Can we start posting our real friends on Instagram again?

Where have all our friends gone? I’m not talking about the selfie you posted on Instagram last week with your running club buddy (“PBs before 9am!”) or your new yoga friend who just happens to have ten thousand followers. I mean your real friends—the ones you’ve known since school, Brownie camp or university. The “normal” people.

For so long, social media was the place where our most meaningful friendships lived. We all followed one another—real people we knew in real life. Our Facebook albums were full of group shots, everyone hugging as though we were in the Friends title sequence. It was cool to show off as many of your mates as possible—that performative element has always been there—but at least they were your actual mates, warts and all. Now, they’re disappearing. How many times have you looked at someone’s Instagram and wondered where their real friends are?

It would be easy to blame the algorithm for making us nervous about our pictures reaching the outermost corners of the internet. Which, though true, feels like an excuse. The real issue, I think, is how social media encourages us to behave: to be the shiniest, most exaggerated versions of ourselves. We’re rewarded for who we know and how well we show them off, which means sharing your normcore friends isn’t seen as cool, or aspirational. Even solo selfies are preferable. “Most of the time I just look like I live alone and sometimes go to the beach,” says Clare, 41.

We’ve been trained to think: Is this picture good enough to post? Is this person? And when it comes to our normie friends, the fear is that their mere presence might topple your curated online persona and expose who you are offline (horror). As Julia, 33, puts it: “It could ruin the vibe.” These days, it can often feel as though only certain friendships are allowed to be visible: the photogenic, high-status ones. The ones that position us as a “girl’s girl”—the kind of woman other women want to be ride-or-dies with. If “love my girlies!” is the new flex now that having a romantic partner is considered embarrassing, only certain “girlies” qualify. Taylor Swift’s 2014 #squadgoals era, which sold us the idea of a perfect group of influential female friends, has a lot to answer for.

And nothing grates more than seeing a photo of your friend with their arm around “this wonderful human!” when you know full well they barely like that human at all. Especially when they haven’t shared a single photo from your walk last weekend. When we do post pictures of our real friends, though, it’s usually accompanied by a caption explaining how we’ve known each other forever. (Translation: I’m worthy.) I should know, because I’ve done it myself. I’ve written about celebrating 30 years of friendship with my oldest school pal and still believe those milestones deserve marking, just as we would in a romantic relationship. But I also know that posting them is, in part, another request for external approval.