At exactly 11.30pm on a Tuesday, I broke a no-texting pact to ask my ex-boyfriend a very important question: “Did you delete me off BeReal as soon as you posted?”
Ah the allusive BeReal — the latest darling in the world of tech. But I’m not here to talk about tech, I’m here to talk about l-o-v-e. Or, love in the age of social media.
The app first came to my attention as my friends and I were walking to a festival back in April. During this long walk down Tamaki Drive, my friends couldn’t stop talking about how “lit” their BeReals would be that day. Their contagious excitement was enough for me to use my precious data and download the app.
BeReal markets its selling point as “Your friends for real” - virtue signalling to how edited they think the social media landscape is. Its attempt to fix this problem manifests in one single notification.
The app sends out an alert at a random time each day, users are then given two minutes to reveal exactly what it is they’re doing, all through a photo taken on both their front and back camera. So if you’re looking dirty and are a moral person (there are cheaters who fake “real” moments), you’ll happily share all that grease with your friends.
The app has since hit peak cultural value. Saturday Night Live just dedicated a skit to it. There have been TikToks of a BeReal notification popping up during Harry Styles and Billie Eilish concerts, the screams of ““BEREAL, BEREAL!” washing across that mosh-pit like a seance. Literally, it’s almost like possession each time the notification appears.
Some places I have been during that daily possession? In my car crying, in line for a concert, sat at my work-desk with 27 dirty mugs, in bed with my ex-boyfriend…
A particular low was when I sent into the app-mosphere a sweet photo of my dirty laundry. How quirky, I thought. It took me three hours to realise that there was a very stained pair of undies at the centre of my artistic pic. So cute.
It’s cute content like this that my ex-boyfriend is choosing to miss out on. What I couldn’t understand was, how much more ‘friendly’ could we get than sharing the most miniscule parts of our days?
After my initial text, he replied with “Lol how did you know” about his deletion of me. Of course, the only correct answer was to remind him that WE ARE MEANT TO BE FRIENDS. Nothing could be more ‘real’ than the fact that we’d be seeing each other at a friend’s birthday on the weekend. Full flesh. Not just front and back camera view.
My sweet ex then reminded me that the app “kinda” comes under the realm of us contacting each other. My reply was very poetic, and inconclusive: that our BeReal friendship is “like a fire in the background that’ll never set your house on fire”. He said he didn’t get it, but later sent another message: “Do you mean it’s nice to see what each of us is up to?”
The truth couldn’t be avoided anymore. We’d been together for two years and the first few months after our breakup, we’d chosen to do a clean-cut communication break. Our new on-and-off talking phase has been fuelled by us trying to learn how to be friends. So frankly, him not wanting to see my daily contribution to the cultural zeitgeist hurt more than thinking about him with someone else.
Because, let’s BeReal for a second. There are some real Ls that get taken in grieving a relationship. For one, my Uber rating has dramatically dropped; I couldn’t get in one without crying for a solid month.
Trying to fill the hole of my relationship also meant the classic technique of relying on good ol’ dating apps. One time, the BeReal notification came up at a fling’s house. I tried to get him into my photo, to which he moved away quicker than the rise and fall of trucker hats. He also lowkey told me off, gruffing “I don’t want to be in it.” Ugh, life isn’t so serious, bro.
I told my ex about this. He got deeply sad and told me this was why he didn’t want me on his BeReal. What I wanted to say was, this man would probably leave me under the Cable Car given the chance, there’s nothing to worry about.
That aside, I think I’ve worked out why I wanted him to be my BeReal friend so badly.
All I wanted from that (slightly humbling) situation with the fling was to recreate the lost joy of a shared social-media literacy. The kind of happiness that comes from things like sending your best friend a TikTok that’s scarily specific to your lives, but also epic in a keep-stealing-my-data kinda-way. I basically just missed my best friend.
There’s so much social media etiquette for after a break up. Mute their Instagram stories, unfollow them, don’t stalk their Spotify… The general consensus is that neither of you needs to know what the other is doing. But what are the rules when you’re trying to relink your lives online and offline as friends?
Maybe BeReal, in its one little snippet glory, is the perfect remedy. Instagram Stories, my ex tells me, are sad reminders of how much of our former shared life he’s not a part of anymore.
We ended up texting till midnight. I noted the time because I got a notification as the clock hit. It was from my bank: I’d yet again forgotten to end my NY Times subscription. $12 lost for yet another month. But what I did gain was a new BeReal friend request.
