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.”
Partly because of this, he says, one of the most frequently upvoted types of comment is the experiential kind – someone saying “I went through something like this as well, here’s what happened to me and here’s how I got through it.” But popular advice, he suggests, isn’t always the same as good advice. “For a very long time the canonical trope of r/relationships was ‘delete Facebook, lawyer up, hit the gym’: the advice tends towards the totalising. Someone might say ‘I wouldn’t be afraid to cut contact’ – that often isn’t what people are capable of doing, or what they should do.” This perhaps goes some way to explaining the subreddit’s appeal to lurkers: beyond the pleasures of voyeurism, it allows people to vicariously ingest the kind of tough love they wish they could give themselves.
Moderating r/relationships presents special challenges. “You've got a high potential for disagreements, in-fighting and escalation,” Alex says. “We don't want people making an OP who already feels bad feel worse.” One of their most misunderstood policies, he says, is the ban on gendered terms, which isn’t so much a political decision as a recognition that a well-intended comment can be dismissed if a loaded term appears in it. As he puts it, “You'd be a lot less likely to take a therapist’s advice if they spent half the session calling your significant other a bitch or a dick or whatever else.”
Of course, hanging over everything is the question of veracity. When a jaw-on-the-floor r/relationships post can so reliably lead to Twitter fame, how many OPs are just performing for the cameras? “It would be naive to think we don't get our fair share of trolls and creative-writing projects,” Alex says. A lot of posters, he says, will post from throwaway accounts that they never use again, “which lends itself to some inventive storytelling on occasion.”
To avoid removing good-faith posts on a hunch, the moderators discuss questionable cases but usually err on the side of giving the user the benefit of the doubt. Sorting the wheat from the chaff, he says, “comes down to thinking rationally about whether a person in that specific situation would even care what Reddit thought about it” (in other words, if their distress was genuine, would their first response to be to take it to a discussion forum?), or whether they’re simply trying to engender a certain reaction (most often outrage). “Most of the ‘real’ r/relationships posts are the most mundane: ‘How do I deal with this crush?’ or ‘I want kids and my partner doesn't, what do we do?’,” he says. “So, if you read a post and it automatically has you in your feelings, odds are already high that it might have been created to do just that.”
This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing love, sex and relationships.
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