The most common ick among women right now is an aesthetic man. You know the one. He curates carousels. He takes an artsy overhead shot of his coffee, then a mirror selfie at the gym, posted with a Drake or Kanye track underneath. On paper, this is an unreasonable thing to be icked by. Men are allowed to care about vanity too. But there's something specific about a man spending hours of his day curating a grid that lands wrong. Men used to go to war, now the battle is a nine slide layout and the right filter.
To find out whether this was just personal bias or a genuine cultural verdict, I asked three women, aged 21, 25 and 34, what “too online” actually looks like when you're dating someone. Their names have been changed: Maya, 34, Tara, 21, and Rhea, 25.
It starts with the gym selfie. Then comes another. And another. Add thirst traps, borrowed poses and an Instagram feed that feels a little too carefully constructed. Maya keeps her biggest social media icks simple: “All of the above, plus any pics with too many girls.”
Rhea's list is longer: “Anything from gym selfies to liking celebrity photos to following over 1000 girls and not having them follow you back.” Even the follower list gets scrutinised. Both Maya and Tara point to the same unofficial rule: if a man's followers are overwhelmingly women, questions start to creep in. It's not necessarily about cheating; it's about what his feed says he wants. Attention, perhaps.
Rhea admits she's quick to form opinions based on what she sees online. Instagram was once her first stop when investigating someone — who he followed, what he wore, where he went. But that detective work isn't always accurate. Sometimes, the person behind the profile is nothing like the person on the screen. Which raises the bigger question: are we judging men for who they are, or for the character they play online?
Tara recalls a colleague who was “the most introverted person I've ever seen” in real life, but seemed to transform on Instagram. Suddenly, he was posting smoking pictures, leather jackets and photoshoot-style images. The contrast was almost comical. Then there was the influencer whose Instagram was practically flawless. His face, body and clothes looked exactly as good in person as they did online. But there was a problem. “Literally no personality,” Tara says. He wasn't a catfish. He was exactly what his Instagram promised. The issue was that his Instagram had promised everything.
Rhea has experienced another version of the same phenomenon: men who can communicate beautifully online, just not directly. “There was an entire time when somebody would put all these quotes on their Instagram stories, but they literally could not reach out to me and talk to me about their feelings,” she says. There is something almost absurd about broadcasting your emotional state to hundreds of people while being unable to tell the person you're dating how you actually feel. Social media has made self-expression incredibly easy. You can post the quote, the song, the sunset or the cryptic story. You can communicate without ever having to actually communicate. Perhaps that is the real problem with being too online: eventually, the performance becomes easier than the person.
Then there is the most dangerous button on Instagram: the like. Not messaging another woman. Not commenting. Liking. It is the smallest, most meaningless interaction on the app, yet it can apparently say quite a lot. Maya considers liking “cringe content or other influencer girls” a major red flag. For Rhea, the problem used to become almost forensic. New follower? Check if it's a girl. New like? Check who it was. New comment? Check what kind of heart he used. “Constantly looking to see if they've liked the picture or commented” eventually became an ick in itself.
The irony is that social media turns dating into surveillance. Instead of getting to know one person, you suddenly have access to a cast of hundreds: his exes, his friends, the girls he follows, the girls who follow him and every thirst trap he has ever double-tapped. The relationship becomes less about what he says to you and more about what the algorithm catches him doing.
Perhaps the biggest plot twist is the platform these women actually find attractive: LinkedIn. Maya considers a good LinkedIn a genuine green flag. “If he has a fire LinkedIn then he is more attractive to me,” she says. Being interested in technology, AI, building a company or sharing knowledge is still attractive. Rhea has taken this one step further. “Now I feel I am the one who's checking people's LinkedIn even before opening their Instagram,” she says. What she wants to know isn't what restaurant he went to last weekend. It's what he studied, what he wants to do and where he's going. “I want to know what have you studied, what are your ambitions, what are you moving towards,” she says.
Maybe the problem was never the gym selfie, the coffee picture, the outfit carousel or even the thirst trap. It's the feeling that there is more effort going into being perceived than actually being a person. Your Instagram is a shop window: you choose what goes in it, what stays out and which version of yourself you want strangers to see. There's nothing wrong with that. But when the shop window becomes more interesting than what's inside, people notice.
Rhea says she's often been more pleasantly surprised by people in person than she was by their Instagram. The real person beat the profile. And maybe that's what women actually mean when they call a man “too online”: not that he uses Instagram too much, but that he seems to need it too much. In a world where everyone is trying to look interesting online, having a life you don't feel the need to constantly prove might be the most interesting thing of all.
One exception, universally agreed upon: "Unless he's posting his dog, that's cute." Some things remain undeniably attractive.