When Lyle “Elle” Bulado was dating an influencer, every date had two layers: The moment they shared, and the version that ended up online on her then-partner’s TikTok and Instagram accounts.

“Sometimes it felt exciting to be part of a storyline,” the 31-year-old, who is a freelance content producer and a nightlife server, tells Yahoo. “Other times it felt like I was a prop.”

She established a few rules with her partner: No showing her face, no tagging, no recording without asking, no posting arguments or emotional moments, no real-time locations and no sharing posts without her approval. They negotiated boundaries around what counted as “private” — soft launches (i.e. ambiguous first photos together), thirst traps and, eventually, even how they talked about their breakup.

As time passed, Bulado found her boundaries and rules violated in small ways, but she’d let it slide because she wanted to “keep the peace.” She found herself switching into “performance mode” when her partner pulled his phone out.

“Even simple things, like walking together, sometimes turned into staging. He’d tell me, ‘Do that again,’ or ‘Say that again for the camera,’” Bulado says. “It pulled me out of being present. The moment stopped being the moment and instead turned into content creation.”

Bulado also posts about her life online, but it was jarring to see her now-ex post TikToks referencing her insecurities or about things she did.

Welcome to dating in 2026, where if you’re a young person looking for love, intimate details of your dates or relationships may very well wind up on the internet, one way or another. You could be fodder for a professional dating influencer, who dub themselves modern-day Carrie Bradshaws and recap their romantic trysts, giving suitors playful nicknames as the fictional Sex in the City columnist did with Mr. Big and the Russian. Or you could become an unsuspecting villain in someone’s dating anecdote that goes unexpectedly, monstrously viral — forever immortalizing you as the guy who offered to do someone’s taxes on the first date then ghosted or the potential soulmate who turned out to be a cheater. It’s a reminder social media algorithms can fling unconsenting third parties to infamy. Just look at Couch Guy, whose muted reaction to a surprise visit from his girlfriend became a widespread TikTok phenomenon for weeks in 2021, or West Elm Caleb, whose bad dating behavior was exposed by a handful of women who realized they’d all been subjected to the same love bombing and ghosting.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that adults under 30 are the most likely age group to be single, with 63 percent of young men and 34 percent of young women falling into that category. Moreover, according to the 2025 yearly report from the dating app Hinge, half of Gen Z men, 45 percent of Gen Z women and 39 percent of nonbinary Gen Z daters said that social media has made them more hesitant to be emotionally open. They’re afraid of being seen as cringe, but that’s a necessary part of finding someone who will love you.

Knowing that we all exist in a panopticon, never exactly sure when we’re being surveilled and shared by people seeking their 15 minutes of internet fame, could make even the most outgoing people shy about opening up. This makes dating, an inherently vulnerable task, an even more harrowing proposition.

Dating in the panopticon

Cynthia Vejar, director and associate professor of clinical mental health counseling at Lebanon Valley College, says dating is an inherently anxiety-provoking experience, even without social media. Two people on a first date must both be vulnerable while still constantly judging and feeling judged.

“[Dating] comes with a laundry list of desires and expectations — some of them explicit, some of them unknown,” she explains. “Now with social media, it’s not only the dating partners who are evaluating and experiencing these moments, but also an imagined or real audience. ”

People feel like they’re being surveilled on dates because they are, Vejar adds. Dating content on social media inevitably highlights the most awkward moments of the process — the unconventional dating app messages, the embarrassing in-person miscommunications and the clumsy process of offboarding a potential suitor who wasn’t right for you. Even when your date doesn’t go viral, the knowledge that it might changes how people behave. It has fundamentally shifted dating into more of a public activity than a private one.

“I wouldn’t quite say I’m afraid of dating, but I’m certainly afraid of going on a date with a stranger,” Vinny, a 25-year-old who lives in California, tells Yahoo.

After seeing so many viral posts recapping dates, Vinny doesn’t see forging online connections then meeting them in-person as a viable way to spark romance — it feels too risky. He and a potential partner would need to start as friends; he likes meeting people through classes and hobbies. For him, it’s not the fear of having his identity exposed that’s the problem. It’s that it makes it so much scarier to be vulnerable during a process that’s supposed to be intimate.

“What makes it weird isn’t the fact that my name is attached, it’s that I’m now being judged by thousands of people that I never gave permission to see that side of me,” he says. “Even if they don’t know my name, I still know that I’m the topic.”

Today’s internet ecosystem doesn’t just encourage people to share their dates — the system rewards those who shame them, as well. Sometimes this is in the interest of holding people accountable for bad behavior, a la West Elm Caleb, but sometimes it’s to drive views. After all, the point of posting something online is to make sure people see it.

In theory, holding someone accountable for their bad behavior is a good thing, but there’s a difference between “accountability and performative exposure,” Jeremy Robinson, a therapist, says. If someone is behaving ethically just because they think they’re being watched, that doesn’t mean they’ve really integrated those values.

“Healthy dating requires psychological safety, not fear of public consequence,” he tells Yahoo. “The goal should be accountability without humiliation, and boundaries without surveillance.”

In defense of sharing freely

As a married woman who hasn’t dated in a decade, I admit that I love watching content creators post about the dates they’ve been on. I especially look forward to the end of the year, when TikTokers share “dating wrapped” videos in which they recap the dates they’ve been on over the last 12 months. It’s as entertaining as a TV show and a fascinating window into how culture is operating today. Being open about the highs and lows of the single life can help people establish a community of others in the same boat, share encouragement, identify harmful patterns and inch closer to falling in love.

