I saw a discussion here recently about the parasocial side of Instagram, and it really resonated with me because I’ve experienced this phenomenon from the opposite direction.
I’m currently going through a divorce from someone who has built a significant platform on Instagram. I’m intentionally keeping him anonymous. I’m not interested in identifying him, linking his content, or having anyone figure out who he is. This isn’t really about one particular creator. But being married to someone with an audience has completely changed how I understand social media.
His platform is largely educational, so his public credibility is connected not only to his content but also to how his audience perceives his character, judgment, and values.
I think most of us understand parasocial relationships in the traditional sense: you follow someone you don’t actually know, consume enough of their content, and eventually develop a feeling of familiarity with them.
What I hadn’t really thought about before was what that looks like to the people who actually do know that person. It’s surreal.
You can watch thousands of strangers develop very strong impressions of someone’s personality, values, relationships, and character because they’ve watched that person for years. And those impressions aren’t necessarily completely wrong. That’s what makes this complicated. An influencer may genuinely believe the things they talk about. Their online personality may genuinely be part of who they are. But it’s still only part of them.
The audience doesn’t see what happens when the phone gets put down. They don’t experience disagreements with that person. They don’t share finances, navigate a household, experience their bad days, deal with their contradictions, or see how they behave when there isn’t an audience. They know the content. And Instagram is incredibly good at making content feel like intimacy.
I’ve had the surreal experience of watching strangers develop very confident ideas about someone I actually shared a private life with. I’m not saying everything an influencer presents publicly is fake, nor am I saying the private version is automatically the “real” person.
People are complicated.
Someone can give great advice and struggle to follow it themselves. Someone can have tremendous insight into other people and still have blind spots about their own behavior. Someone’s public and private selves can both be authentic while also being remarkably different.
What interests me even more is what happens when a private relationship breaks down. Normally, two people leaving a relationship each have their own perspective.
But when one of them has a large platform, one person has their experience while the other has their experience plus an established public persona and an audience that already trusts them.
That creates an unusual power imbalance that I don’t think we discuss enough. If personal relationship experiences become content, thousands of strangers can hear one person’s interpretation of events while having no access to the other person’s history, context, perspective, or experience.
And because followers already feel familiar with the creator, they may not experience it as, “I’m hearing one person’s perspective on a complicated relationship.”
It can feel like someone they know is telling them what happened. Except they don’t actually know them.
And I don’t say that because I think the private partner’s version should automatically be believed instead. That would just recreate the same problem in reverse.
My takeaway has been much simpler: I’ve become much more cautious about believing that social-media familiarity gives me meaningful insight into someone’s private character. There are creators I’ve followed for years who I previously would have described as genuinely wonderful people.
Now I catch myself thinking:
Maybe they are.
But I actually have no idea.
I know what they’ve chosen to show me.
I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone who has experienced influencer culture from the other side — whether you’ve dated, married, worked with, been friends with, or been related to someone with a sizable Instagram following.
Did seeing the difference between someone’s public presence and private life change the way you view the people you follow online?
TL;DR: Being married to someone with a large Instagram platform taught me that knowing someone’s content isn’t the same as knowing them. Watching strangers develop confidence about someone’s character based on a curated online presence completely changed how I understand parasocial relationships, especially when private relationships become public content.
