Most Saturdays, my husband Seth and I spend approximately the whole day with our phones aimed at our son, taking pictures of him from slightly different angles. There’s a diptych of him dancing in the bagel shop. There’s one of him scooting in the park. Until a few weeks ago, we'd spend our Saturday night bickering over beers about who got to post which photo to our separate Instagram accounts.
It’s a glamorous life.
Mutual friends who follow us both on Instagram often wound up seeing our days play out there in mirror images of each other: pictures of me and our son on Seth’s Story; photos of Seth and our son two minutes later doing the exact same activity on mine. That might feel a bit repetitive for them, but it gets weirder for everyone else. Seth’s friends who don’t know or follow me only ever see pictures of me, and my friends who don’t know or follow Seth only see pictures of him. “My friends from high school see you on Instagram all the time but probably have no idea what I look like now,” he observed a few weeks ago. This is a common problem for couples.
Now, we have a lot of real things going on—we’re about to move across the country, so we need to find a new place to live, and a new school for our son, and all the other hard tasks that come with uprooting a life. So, naturally, instead of doing any of those things, we decided now was the right time to solve this thorny Instagram problem once and for all. And we wouldn’t stop until we landed on a perfect solution.
Maybe we should post more selfies? No, too much vanity. Maybe we should just swap the photos we take of each other and post them to our own accounts? Too much work. Hmm. We poured some wine. That’s when we get our really good ideas. What if, Seth posited, we just had one account?
I scrunched up my face. I worried. Wouldn’t that entail a loss of self-identity? Then again, what bearing does Instagram have on our real identity, anyway? As individuals Seth and I are very different, yet our Instagrams are always almost identical---proof in itself that these curated windows on existence are not real insight into a person’s soul. They are merely a record of our weekends.
So Seth and I did it. Two weeks ago, we each put a photo of our faces on our personal Instagram accounts, overlayed with the message: “Follow our new family account at [REDACTED]. This account is over.” In the caption, we explained this was an open-ended experiment and that we would no longer be checking or posting to our personal accounts. Then we uploaded a very cheesy family photo to our new account, argued one last time over the name, each logged in on our respective phones, and sat on the couch clicking to “follow” all the people we had followed separately.
Immediately, things went wrong. Instagram flagged our account as suspicious because we were following people too quickly. After managing to add around 200 friends, we got locked out for 24 hours. This was the first indication that Instagram is not set up for this kind of shared experience. To Instagram, a couple wanting to use the service together is a bot.
We’d wondered whether people would actually follow the new account, and we quickly got our answer: Some would! But not necessarily the ones we expected. Instagram is weird like that---sometimes your most avid “fans,” who watch every Story and send you emoji DMs, are people you barely interact with in real life. All our superlurkers and hypercommenters followed the new account immediately. As did our college friends and former colleagues. It was our family members who hesitated---knowing us well enough, perhaps, to suspect we’d quickly tire of the experiment and close the new account, thus making a fool of them.
Well, joke’s on you, fam. After 10 days of using our new shared account, and despite near daily vexations, we’ve decided we like it. One of my brothers finally relented and followed us. Now he can see the video of his nephew singing “London Calling” into an unplugged microphone while wearing banana pajamas. High-quality content! The other brother is not yet convinced.
That’s because the idea of the joint account for a couple is admittedly obnoxious. It’s social media PDA, like when people enter a new relationship and the oxytocin makes them temporarily insane so they refer to themselves as “we” all the time. It’s gross. I understand not wanting to support it! I hate when people make Instagram accounts for their babies or dogs for the same reason---it’s saccharine. But I also always follow those accounts because I love pictures of babies and dogs. (The only thing I don’t love about those accounts is when people pretend their children or pets are writing the captions. Even I have a cheese threshold.)
It’s kind of mortifying to me to be such a “we” on social media, but it’s also truer to our lived experience. As our very best friend put it, “The idea of it is annoying, but the reality is that it’s better!” Now she has us all in one place. Our feed approximates the experience of hanging out with us IRL all the more accurately.
