Forget 'Instagram Official': If You Want To Make A Partner Feel Secure, Do This Instead

In the modern age of dating, it’s usually safe to assume a couple is getting serious when they post a photo together and make it “Instagram official.”

But if you’re dating and really want to signal your commitment to a new partner, you might be better off simply scaling back on those “likes” of other people’s thirst traps.

That’s a key takeaway from a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at how certain social media behaviors can strengthen relationship stability, especially for people with high levels of attachment anxiety.

To create a feeling of security, it’s less about posting about the relationship ― tagging your partner in a story, for instance, or hard launching them on Instagram with a mid-carousel photo. Instead, what fosters a real sense of security is the way in which you interact with others online: Are you “liking” random people’s selfies? Following a ton of hot people? Most importantly, are you actively shutting down threats from attractive people?

“It appears, at least from my work, that effective commitment expressions on social media rely less on a presence of the positive and instead require an absence of the negative,” said study author Alexandra E. Black, a postdoctoral scholar at the Social Connection and Positive Psychology Lab at Arizona State University.

“There’s a well-known study finding that ‘bad is stronger than good’ ― and I think that dynamic plays out on social media as well,” Black told HuffPost.

In the study, Black found that anxious people reported feeling threatened when seeing online “evidence” that their partner may be interested in someone else, she told HuffPost. (Those with anxious attachment styles may fear abandonment in