On your birthday, you shared your pictures online. A friend likes the post and comments “happy birthday”; they don’t send you a message or call.

Your partner still follows an ex. Someone watches your WhatsApp status regularly but barely responds to your messages. A friend suddenly stops liking your posts, and you start wondering what happened.

These may seem like small things, but social media has given them meaning.

Platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X have become part of how we maintain friendships, keep in touch with family, meet new people and fall in love. But as more of our relationships acquire a digital side, so do our expectations about attention, availability, privacy and affection.

Now, we are not just communicating differently. We are also learning to interpret what people do, and don’t do, online.

From Meeting People to Maintaining Relationships

Before the rise of social media, relationships depended on physical contact and proximity. You were more likely to get close to the people you saw regularly: the friend from school, the colleague from work, the church member in your neighbourhood.

Even meeting potential partners depended on introductions made by family, friends, work, or other social circles. Today, social media has expanded those circles.

A friendship can start on any platform on social media or through a mutual connection online. Many relationships have even blossomed into marriage this way; for example, Nigerian Gospel singer Moses Bliss met his Ghanaian wife Marie Wiseborn via an Instagram dance challenge.

Social media has given relationships a way to remain part of everyday life even when people are no longer physically together.

A friend who moves to another city can still send you a voice note or video call, unlike before, when it had to be only via international calls.

With the internet and the pervasiveness of social media, a sibling living abroad can follow family updates in a WhatsApp group. Couples separated by work or migration, which is on the rise in Africa and popularly called “japa” in Nigeria, can share photos, check in throughout the day, and stay involved in each other’s routines.

A study published in 2023 of young people in Ghana, for example, found that WhatsApp was helping children maintain relationships with migrant parents and create a sense of being together despite the distance. 

In Nigeria, research on distant spouses of about 372 people in Ibadan, Oyo State in Southwest Nigeria found that social media was used to manage relationships across physical distance. For couples separated by work or migration, these platforms provide another way to remain involved in each other’s lives even when they cannot be physically present.

In Kenya, findings suggest that WhatsApp and Facebook were among the platforms most frequently used by family members, with WhatsApp used very often by 39.25% of respondents. Socialisation and information sharing were also among the main reasons families used social media, suggesting that these platforms have become part of the everyday ways families stay in contact and share their lives.

Constant Connectivity and Changing Expectations

Being easier to reach has also changed what people expect from one another. When someone does not answer a message, there is now often another piece of information to consider: they may be online.

WhatsApp shows when someone is active or when a message has been read. Instagram and Facebook show an active status when someone is online. It also shows that someone has viewed your story or is posting while your message remains unreplied.

What used to be a case of not knowing why someone hadn’t returned your call or replied to your text, and giving them the benefit of the doubt of being busy or not simply with their phone, now comes with clues.

You can see that your message has been left as “seen” with no reply and that the person is online while your message is unanswered.

And that can raise questions such as: why haven’t they replied? Did I do something wrong? Who are they chatting to? Are they ignoring me and responding to others?

It is not that the technology itself creates these questions. However, what it does is make information that was previously invisible visible. And that visibility can come with an emotional cost.

Research indicates that the pressure to respond is not imagined. A 2026 study involving 2,367 people aged 15 to 59  found that longer reply delays increased the likelihood of negative emotions, with anxiety emerging as the earliest and most common response, particularly when people could see that their message had been read.

Chisom Glory, a pharmacist, says she does not read too much into it when her friend is online but does not respond to her message. “I think they are probably busy or they got distracted after seeing it,” she says.

Abasi-ibiangake Emmanuel, an entrepreneur, says being left on “read” can feel like a message in itself. “It does speak volumes,” she says. “It just tells me that I’m probably not a priority.”

Family members can also interpret a delayed response as indifference. A simple “seen” notification can become something that needs explaining or even an apology, particularly when the message comes from an older family member.

A person may be at work, studying, or not in the mood to talk, yet their visible online presence can make the lack of a response harder to explain. This has created a strange contradiction in communication: people are more reachable than ever, but being reachable does not mean being available.

Relationships have always involved understanding when someone is present, distracted, or unavailable. Social media has given us more information with which to make those judgments, and it appears to offer more opportunities to get them wrong.

When Likes, Views and Posts Become Signals

If no-response is interpreted as a choice, other small actions such as a like, dropping comments, story views, follow or unfollow on social media can carry meaning of interest, support, affection or even rejection.

Abasi-ibiangake Emmanuel says she does not attach too much importance to likes and comments, but appreciates them when they come from friends because they make her feel that they share her vision and enjoy what she posts.

She also checks who views her WhatsApp status. “I don’t have a particular reason,” she says. “I just love to see who’s enjoying what I post.”

For Aniebiet Alphosus, a civil servant, likes and comments can have a more direct emotional effect. “I like compliments a lot,” he says. “Sometimes I feel satisfied when a friend likes and comments on my post. It makes me feel seen.”

Social media can also become a place where people express things they might not say directly. On WhatsApp and Instagram Stories, for example, someone may post a vague message about a disagreement with a family member, colleague, or partner.

Experts call this vaguebooking, which is writing something emotionally charged to attract attention and validation without context. Williams Melvin, an American associate professor of communication and media studies at Pace University, explains that the prevalence of this in today’s world speaks to the breakdown of communication.

Emmanuel admits she has done this on her WhatsApp stories before, saying it “came from a place of hurt”.

Even the action of following and unfollowing can carry more weight when relationships are involved. Between people who know each other, an unfollow can feel like a statement about the status of the relationship.

