By Julie Jargon

It's called the Snapchat half-swipe, and it's making a lot of teenagers miserable.

When users swipe open a message without lifting their finger off the screen, they can see the message in full without marking it as read. If they swipe it closed again before removing their finger, the message's sender sees no evidence of the sneak peek.

The point of this design was to alleviate the pressure teens feel to respond immediately, a Snap spokeswoman says.

But when teen girls, in particular, see that a crush is active on the app while their message remains unanswered, it can set off a spiral of self-doubt: Did I say the wrong thing? Does he not like me? WHY ISN'T HE WRITING BACK?!?!

"Just dating and talking to guys in general can be so complicated. It's hard to grasp how they're feeling about you," says 15-year-old Elke Thorsen of Darien, Conn. "The whole half-swiping thing just amplifies everything before it's even begun."

Whether teens meet online or in class, the "talking stage" that precedes dating often starts on Snapchat. They exchange flirty messages, and when those are labeled as read, it's an unofficial mile marker for how things are going.

Snap acknowledged that the half-swipe gave some people -- generally the boys -- an upper hand, and in late 2023 it released a countermeasure: Snapchat+ subscribers, who pay $4 a month, can catch someone in the act of half-swiping them: The "eyes" emoji appears while the lurker is lurking.

But that's created a whole new set of problems, teens say. Chronic half-swipers are on edge because they're at risk of being outed. For the senders, knowing for sure they have been micro-ghosted might only deepen the anxiety. And since the eyes only appear in the moment, many teens say they remain glued to the app after sending a message to a crush.

"Those eyeball emojis have become one of the most stressful things in my life to see right now," says Thorsen, who signed up for Snapchat+ in order to know if her messages were being read.

Snap has a knack for capitalizing on teenage insecurities. The Snap Map allows them to check where their friends are hanging out -- whether they were invited or not. The friend solar system shows them how they rank in importance to others. (Snap made the friend solar system opt-in, rather than default, after I wrote about it last year.)

"Our hearts go out to every teenager who is dating. It's incredibly hard!," the Snap spokeswoman says. "We've been deliberate in the features we bring to Snapchatters so that they work to reduce pressure, not add to it."

Why girls?

"Long before the advent of social media, we've known adolescent girls are more likely to be affected by interpersonal stress than boys," says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the school's Teen and Young Adult Lab.

Since girls are socialized from an early age to be caretakers and to pay attention to others' needs, she says, they're more likely than boys to be hyper vigilant to any signals that they're being rejected or ignored.

Elle Liemandt says she has been half-swiped by boys more times than she can count and that the practice has become one of the most toxic parts of teen dating. The Austin, Texas-based 16-year-old -- who dispenses dating advice to her 189,000 TikTok followers and to more than 40,000 teens who have downloaded her AskElle app -- fields frequent questions from girls about how to handle the snub. She advises girls to forgive and forget if it is a one-time offense. But if the half-swiping persists, Liemandt says, it is time to re-evaluate the budding relationship.

As adults, we tend to assume that if someone doesn't text back right away, that person is probably busy. But for teens in the throes of a crush, waiting even minutes for a response can feel like an eternity.

'You can't not look'

A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Jordyn Drap, of Westchester County, N.Y., messaged a boy on Snapchat to ask if he wanted to hang out that night. Since she had Snapchat+, she watched him half-swipe her and then she waited...and waited. When he finally responded an hour later, he said he could hang out but made no mention of the delayed reply.

"I was confused. Why read it and not answer me? Like, you're clearly on your phone," she says.

Drap says she kind of wishes she didn't have the premium service, because of the temptation. "You can't not look," she says.

She says she's witnessed being half-swiped many times by different guys. Are they trying to play hard to get? Are they just not into her? "There's never any explanation for why they're half-swiping you, so you come up with reasons in your head and assume the worst," she says.

As for the guys? Keyen Gupta says half-swiping girls' messages was the norm for him before he began dating his current girlfriend. It's the same for all the other guys he knows, says the 17-year-old from Austin. There's no ill will behind it, he says. He usually wants to think about a response before messaging someone back. And sometimes he's doing homework and doesn't have time to compose a proper response.

There have been times that he's worried that girls were half-swiping him, but it never became a huge distraction. It also never occurred to him that his own half-swiping would cause girls so much angst, he says, though he has received texts from girls asking why he wasn't responding.

"I was like, 'I'm sorry I didn't respond to you in one nanosecond,'" Gupta says. "It feels like so much pressure."

Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 15, 2025 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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