The 'grandstanding' theory is the reason why most loved-up couples you know don't work.

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We all know that one couple.

The "we found each other in this cold, cruel world and now you all have to suffer by watching us kiss in every imaginable setting" couple. The one whose Instagram stories are a rotating carousel of gushing tributes, hard-launched anniversaries (happy two-and-a-half months, by the way) and collaborative photo dumps that serve as stark and shocking reminders that you can't even get a text back.

They post so much of their love online you'd think they had struck a brand partnership deal with Cupid himself. You almost feel like you're in their relationship, too — third-wheeling through every grainy dinner photo, every "random" delivery of a bouquet of roses, every beach walk captured at golden hour. 

Watch: The Spill on the most unexpected celebrity couple of 2025. Post continues below.

It's parasocial romance theatre: you know their inside jokes, their pet names, the fact that he snores when he's had more than three beers. Except you're not dating either of them. You're just trapped in the emotional splash zone. 

And yet, if you've been alive for more than three business days, you know what happens next. They split. Publicly. Dramatically. Shockingly "out of nowhere". Except… it wasn't really that unexpected. 

Because we — the real relationship experts (by which I mean women who have been emotionally demolished and rebuilt more times than an IKEA bookcase) — have a theory. We call it grandstanding. The louder you scream "forever" online, the faster forever seems to run out of breath. 

Grandstanding is performative PDA in its final form. It's not just about showing off the fact that you're in love, but about proving it, to yourself as much as to everyone else. Deep down, if you were truly that secure about your relationship, you wouldn't need the algorithm's applause to validate it… right? 

The celebrity world proves it better than any of us ever could.

Exhibit A? Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes. A couple so aesthetically perfect they looked as though they were manifested by Pinterest. Just days before their breakup was announced, Chase was on Instagram typing out a poetic birthday tribute to his "love". 

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A post shared by @hichasestokes

"Although you keep saying you're not excited for 32, I'd say I'm lookin forward to more of this," he wrote. 

Two days later? Spitsville. With an official statement delivered from her team straight to People Magazine saying it was over. Proof that nothing says "the end is near" quite like a man using a red heart emoji unironically. 

Exhibit B: Nina Dobrev and Shaun White. Peak grandstanders, they posted loved-up selfies from ski slopes, hotel hallways and Spanish beaches. There was also that viral engagement announcement that looked like a still straight out of a Netflix rom-com. 

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A post shared by Nina Dobrev (@nina)

But fast-forward a few months? Engagement abruptly called off. Their Instagram feeds now live on as a digital tombstone, haunting them (and us) with smiling ghosts of a love that now only exists on the grid.

Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox practically wrote the grandstanding handbook with their blood-drinking declarations of love, chaotic joint photoshoots and captions that made everyone who read them whisper, "please make it stop". Now they're in that weird grey zone of maybe-on, maybe-off (seriously, we can never actually tell with these two) but the point remains: the higher the pedestal, the further the fall.

This isn't just a problem for celebrities. I once had a boyfriend post photos of me with the caption "my person". He dumped me a week later. I've hard-launched a new love with a five-picture carousel of us holding hands on the beach at sunset, only to no longer be on speaking terms the next month. I've had friends delete entire highlight reels of "soulmate" stories faster than you can say "straight to the archive". 

Grandstanding, I would argue, isn't just a correlation, but in most cases, it might actually be causation. Because posting every single second of your love story online opens up the gates for endless speculation from friends, family and even complete strangers. Think Hailey and Justin Bieber. Every selfie, every tattoo tribute, every slightly pained smile becomes fuel for the internet's favourite pastime: diagnosing a marriage like it's a university group assignment. 

When the world thinks they're co-authors of your relationship, it can become hard to remember whose story it actually is. 

The point? Nothing screams "impending doom" like a carefully curated post that exists purely to prove your relationship is thriving. If you're trying that hard to convince everyone else, odds are you're actually just trying to convince yourself. 

Listen: The love story the Mamamia Out Loud hosts desperately wanted to be true. Post continues below.

Of course, the urge to share isn't innately evil. Love makes us truly feral — we want to shout it from the rooftops, show it off, prove it to the haters. There is something intoxicating about translating a private feeling into a public artefact. We want to say, "Look, this person loves me and now the whole world knows."

Even as a card-carrying single gal, I fully plan on shouting my next great love from the rooftops. I'll no doubt post the whole damn rom-com montage. I'll probably write about it here. I will, in fair warning, be totally unbearable. Because when it's good, you want people to witness it. You want proof it existed. The trick, I guess, is not to let the performance eat the relationship alive.

But even I know intimacy thrives in the quiet. The real stuff that makes love special is vulnerable, messy and categorically un-Instagrammable. It can't be captioned or curated for all the world to see.

Grandstanding, on the other hand, makes the relationship less about two people and more about the audience. It's like putting on a play where you're constantly checking if the crowd is clapping while forgetting that the moments that matter the most — the whispered confessions, the ugly-cry apologies and the "we're in this together" pep talks — all happen offstage. Remember: if you spend too long playing to the audience, you risk losing the plot entirely.

So what is the solution? Do we delete our boyfriends off the grid and go full witness protection until further notice? Not necessarily. Sharing a soft-launch story or a cute couples candid isn't a curse.

Perhaps the sweet spot is somewhere in between. Give people a little something and keep the rest between you and the person who actually matters. 

After all, the strongest couples I know aren't always the ones screaming into the void of social media. They're the ones quietly laughing together on the couch on a Wednesday night, phones down, thriving on the kind of love that doesn't need a highlight reel. 

But if your boyfriend ever writes you a full paragraph on Instagram? It might be time to start packing.

Feature image: Getty.