Relationship Soft Launch

About

A Relationship Soft Launch is a slang term referring to the practice of gradually introducing a new significant other to one’s social media following, often through photographs that do not show a face. Most commonly done on Instagram, the practice has been adopted by both celebrities, internet personalities and non-celebrities alike since the mid-2010s.

Origin

The idea of a “soft launch” is a kind of marketing strategy in which a company releases a new product without any significant push at first, often in order to test out if the product will sell and gauge the response of consumers. The practice is similar to a rehearsal for a larger rollout.^[1]

The first mention on Twitter of doing a “soft launch” in the context of a personal relationship was on December 25th, 2016, in a tweet by @RayBLK^[2] that received 31 likes in roughly six years (seen below).

Followers of @RayBLK posted in the replies, congratulating the user for applying their “marketing knowledge.”

Spread

The practice is strongly associated with Instagram, but since relationship soft launches tend to not label themselves as such, it is unknown when exactly the first relationship launch may have happened on the platform. The phrase continued to be used sporadically on Twitter throughout the latter half of the 2010s without generating a large amount of engagement up until July 12th, 2020, when comedian Rachel Sennott tweeted about the practice, receiving nearly 130,000 likes in two years.^[3]

On September 25th, 2020, TikToker jess.fisher5^[4] uploaded a video defining a “relationship soft launch” and explaining how to perform one, which received over 272,000 likes in roughly a year and a half (shown below).

The jess.fisher5 TikTok and the Sennott tweet were then referenced by articles from that fall and spring explaining how to perform soft launches on many lifestyle websites such as Refinery29.^[5] These types of articles continued through the summer of 2022, and the phrase became common enough for an Urban Dictionary entry on July 4th, 2021.^[6]

The majority of articles talking about relationship soft launches cite an Instagram post (seen below) by Kourtney Kardashian on February 18th, 2021, which received over 3.75 million likes in four months, as a defining example.^[7]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References