M+ ESSAY : When Did Sharing Everything Become The Price Of Being “Relatable”?

By Rupa Tailor Ord

Recently, I have found myself having several versions of the same conversation. Women telling me, quietly and slightly apologetically, that they feel they should be sharing more of themselves online. That perhaps they are holding back too much. That maybe this is why their audience is not growing. That maybe they are not being “real enough”.

Last week, someone said something that genuinely stayed with me. She is going through something deeply personal connected to fertility, and she told me multiple people had suggested she should be talking about it publicly. That she had “missed a trick”.

Missed a trick.

I found myself wondering when our private lives became marketing opportunities. Because this increasingly feels like the message women are being given online. If you want to grow, you must open yourself up. If you want people to connect with you, you must disclose. If you want to be relatable, you must tell people what hurts. And I am not entirely convinced that is true.

When Did Vulnerability Become A Strategy?

This is not about honesty being a bad thing online. Some of the most powerful writing I have ever read has come from women speaking openly about grief, miscarriage, motherhood, identity shifts and loss. Those conversations matter. They help people feel less alone.

But connection is not the same thing as obligation.

Somewhere along the way, vulnerability stopped being something offered and started becoming something expected. You are encouraged to “show more of yourself”. To “bring people along for the journey”. To be “warts and all”. And if you do not, there is often a subtle suggestion that you are somehow holding back or even harming your business and personal profile by staying private.

The Relatability Trap

Relatability has become one of the most valuable currencies online, particularly in motherhood. We are told people want honesty. The messy kitchen. The tired face. The difficult conversation. The behind-the-scenes reality. And yes, often they do.

But there is a difference between choosing to share and feeling that you have to share in order to stay visible.

Sometimes it feels as though the threshold quietly keeps moving. First you share a little. Then something personal. Then something painful. Then suddenly parts of your life that once felt entirely your own begin existing publicly too.

And because the internet does not forget, those stories do not simply disappear if you later regret sharing them. They remain there permanently, attached to your name long after the moment itself has passed. You cannot take it back. Even if the situation changes, or you change your mind, that moment has already been captured, consumed and archived online. That permanence is rarely part of the conversation when we talk about “being real online”.

Why Does This Pressure Feel So Gendered?

What strikes me most is how heavily this expectation seems to sit with women.

We do not routinely expect male founders, writers or public figures to build audiences by publicly unpacking the most intimate parts of their lives. They are rarely advised to turn personal pain into engagement. Women, meanwhile, are often encouraged to start there. Particularly mothers.

Motherhood already comes with endless pressure to explain ourselves. How we parent. How we work. How we cope. Whether we are present enough, grateful enough, ambitious enough or calm enough. Add social media into the mix and suddenly even our hardest moments can start to feel like potential content - do you fix the situation or film it first?

Privacy Is Not A Failure Of Authenticity

There is now a quiet assumption online that the more you reveal, the more authentic you are. I am not sure that is true.

As someone who actively chooses not to share every aspect of my life online, I am aware of the limitations that may bring. But I am also aware that connection is not limited to, or decided by, the algorithm.

Authenticity does not have to mean total exposure. It can also mean boundaries. It can mean deciding what belongs to you and what belongs to everyone else. It can mean waiting until you are ready to talk about something, or deciding never to talk about it publicly at all.

Some people genuinely feel comfortable sharing everything online and for them that openness feels natural. But for many others, the pressure arrives externally. Through algorithms, audience advice, growth conversations and subtle messaging that tells women the best way to connect is through disclosure.

And that is where it starts to feel complicated, because telling your story should never feel like the entry fee for being visible.

When Did “Enough” Stop Being Enough?

What I keep coming back to is this: When did it stop being acceptable to simply show up as yourself without explaining every intimate detail about yourself?

Why do women increasingly feel that unless they publicly unravel their hardest experiences, they are somehow not doing it correctly?

There should be space for both kinds of presence online. The deeply personal and the thoughtfully private. The open diary and the edited window. The storyteller and the observer.

Growth does not always have to come through disclosure and perhaps the more interesting question is not what women are willing to share online, but why they increasingly feel they have to share it at all.