wish for mystery is a response to that. But wanting mystery can only come from a place of embarrassment or shame.
Posting, in whatever form and whatever frequency, inherently requires varying levels of openness and vulnerability. It may sound silly to think that posting about your European summer or a meme about not wanting to work is vulnerable, but every time we post something, whatever it is, we are sharing a part of ourselves with the world and this openness is vulnerable. We are allowing ourselves to be perceived and taking the chance that this perception may not yield the results we want. When we post less in order to seem mysterious, we have more control over our perception because there are fewer opportunities to be perceived and that feels safer. But mystery is just an illusion. The art of being mysterious still relies on the notion of being perceived.
I do think there is a value to privacy online and I do think it’s important to analyze your motivations for posting something because they aren’t always coming from the best place. But at the end of the day, it’s just the Internet. It’s not that serious. Post what you want to post as much as you want to post it. Who cares what people think of it? Because realistically, they’re not thinking much about it at all.
I detest this word but it does succinctly define the current state of modern dating. A “situationship” is a romantic/sexual entanglement between 2 people where the relationship has not been defined. Most of the time, it means that one person wants more while the other just wants something casual. The “situation” is simply that they don’t want you!