How do you stay in touch with someone who doesn’t exist online?
The other day, I was watching The Bold Type, and there’s this episode where Jane has to write about stalking an “unstalkable” ex. You know, the kind of person who just doesn’t have a digital footprint. No Instagram, no Twitter rants, no tagged birthday posts. She literally got her girls in a car and parked outside his house, bumped into him, to get to know what he is up to (crazy stalker behaviour ngl). Watching her struggle with that made me think: I have one of those, too.
Actually, two.
One is my best friend from childhood. We’ve known each other practically our whole lives, but she’s not had social media for like 10 years now. Not a single account. No trace. The other is someone I was briefly seeing, whose entire online footprint is a little LinkedIn page, basically just job postings and the occasional repost from his friends who are hiring. That’s it. No soft-launch posts, no cryptic captions, not even a Spotify playlist to dissect. And it made me wonder: how do you actually stay in touch with people who don’t live online?
Because honestly? Most of my day-to-day connections survive on scraps. A meme in the DMs. A reel shared at 2 am. A “lol this reminded me of you” post that spirals into a conversation after weeks of silence. It’s not daily phone calls or check-ins. It’s lighter, lazier. The meme is the door, the chat is what sneaks in behind it.
And there’s a word for this: ambient intimacy. That feeling of closeness you get from just being passively around someone online. It’s when a story reply feels like catching up. Or when someone likes your post, it’s shorthand for “I still follow you.” They’re not real conversations; they’re what media theorists call digital breadcrumbs, tiny little markers we drop for each other to say, “Still here. Still thinking of you.”
But what happens when you don’t have that portal? No stories to reply to, no posts to double-tap, no close friends green circle to lurk in. No contact, unless you make the deliberate effort to break it.
It made me wonder if that’s the thing we’ve forgotten: intentional connection. Not just slipping into someone’s day through an algorithmically placed story, but directly showing up at their doorstep (digital or otherwise) and saying: Here’s a picture of my food, look at this dog I met on my walk, this book reminded me of you, how are you doing? let’s talk.
We’ve built a whole vocabulary of connections through platforms, the Snapchat streaks, the tags, the online status, and the seen at 11:32 pm. Some sociologists even call it parasocial maintenance when we keep relationships alive this way, like a low-effort survival tactic. Without those crutches, you’re left with the raw question: Do I actually want to talk to this person? Enough to write them? Enough to call? Enough to schedule seeing them?
And this is where it overlaps with dating apps, too. So much of modern romance survives on the digital breadcrumbs - likes, story replies, and half-hearted Snapchat streaks. But take away the app, the algorithm, the easy scroll, and what are you left with? You, choosing whether to actually show up. Whether the person is interesting enough to text first, is funny enough to have a laugh without a meme?
And maybe that’s why it feels so rare, so precious, when we do it, because the meme is easy. The text, the email, the call, those take something from you. They make a choice. They take time.
I don’t have an answer to this yet. I’m still fumbling between memes and emails, still wondering if the people who don’t exist online are harder to keep close, or if maybe they’re the only ones we keep close on purpose.
What I do know is this: the algorithm can keep me in touch with everyone, but it can’t tell me who I actually care about. That’s where the line between ambient intimacy and active care shows up.
Because at the end of the day, Instagram might remind you of birthdays, TikTok might tell you who’s trending, and Hinge might decide who’s “most compatible.” But none of those apps can keep a friendship or a love alive. That’s on us.
So maybe the real question isn’t how to stalk the unstalkable, but this: when the online status vanishes and the notifications stop buzzing, whose name do you still type into the blank message bar first?
Media I consumed instead of doom-scrolling:
Article - If I Don’t Post About My Vacation, Did It Even Happen?
Article - The Big Lebowski Friendship Test
Article- In ‘And Just Like That …’ a Craven Era Took Its Revenge on Youth and Hope and Fun
(On some days, I’m only writing because I know the 5 people who will definitely read this and write back to me. I love it when you write back to me and tell me how you feel, what you like or what you think can be improved. You can just reply to this or drop a text on any of my socials, and I’ll get back to you soon, Promise.)
Drink some water and buy yourselves some flowers.
See you later,