It starts innocently enough. You meet someone on a dating app. You swap Instagram handles. You watch their Stories. You notice where they go, who they follow and what they're doing on a Saturday night. Then, suddenly, you're investigating their ex's Instagram from 2019.
Welcome to digital detective dating — the increasingly normal habit of researching someone online that can sometimes cross a line into obsessive monitoring or stalking.
Let's be clear: looking someone up online isn't automatically creepy. Googling a date before meeting them, checking that their social media matches who they claim to be, or having a scroll through their public profile can be a perfectly sensible part of modern dating.
The problem starts when curiosity becomes surveillance.
When does checking become too much?
There is a difference between seeing someone's latest Instagram post and constantly monitoring their digital activity.
If you're repeatedly checking whether they've been online, tracking their location, analysing who has liked their posts, creating fake accounts to view their content, or contacting them across multiple platforms after they've stopped responding, it's time to step back.
The same applies when someone is doing it to you.
Your date doesn't automatically have a right to know where you are simply because you've exchanged numbers. Nor does someone you've been seeing casually become entitled to your passwords, private messages or constant updates about your whereabouts.
And while checking a partner's location might be mutually agreed upon for practical reasons, secretly tracking someone or using location information to monitor their movements is a very different situation.
The social-media spiral
Dating apps can make this behaviour particularly tempting.
Someone hasn't replied for three hours, so you check their Instagram. They're active. Then you notice they've followed someone new. Suddenly you're wondering who that person is, whether they've met and whether their latest selfie was secretly aimed at them.
Congratulations: you've turned three hours of silence into a full FBI investigation.
Social media rarely gives you enough information to know what's actually happening. Filling in the blanks can create anxiety, jealousy and assumptions that may have nothing to do with reality.
So what's the boundary?
A useful question is: Would this person feel comfortable if they knew exactly what I was doing?
If the answer is no, that's worth paying attention to.
Healthy dating involves curiosity, but it also involves privacy and consent. You shouldn't have to surrender your digital life to prove that you're interested in someone.
And if someone's behaviour towards you makes you feel watched, followed or monitored, don't dismiss that feeling simply because the relationship is new.
Romance should involve getting to know someone.
Not conducting surveillance on them.
By VavaViolet Magazine's Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Sophie Blackman
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