One of my favorite dating TikTokers is Jezabel, a 30-year-old lawyer in Los Angeles who posts about fashion, travel and her personal life — whatever’s on her mind, really. Right now, that’s often dating. She noticed those videos tend to go the most viral, too.

"If you think of everything as an opportunity to create, then life just becomes more fun. That's how I see things and everything I do,” she tells Yahoo. “I make the [dating] videos because I think it's fun. I also make them because I love watching date videos.”

With the same mix of optimism and cynicism that women often exhibit when debriefing IRL, Jezabel recaps the dates she goes on and the conversations she’s having between in-person encounters. She’s careful about not sharing any identifying information about the other party.

“I’m not looking for vindication. I’m just talking about my experience, and that’s why it’s actually not relevant at all who they are, because it’s just my story I’m trying to tell,” Jezabel says.

In one of her viral videos, Jezabel recounted one particularly discomfiting experience: One of her dates said that he had watched many of her TikToks, and he asked questions about them. At one point, he told her that she was lucky to be dating him, because “most guys would be like, really uncomfortable” about being posted online. He asked that she wait a while to post about their date, but later he suggested they owed it to her followers to hook up.

The man expressed concern that she would “dox” him if things went south, but also threatened to comment on her posts, which would reveal his own identity. He also wanted to take credit for the success of her account, as if his presence as a character was boosting her ratings before they’d even been on a second date.

Jezabel hasn’t had another experience like that since then, but it sheds light on the complicated dynamics of sharing your dating life so freely online. For some suitors, it becomes enticing to be a character in someone else’s story, even if their identity is never revealed.

Only one person she’s shared dating content about has been uncovered by her audience — an ex she dated for 12 years. She posted a multi-part series about the end of their relationship roughly five years after their final split, and though she didn’t share identifying information, people still found him. This sort of thing happens a lot online — a post goes viral, and suddenly dozens of armchair sleuths are searching for digital breadcrumbs to identify the characters in a story they’re not a part of.

Still, Jezabel doesn’t disclose that she might post about an interaction online before going on first dates, and if someone asked her not to post about them, she probably still would — just carefully. She has a right to post about what’s happening in her life and they’re not being identified, so why would it matter if they’re not yet in a relationship?

“I think I’d be like, I hear what you’re saying, but this is my experience, so I will share it. I’ll just be more mindful about what I share,” she says.

There have been a few times when she’s considered posting screenshots of a conversation, but decided not to because it felt “too intimate or too vulnerable.” It’s not her intent to put people on blast — just to talk about her life honestly. She welcomes anyone who wants to respond and share their side of the story to do so, but they’d have to reveal their identity to go on TikTok and do what she does.

Rules for modern dating

Establishing rules for posting and boundaries, as Jezabel does when casually dating and as Bulado did with her influencer partner, might just be the way forward. People aren’t going to stop sharing their romantic lives online, so the rules people have for dating must evolve.

Of the dozens of people in their 20s and 30s Yahoo spoke with for this story, most had the same general rules for dating in the panopticon: If you’re going to post, withhold identifying details and don’t film without consent. If you happen to find yourself on the other end of the camera, scope out your date’s social media habits. If you suspect you might end up as content, don’t be afraid to voice those concerns beforehand.

Mariah Zur, a 32-year-old therapist in North Carolina who works with young adults navigating dating and also posts about her own dating life, won’t post play-by-plays of dates or share recognizable stories without consent.

“That boundary exists because visibility changes power. Once a moment becomes content, it stops being mutual,” she tells Yahoo. “I decided early on that protecting privacy creates more safety and better connections, even if it's less engaging online.”

Some of her clients say they feel like they’re performing a “dateable version” of themselves while managing a constant fear of being screenshot, filmed or discussed later. The damage has been done — most people are less surprised than they are accepting of the fact that they might end up as content, which reinforces the idea that vulnerability is risky and potentially unsafe.

“For some, it's background noise. For others, it's paralyzing. Either way, it shapes behavior,” Zur says. “Dating in a panopticon doesn't just change how people act, it changes how close they're willing to get. … When every interaction is potentially permanent, people protect themselves by staying shallow.”

Other daters have deployed a range of strategies to manage this new reality. Alex King, a 36-year-old finance platform founder living in London, tends to avoid anyone who advertises their public social media accounts on their private dating profiles. Lachlan Brown, a 38-year-old psychologist and blogger based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, waits three days before sharing a dating story to make sure it doesn’t feel too “tender” when he puts it out in the world, and has instituted a “no content creation during appetizers” rule for himself. Tim Lagman, a 32-year-old sex educator and content creator living in Toronto, says he’ll tweak the details of his stories a bit to make sure his online personality remains a distinct entity from his real self.

The modern quest for love has been forever altered by digital surveillance and the hunger for virality. What’s left is deciding how to prepare for and respond to it.

The fear of having your romantic life broadcast for all to see and judge might seem like an unserious, easily dismissible problem, but it’s woven into our greatest vulnerabilities as humans. So is the inclination to share what we go through, protect ourselves and evolve. Maybe the answer is just posting through it.