Patricia Grisafi
For some people, social media is a passion. They have carefully curated accounts, make work connections, and save memories. Many careers are launched through social media and moments can be shared with loved ones who are miles away. Sometimes, the amount of time folks spend on social media can be frustrating, but is it ever right to just delete an account because your partner is constantly logged on?
On Reddit, one annoyed partner decided that yeah, it’s okay to delete his girlfriend’s Instagram account because he claims she spends too much time on it.
“My girlfriend [24F] and I [27M] have been dating for 5 years now. I don’t have any social media – no facebook, instagram, twitter, snap etc. I am a private guy and like keeping my personal life to myself,” he wrote for thousands of people to read on Reddit.
“My girlfriend on the other hand, is obsessed with instagram. She has over 800 photos posted on instagram and is constantly scrolling through instagram every waking moment she’s not working or sleeping. She would rather spend time attention-seeking from her 5000+ followers than spend some quality time with me.”
And honestly, once we learn more about the OP, we can understand why she’d rather do that.
“I confronted her a few times about this in the last few years, and she always tells me she’ll cut down on her instagram usage but she never did. Last week she was using my laptop because her laptop was at the store and noticed she forgot to logout from her email. I did the forgot password thing and reset her password to log in. I googled ‘how to delete instagram’ and followed the link and deleted the account.”
“She woke up the next morning and started screaming and crying about how I permanently ‘deleted’ her instagram instead of “deactivating” it and that I betrayed her trust etc. Now she won’t talk to me because she says she can’t recover instagram and her profile of 10 years is lost forever. I think she’s being incredibly childish and throwing a tantrum over some random app,” he concludes.
Reddit did not agree. They observed the OP’s controlling behavior, selfishness, pettiness and his willingness to violate his partner’s privacy.
“He might not value Instagram, but she clearly does. Whether she used it to keep in touch with friends, express artistic talent, or earn income he has no right to destroy it. Is he gonna hack her bank accounts as well when she spends money on stuff he doesn’t approve of? She should run…If he needs to date someone who isn’t on social media he should find someone like that, he needs to get therapy for his controlling behavior either way,” said user insomniac29.
“He deleted his GF’s account for no other reason than personal pettiness. The site is like a scrapbook and he effectively wiped 10 years of history for her to ‘protect his privacy’ while voicing his personal crap on reddit. And he hacked her, a pretty nice violation of her privacy,” said BigMeaning0.
“OP, her account is HERS. It belongs to her and to her only. How would you feel if someone took something you love and destroyed it? She had this account for 10 years. YEARS, OP. If you wanted her attention, you should’ve had just talked to her a few times. If she said she will cut down on it, just REMIND her of it or make a deal that if you two are spending time together, she should not play around with her phone,” said miss_fantazmagoria.
To complicate matters, the OP responded to a bunch of Reddit commenters explaining that he is rich and his girlfriend “depends on him financially”—which just caused folks to bring up the issue of economic abuse even further. He also disparaged her education and basically called her a failure.
“You destroyed her intellectual property. That is abusive,” noted SpoilThePeach. “Break up with her if you don’t like her conduct and repeated conversations don’t produce acceptable results.”
“Economic abuse is a form of abuse when one intimate partner has control over the other partner’s access to economic resources, which diminishes the victim’s capacity to support themselves and forces them to depend on the perpetrator financially,” NoOneIsAnAsshole quoted from Wikipedia.
Looks like the OP’s girlfriend needs to delete him from her life—and soon.