For celebrities and social media influencer couples, it is even more significant. Fans scrutinise whether the couple still follow each other, especially if they’ve posted about each other regularly and then stop.

A change in these online behaviours sparks questions and rumours about the relationship. A recent example of this was in 2025 during the 2Baba and Annie Idibia separation news, when fans checked their social handles to see if they had both stopped unfollowing each other.

Social media has therefore created a collection of small signals that people can notice and interpret. And although none of these actions has a fixed meaning, once people attach meaning to them, the absence of one can become part of how relationships are read, dissected, and discussed online.

Love, Friendship and New Boundaries

With social media giving us more ways to communicate, there are new expectations about what people should share, what they should know about one another and, sometimes, what they should be allowed to see.

For couples, these expectations can be complicated. Is your partner expected to post you? Is liking someone else’s photograph harmless? Should you still follow an ex? Should we post our lifestyle online?

These questions are already becoming part of how relationships are negotiated. Research from different parts of Africa suggests that there are cases where the use or improper use of social media has caused relationship issues.

A study of married couples in northern Ghana found that frequent social-media engagement was associated with partner monitoring, suspicion, jealousy, and mistrust. The researchers noted that while social media was not the cause of relationship problems, its use could become a source of tension between partners, particularly when it involved monitoring or behaviours that created suspicion.

For Mrs Susan Awor, a digital marketing strategist, there are unspoken social media boundaries in her marriage.  “We didn’t have to sit down to write any rule,” she says. “But based on the way we both see life, privacy and respect for each other are important to us”.

That understanding helps them navigate their individual use of social media. “As a couple, we like to post about things that make us happy,” she says, “but not every nitty-gritty detail of our lifestyle on social media.” When she is unsure if a post might cross their unwritten boundary, they ask each other. “Sometimes he asks me, and sometimes I ask.” 

That boundary can look different from one relationship to another. One couple may see password sharing as a sign of trust; another may consider it an invasion of privacy. One person may think there is nothing wrong with following an ex, while their partner may see it as wrong.

Friends can face similar issues too. Someone may feel left out for not being included in a WhatsApp group or tagged in a birthday picture, while others may expect their friends to ask before sharing their pictures or personal information online. 

Who gets to decide what is shared becomes even more complicated between parents and children.  “Sharenting”, when parents share their children’s pictures, often minors, videos, or personal information online, has raised concerns about children’s privacy.

A 2025 study on sharenting in Egyptian families examined how the practice is affecting family dynamics and the privacy of children.

A parent may see a post as a harmless family memory and a way to share moments with family and friends, while the child may not want it shared. Relationships of all kinds now have more rules to navigate, as people figure out what it takes to maintain them both online and offline.

Different Generations, Different Rules

People of different generations may use the same social platforms, but they do not attach the same meaning to being connected online.

A 2026 study, titled “Examining the Impact of WhatsApp on Family Interactions among Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z in Urban Southwest Nigeria” and published in the e-Journal of Media & Society, states that generational cohorts differ in their communication style due to technological exposure, as older people lean more towards “pragmatic” exchanges, millennials towards multimodal interaction, and Gen Z lean towards speed and visual expressions; hence the rise of “memes” and “stickers” while chatting.

While Generation X communicated more with extended family, communication with parents and siblings remained strong across all three generations. The differences may therefore be less about whether people use social media and more about what they expect from it.

A younger person may see a WhatsApp message as something that can wait, while a parent may expect a response once the message has been seen. A young person may also consider a post private, while a parent may see sharing it with family as harmless. Even the idea of being “available” online can mean different things to different generations.

Partners from different generations can also bring different ideas about privacy, posting, and communication into the same relationship. Social media has created a space where different generations are having to negotiate what those rules should be.

More Connected, or Just More Connected People?

With social media, our social circles can be much larger. A user can have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of followers, belong to several WhatsApp groups, and remain connected to people they have not seen in years or people they have never met.

But does having more connections online mean we are more connected? The answer is not a simple yes or no. Research from Africa shows that social media can extend relationships that already exist offline.

In Ghana, young people use WhatsApp to maintain relationships with parents who have migrated abroad, while research in Kenya and Nigeria shows that social media has become part of everyday communication among family members. In these cases, social media helps people remain involved in relationships that distance might otherwise make harder to maintain.

Social media can also bring people together around shared interests, professions, or experiences, allowing them to find communities that provide advice, companionship, or a sense of belonging.

At the same time, online interaction can sometimes come at the expense of face-to-face connection. A study of 102 families in Nairobi found that 60% of parents surveyed felt social media took away from their face-to-face family time, while 55.5% said it reduced the time they had to bond with family members.

The issue, then, may not be how many people we can remain connected to, but what happens within those connections. Social media has made it easier to keep people within reach, but reach alone does not determine the depth of a relationship.

Relationships Are Being Rewritten

The human desire to connect and relate with other people never changes; what social media has done is change the environment in which those relationships now exist.

Social media has changed the meaning we attach to some of the things we do online. Small actions can now be read as signs of attention, support, or distance, while the platforms themselves have become part of how we maintain relationships.

They have made staying connected easier, but they have also given us new expectations about what we share, how we respond, and where our boundaries lie. Our relationships now exist in both physical and digital spaces, and require that we figure out how to navigate the space between the two.

Perhaps what is more important is how we use it without allowing the expectations of the digital world to define what we owe one another, and the physical interactions that are needed to keep relationships thriving.

Because as much as social media reveals how connected we are becoming, it also reveals the gaps in how we relate to one another.