It’s incredible that Kaitlyn Tiffany and I haven’t yet asked why people slide into other people’s direct messages, but that ends today. On this week’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button?, we want to hear love stories and stories of failed courtship attempts. We ask why people slide into DMs, and then we process how the direct message’s connotation has changed over time.

We chat with our friend Blake who has slid into multiple DMs, as well as Tasbeeh Herwees, who called DMs the “new little black book” in MEL. Then we talk to a man named Thomas who met his boyfriend on Twitter through the DMs. We love love!

Finally, we take all our questions and thoughts to Connor Hayes, the director of product for Instagram messaging, who explains what the company has seen when it comes to DM behavior and what the future looks like for DMs. Notably, he says that Instagram wants to feel like a cool party where you can talk to all your friends, especially once Facebook merges all its messaging products together. This intimidates me, to be honest. Sometimes I don’t want to be at a party.

“If we do our job well, at the end of the day Instagram, when you open it up, is going to feel a lot more like walking into a party and hanging out with your friends than it is today, and we see messaging as a big part of that,” he says.

Listen to the episode above, and you can subscribe to the show anywhere you typically get your podcasts. To make it easy for you, we’ve also got our usual places linked: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and our RSS feed.