Not everyone agrees with her. An old colleague of mine, who followed the new account, told me that though he will remain a loyal follower because he’s a mensch, he finds the whole thing annoying because he’s never met Seth and therefore doesn’t care much about Seth’s perspective, which is fair.
But for the most part, when polled, our followers said they liked the new account, and judged it to be only mildly irritating. Hell, only mildly irritating? I’ll take it.
The things Seth and I find aggravating about the new account are not what I anticipated. I thought it would be confusing to DM with our friends and comment on their photos because they wouldn’t know which of us they were talking to. Turns out, they know it’s always me because Seth has never in his life commented or sent a DM. I thought it would be weird because we have such different Insta habits---I hit the heart button on basically every photo I see on Insta, and Seth never has---but it turns out that doesn’t matter at all. Sure, there are probably people he’s always followed who are surprised that our account is now liking their photos at a rapid clip, but as it turns out, I don’t care! Also, you’re welcome.
No, the actual annoyances of sharing an account have nothing to do with us and everything to do with Instagram and its blasted algorithm. Because Instagram is not chronological, when I scroll through our account idly waiting in line at the pharmacy, it marks those posts as seen and buries them for Seth. If he watches a Story, that story cycles to the end of our feed and I never see it. In this way, Instagram thwarts our attempt at having a joint experience.
Other than that, though, there are real benefits. For one, we’re both looking at Instagram less. That’s partially because making the conscious decision to merge accounts made us more aware that the pressure to cultivate some kind of “personal brand” on Instagram is absurd. And it’s partially that my feed is now filled with some people who I don’t really care about, so the whole thing is a little less appealing to me.
The experience also expanded both of our horizons a little bit. I’m exposed to way more tattoo artists from Europe, and he’s seeing a lot more women journalists from around the world. Plus, we seem to have thoroughly confused Instagram’s ad mechanism, which is now serving me equal parts Jack Ryan movie promos along with my customary (and unwanted) bra suggestions. We’re ad disruptors!
The part I like the best is checking our own Story and seeing something Seth has posted. I used to always rewatch my own Stories anyway, but it was a guilty act of navel gazing. I’d live my day, upload my day, then rewatch it. Why? I don’t know. I was just compelled to. Now that same compulsion lets me find unexpected images---photos or videos of Seth’s day. It’s nice.
And we’re not the only ones doing this, though it’s far from a trend. Journalist Taylor Lorenz, who covers internet culture for The Atlantic, has two shared accounts with her boyfriend. They have kept their separate accounts, and use the two joint accounts to focus on specific interests. Teenagers commonly use the platform in a similar way, she points out. They’ll sometimes share group accounts with friends to post about something they’re all into, or more commonly to have a place to debate hot-button issues.
Brands, of course, also have joint accounts. WIRED’s Instagram has multiple administrators. A few people on Twitter told me they have family members or friends with couples or family accounts. Given that, it would be nice if Instagram would create a proper group accounts option to support our kind. Instagram declined to comment on any plans to introduce group accounts.
“I feel like running a joint account helps relieve pressure,” Lorenz says. Like me, she’s an active liker and commenter, but in joint accounts she doesn’t worry about engaging with everyone as much. “I think overall they're a good thing,” she told me in DM. “Since you can sort of both delude yourselves into thinking the other person is doing all the mundane work of keeping up with likes, engaging with all your friends' latest content etc, so then you check it less, which leads to a better life.”
Yes, I still feel a twinge of embarrassment about sharing an account with Seth sometimes. But so far, my tiny hang-up is the only real downside to our new joint-account life. If you’re considering it and you’re sensitive to the judgment of others, you should know that when I asked on Twitter whether anyone knew people who did this, the common response was “ew” and “I assume anybody who replies to this in the affirmative gets arrested.” But you know what? Lock me up, folks, because I love love and I love our joint Instagram account.
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