There is something to be said about trust in the digital age.

Trust is a small, glittering fish that slips through your grip if you are careless. I have watched my own little fish dart from me, no matter whose hand was held in mine. I have even fantasized about crushing my little fish with a rock—an expulsion of scales and guts and the last of my ability to be truly vulnerable.

Relationships are tricky. Especially in a current climate where social media rubs its dark hands over our heads. Images are piled in front of us every day, bright and terrible in their consistency. Instagram is like a bazaar in some fantastical kingdom: here there be girls, a menagerie of babes with skin as lustrous as candy shells! If you type “my boyfriend follows models on Instagram” into Google, you’ll find pages and pages of results. It would appear the girls are worrying about the girls. Love has a razor-sharp smart phone at its throat.

I doggedly check my boyfriend’s Instagram. I heave myself through his followers, through who he is following. It’s an exhausting exercise in compulsion and fear. There are hundreds of babes. Beautiful blondes with savage teeth, their backs arched like greyhounds. He likes the photos of the babes. He paints the Insta hearts red. He used to leave stray comments, bits of acknowledgement like flower petals over a body. There was a hot babe in glasses, so he left the smiley face with glasses emoji. A babe in a hat was smiling holding a bee, and he commented “that hat!”

He doesn’t know these babes. They don’t follow him back. I would screenshot these moments and send them to girlfriends, is this ok? No, they would wail, this is despicable! I scrolled some more. Eventually my little trust fish nosed itself out of my hands and slimed through my fingers. I lost it. I imagined his direct messages, the invented strings of communication he must be having with these women—is that normal now? Have our expectations become so thin and starved that they huddle together instead of rallying against social media’s onslaught of instant gratification?

There is a hell of a lot of choice nowadays, or at least it sure looks like it. Twenty years ago we had to be visually satisfied with whatever we saw in the flesh, or whatever looked good on cable. Today, we carry the Kingdom of Lost Babes around in our hands. I wonder sometimes, if it’s good for the brain, all these curves, these bottom cheeks bruised against the camera lens—so that you aren’t sure if you’re indeed looking at an ass or a squashed ball of mozzarella. Is the accessibility to the Insta babes too tantalizing to ignore? With one tap you are instantly connected; it’s as delicious as sorcery.

I asked him, why do you follow the babes?

Wouldn’t you prefer I fantasize over an attractive girl on Instagram instead of porn?

No. Social media has become a safe tower for the voyeur.

I would rather he salivate over deliberate babes, the girls with the rabid loins, the ones who purposefully swallow cocks and splay their bodies to the eye of the camera. The girls with brave brown limbs, ridden as prize racehorses, skin shiny with fluids. They are there to be seen and to be enjoyed. The Insta babes have no courage in their crotches, they just want little red hearts and the most they will give in return is a sly peak of areola.

He protests as if it’s something he has to do, something undeniable that comes from being male, something that I just have to learn to accept or to turn my attention from. But it’s feels like watching your boyfriend blow a kiss to a girl on the street. It’s something that makes your guts burn.

Inevitably, I compare myself to the babes. I stand in the bathroom in my underwear, my skin silver and uncorrupted from any filters. I wonder if he too compares me to the babes. If when his zombie eyes pass over their haunches, he remembers the everyday weight of my own limbs. I pinch the screen and zoom in on their pretty faces. I have a lot of friends. I love girls. I think, you would like me more than him, we could be friends! But he has hunted you, trapped you in his phone and now you are his idea to drool over.

At wild, terrible moments, I fantasize about messaging a babe and asking her if she and he communicate, of liking one of her photos, of showing him that I too can play the game.

I went for a beer with a friend of mine the other night. He blithely tossed me his phone and asked me to look something up. I held it in my hands, horrified, as if it were a disembowelled animal.

You’re giving me your phone?

He laughed at my incredulity. He pulled at his mustache and wiped the beer scum from his chin.

You’re better at writing than me anyway, reply to that message would you?

He doesn’t have Instagram or Snapchat. He says he doesn’t have time. I thought of my boyfriend, who holds his phone close as if it were his last secret left. He has told me he would never show me its contents as that is breaking a boundary. My brain heard there are truths in there that would break your heart. My little fish was a sliver of tarnished gold.

Am I insecure? Do I have trust issues? In reality, I am happy with my body, my face, my mind. I am not threatened by connectivity, and I love meeting new people, especially babes; they have great clothes you can borrow. Another male friend assured me that not all men do this, some men tie themselves to the mast and avoid the sirens’ howling. Some men do not succumb to base temptation. A girlfriend declared following pretty girls that you don’t know when you’re in a relationship is tacky, like having a Porn mag from 1980 under your bed.

If anything, watching your boyfriend rack up the number of babes on his Instagram followers list has been a lesson in self-control. I peruse a new babe, scroll through her photos to check which ones he’s liked. I follow his actions, I nose after him, blood on my lips—the little fish is torn to pieces at my feet.

I wonder if it will ever stop, if this is a compulsion he will enjoy for the rest of his life. And the babes will remain timeless, trapped in plastic like insects in amber, flawless wings and thin as whispers. I will age, and hopefully be past the want or need to validate myself online. It’s already becoming dull. It’s already beginning to hurt.