A couple of years ago, an old flame of mine had the nerve to start dating a new woman. He had posted a photo with her on Instagram; they were wrapped around each other, smiling, with a cheeky caption that I took to be some sort of lovers’ inside joke. I clicked on her username. She had a public Instagram account, so I was free to peruse her photos until I reached her high-school graduation, or until I made myself cry, whichever came first. I noticed she’d posted an Instagram story that day. It was the only bit of content I couldn’t access without revealing myself—users can see a list of everyone who opens their stories. So I did what any sane woman would do. I logged back in to my dead dog’s Instagram account and looked.

“Hidden lurkers,” as one TikTok user put it, are either in luck or damned: Instagram announced earlier this month that it will be rolling out a new paid subscription called Instagram Plus. For only $3.99 a month, users can access a slew of dismal new features, including the ability to “preview stories without appearing on the viewer list,” as the ads say. Other features include an option to shirk the burdens of online popularity by searching your story viewers for a specific person, instead of scrolling through all the names you don’t actually care about; insights into how many times people rewatched your story; and “story extend,” which allows you to set a story to expire in 48 hours as opposed to the usual 24, in case that special someone hasn’t viewed it yet.

All of this is “designed to give you more of what you love about Instagram,” the app claims, helping you “express yourself, connect deeper with friends, and customize your experience.” If what you love is the ability to more conveniently keep tabs on crushes or enemies, by which I mean torture yourself, then Instagram nailed it. Instagram Plus is social media’s newest low—a company preying on our most pathetic impulses, for the price of a small iced coffee.

Instagram Plus isn’t just a sign of what’s gone wrong with social media, but also with modern romance. The app has become a quintessential cog in the dating machine—especially in those liminal stages, the flirtations and the breakups. It provides yet another way to try to create narratives about one another, if mainly by providing meaningless data to back up our least logical hypotheses. If my ex views my story, it must mean he’s still invested in my life. Right?

Any single person who even passively uses the app can tell you that it has added a new level of torment to their love life. Since Instagram was founded, in 2010, the brokenhearted and heart-eyed alike have pored over which pictures to post to attract a particular person’s attention. Things got worse in August 2016, when Instagram created stories to imitate its competitor, Snapchat, which offered users the chance to post any regrettable content for 24 hours before it vanished, filed away somewhere in the endless Internet annals of potentially blackmail-worthy content. Suddenly, Instagram went from a place to document “what were you doing to what are you doing right now,” Caitlin Begg, a sociologist and the founder of the research lab Authentic Social, told me. “It was one thing to see a Facebook album pop up after a weekend, but now to be seeing all these everyday moments of people’s lives definitely changes the way we’re perceiving things.”

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Courtney Tracy, a therapist known on Instagram as “Dr. Courtney” who focuses on attachment issues, told me the surfeit of information about other people’s behavior can make us jump to ridiculous conclusions. “We get overloaded,” she said, and our brains try to take back control by coming up with our own explanations for that behavior. “And most of the time, we’re not right.”

If you’ve never been lovesick and delusional in the age of Instagram, let me fill you in on the crazy things people do. I have spent hours scrolling through story viewers to see if an ex had seen my post, as if having his eyes on an image of my breakfast might make him change his mind about me. One woman I know has memorized everyone an ex follows, and routinely checks to see if the count has gone up so she can try to figure out who he’s added—in case it’s a beautiful woman. She wasn’t even that excited about Instagram Plus. “Tell me when they let you view who someone follows chronologically,” she said.

A number of people I spoke with had fine-tuned the art of targeting their stories to specific viewers. Some of them post stories to “close friends,” a feature that lets you narrow who can see a story down to a targeted group or even—unbenownst to him—one person. This is an especially helpful tactic for a hot photo. One woman told me that, although she has blocked her ex-boyfriend from seeing her Instagram, his family still follows her. She usually hides her stories from them, but not when she posts wholesome content, such as a photo of her holding a friend’s baby. Maybe they’ll see and tell her ex that she really would have made the best mother.

Lots of people ask to borrow their friends’ phones or create burner accounts to continue to look at the profile of someone they’ve blocked or who’s blocked them, or to avoid getting caught looking at their stories. I used to lend my phone to a friend so she could see who her ex was following. She’d always pan the phone toward me whenever she saw a new woman who seemed like his type. “You’re prettier,” I’d assure her, while questioning my feminism.

The Instagram-story obsession doesn’t apply to only romantic relationships. “I’ve had entire hour-long sessions with clients just talking about why their ex–best friend is viewing their Instagram story every day, but not liking any of their posts,” Tracy told me. “You can start to ruminate or overthink about the actual relationship you have with that person, when sometimes, it’s just really not that deep.”

Most of the people I spoke with said they wouldn’t bother subscribing to Instagram Plus. But a number of them said that they would feel differently if they’d recently gone through a breakup. Both Tracy and Begg worried about the app preying on vulnerable people in exactly that situation, as well as those who struggle with attachment disorders, OCD, or sensitivity to rejection.

It’s not good for anyone, Tracy said, to “know where people are, what they’re doing, who they’re with; it can create these obsessive tendencies where it’s just a lot healthier to have some blank canvas in your mind.” She predicted the features would “increase anxiety, stalking behaviors, and time on social media, which is obviously what the platforms are going for.”

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Begg was particularly concerned about being able to peek at people’s stories anonymously. The use of burner accounts, she said, at least creates a sort of shame ritual that encourages you to step back and think, Should I really be viewing this story? That friction is an opportunity for self-reflection. It helps stop people from acting on behavior that could easily become compulsive.

Exactly how much of this tantalizing material can you secretly access for $3.99? In an explanatory video, Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO, said that you can get “a little preview of someone else’s story—not the full thing, but just a preview—by long-pressing on it.” (Here he raises one thumb to demonstrate the long-press maneuver.) This seems, if anything, deliberately obscure. Lots of stories consist of a single photo: How do you “preview” that without simply viewing the photo? Regardless, Tracy summed the issue up: “If the purpose is to be social, why are we looking anonymously?”

The genius of social media is that these companies know all of the secret things we won’t admit we deeply want to do. The danger is that they let us do them. “There’s a pattern that we’ve seen with these social-media companies saying, Let’s find out what their behavior is, and let’s make it easier for them to do it despite the psychological repercussions,” Tracy said.

Instagram Plus is rolling out gradually, but it will surely expand. Maybe the price will go up. Maybe more options will be added. Maybe—almost definitely—we’ll spend more time online driving ourselves insane.

If that sounds good to you, then definitely sign up for what Mosseri called these “fun little extra features.”