I (30M) have been in a relationship with my girlfriend (32F) since November 2024. To say it has had it's ups and downs would be an understatement. A lot of arguing often so often triggered by her jealous outbursts. It's a shame because when we're good, it's great, funny, silly and quite considerate of one another.

I'm writing this after yet another argument about the content of my Instagram - an app that I only have on my laptop and barely use. I did have a few pictures of me with an ex partner. These pictures all had other people in them and we weren't embracing and didn't even resemble a couple. I removed them from Instagram as it bothered her so much but honestly I felt like I was surrendering to some quite controlling behaviour. That seemed to placate her until a few days ago when she discovered a picture amongst a 'multiple picture' post. The picture is of 7 people including me and my ex-girlfriend, we're on opposite ends of the group of people not even so much as looking at each other. It's a nice picture of a skiing trip and it actually holds pretty good memories for me. She brought this up and asked me to delete it, I said yeah, I must have overlooked that picture and that I'd delete it. I never got round to it mainly because I've had multiple job interviews the past fortnight and also because I don't feel as though someone should control my social media (within reason - maybe different if I had several intimate pictures with an ex partner or scores of OF models in my following). She accused me of back-tracking and being 'all talk' and concluded that I must still be in love with someone else because I won't delete the picture.

The most ridiculous thing about her whole argument is that she has a whole post of a holiday with her ex-boyfriend up on Instagram, as well as a picture with her ex ex-boyfriend up on Facebook for some anniversary meal. Her reasoning for not deleting these is that it doesn't bother me, which is true, the content doesn't really bother me at all. The absolute astounding hypocrisy does bother me though. Just seems to be a case of 'do as I say, not as I do'. I find this displays an extremely low level of introspection on her part and a sense of entitlement? childishness? She's told me before that she has an anxious attachment style which was a completely new thing for me to deal with but the more I've read about it, the more her behaviour makes sense. Perhaps this post belongs in r/relationships or r/attachment_theory but I want to just get some opinions on this particular episode.

AITAH for not deleting this picture? I explained to her that she needs to sort something out within herself if she's so triggered by it, instead of me kowtowing to her anxiety all the time and enabling her. There's a LOT more episodes like this often triggered by something completely out of the blue but social media seems to be the most common cause of contention.