WIRED
You probably already have a favourite. Maybe it’s the guy whose ex-girlfriend would briefly unblock him on WhatsApp every Monday to send him Game of Thrones spoilers, or the marine biologist whose boyfriend surprised her with a large octopus on her birthday. Or maybe it was the poster who’d met his girlfriend – a distant cousin – through the DNA testing site 23andMe. Reddit’s r/relationships, the subreddit where people ask for love-life advice, is a uniquely compelling prospect: a vast problem page that invites audience participation.
Launched in 2013, the subreddit currently has 2.2 million subscribers and is visited by tens of thousands of people every day. It has also become Twitter’s guilty pleasure – screengrabs of the wildest posts go viral, and there’s even an account dedicated to them, @redditships (which styles itself as “choice quotes from the garden of r/relationships”). If your only exposure to it has been through social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking people were all there purely to rubberneck at strangers’ romantic misfortunes. But you’d be wrong.
“If you’re running a relationship support forum, you probably care,” says Tim Squirrell, a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh who focuses on online communities. Platforms shape the kinds of discourses people have – in r/relationships’ case, even a cursory look reveals that the moderators have put a lot of effort into trying to create an environment in which people feel able to unburden themselves. The subreddit’s mission statement, after all, is “helping people in need”.
The (lengthy) rules page prohibits advocating violence, bigoted language and gender stereotyping, as well as victim blaming and – in hope rather than expectation, perhaps – cross-posting. Then there’s the prescribed formatting for posts (ages, genders and relationship length at the start, a TL;DR at the end), which feels in this context not unlike the conventions that counsellors and therapists use to help their clients feel “contained” (a 50-minute slot at the same time each week, a room that never changes). There’s been a concerted effort to combat the subreddit’s sensationalist reputation. A few years ago stories were allowed more than one update, which led to some taking on the feel of a soap opera; this is no longer permitted.
“I was initially drawn to r/relationships out of sheer curiosity – both that people were openly sharing these stories and how outlandish some of them seemed,” says Alex (who asked for his surname not to be published). An American, he first subscribed four years ago. A little while later, he found himself posting about a situation in his own life. “Everyone gave me conscientious, well-meaning advice, whether they agreed with my side of the story or not,” he says. He’s now been a moderator on the subreddit for about 18 months, and although r/relationships has doubled in size since he first saw it on the homepage, he says, “that spirit remains the same. People really are trying to give the advice they think will help OP [the ‘original poster’] navigate their situation, and we have some really great long-time users.”
Alex was the only moderator willing to go on record for this story; since r/relationships went mainstream, the subreddit has mostly been the subject of salacious listicles and coverage which the team feel violates posters’ privacy. The moderators deal with hundreds of posts each day. The majority get zero or one upvote, but almost all attract a lot of comments. And although all human life is here, some themes come up over and over again: commitment issues, fundamental differences of opinion within a couple (whether or not to move house, get a pet or have children, for instance) and infidelity. “The posts which tend to do well are either the weird ones, or ones in which people relate to the problem, or ones where people find it an interesting problem or like the answers,” Squirrell observes. Posts that suggest resilience on the part of the OP are another vote-winner. “Reddit is predominately male – although I’d guess r/relationships is closer to 60/40, or maybe even 50/50 – and there’s this thing that another researcher calls a ‘geek masculinity sensibility’,” – the idea that you should support emotional strength in others, rather than trying to tear them down.
In the real world, talking about issues in your relationship is hard. It can leave you feeling exposed or ashamed, and might also have dire consequences, like losing a job, if the person you confide in breaks your confidence. “You can post something with a feeling of a qualified lack of judgement,” Squirrell says of the subreddit. “People can lambast you, and that can still feel bad. But it’s still better than the alternative.”
And while the memory of one friend telling you to leave your partner can be easy to dismiss, a whole page of replies to that effect feels more concrete – and if you’re trying to summon the courage to do something difficult, that has value. “A lot of people end up posting when they’re at a tipping point,” Squirrell says. “Sometimes they’re genuinely looking for input – and obviously it has to be framed as though they are – but quite often they’re looking for someone to push them over the edge into action.”
