It was February 2021, and Carlita Victoria had just about had it with dating apps.
Exhausted by the lack of face-to-face connection, she decided to tell a man she had been chatting to on Hinge that she was planning to delete the app.
He was persistent that he still wanted to get to know her and asked for her number, she said, adding that they then began dating and eventually got into a serious relationship.
Victoria, 38, told Insider she noticed early on that her boyfriend was quite private about their relationship, saying he told her within the first month of dating that he did not want to post a picture of someone he was going out with on social media until he was engaged.
At the time, Victoria, who is based in North Carolina, was compassionate about his preference, assuming that he was being cautious to not prematurely share a relationship with the world if it wasn’t going to work out.
However, 10 months later, around the holiday season, Victoria thought the relationship had grown serious enough that it warranted her posting a picture of them both on social media. To her shock, her boyfriend insisted that he did not want to be featured on her accounts.
His decision led to a series of arguments between the pair, according to Victoria, who said she eventually broke up with him on the suspicion that he might have had ulterior motives for not wanting to go public with their relationship.
Although her boyfriend expressed some concern, Victoria eventually did share a montage of photos of them both on TikTok, putting a sticker over his face to protect his privacy. But, according to Victoria, he asked her to take it down because he was worried people would be able to identify him by his tattoos.
He kept saying he wanted to marry me but he wasn’t really taking the steps to really invest in me,” she said, adding, “I kept thinking, ‘there’s no way this rule could be more important than what we have,’ and that’s what made me think there’s got to be someone else in the picture, and she must be important because I don’t know anyone who would sacrifice a relationship with somebody they love for a rule.”
When it came time for the couple to celebrate their one-year anniversary in February, Victoria said she decided to end the relationship, since her partner still did not want to go public on social media, even though she had met his family and invested a lot of time into the relationship by that point.