Not many people would willingly hand over their social media login information to an ex.

Unless, of course, one of them is going on vacation with no cell service, and they’re both determined to keep alive their 500-day Snapchat correspondence.

“We started [Snapchatting] when we became friends again after we broke up, so I guess this is as long as we’ve been friends after we stopped dating,” sophomore communications major Megan Tuncer said. “We really haven’t broken it since we started talking again. It was one of those things where it’s creating a friendship again, even though I was in college and he was still back at home.”

The Snapchat “streak,” a number that shows up when two people have sent messages back and forth for a consecutive number of days, has emerged as a visual medium to gauge the quality of a relationship. Sometimes, streaks even date back to the very beginning of a relationship.

Freshman physics major Ben Mendelson, for instance, met his now-girlfriend at a party in high school. The two exchanged Snapchat usernames and now have a streak spanning more than 250 days.

“I was considering exchanging numbers, but I decided Snapchat was better,” Mendelson said. “That’s how our streak started. And then a few months later, we started dating. We keep that streak to remind us how long we’ve known each other.”

One morning, freshman government and politics major Caroline Larkin woke up to a text from her boyfriend, Patrick Geleta, a freshman enrolled in letters and sciences.

“I have some very, very bad news for you,” Geleta wrote.

No one had died, or been injured. Geleta wasn’t texting his girlfriend to break up with her. He was informing Larkin that the couple’s 255 day streak had ended. As new college students, Larkin and Geleta had gotten distracted and, though their actual relationship was in good standing, had forgotten to keep up their Snapchat correspondence.

“It was upsetting because it was a tie to the first day we met, so that was kind of cool,” Larkin said. “We’ve moved past it since, but I was probably more upset than I should have been. I’ve kind of outgrown it now because my longest one died.”

The thought of putting excessive effort into a little number on a social media account sounds absurd to outsiders. Even those who are obsessed with continuing Snapchat streaks joke about how dramatic they act about something so trivial.

“Usually we’ll text the other person and be like, ‘Hey, I won’t be around. Will you log in?'” Tuncer said, explaining why she and her ex-boyfriend have each other’s login information, before pausing and laughing. “It sounds so ridiculous now that I’m saying it.”

The extent to which Snapchat fanatics will go in order to save a streak are largely indicative of a trend on social media as a whole: There’s a seemingly ceaseless pressure to prove the extent of a relationship to the rest of the world.

Before Snapchat introduced streaks in March 2016, users were able to view every friend’s “best friends” — the people you send Snapchats to most often. It resulted in a competition, of sorts, to publicly display the quality of a friendship.

“You go through and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I talk to this person way more than you,'” Tuncer said.

Other social media platforms aren’t immune to this friendship arms race, either. Instagram, an app often used as everyone’s personal highlight reel, is the home of cute photos from a fun night out and throwbacks proving the longevity of a relationship. It’s debatable whether millennials have been scaling back on their Facebook usage as of late, but they still use the site to tag their friends in memes they relate to, almost as a public display of inside jokes.

Those who care about the prosperity of a Snapchat streak do so because they also care about the prosperity of the relationship, whether it be romantic or friendly. Continuing a streak with a friend is a way to say “hi;” a quick reminder in a busy society that people care about each other even if they don’t talk every day.

“It’s fun to keep in touch with somebody,” Mendelson said. “Especially because I have friends that go to other schools now, so once a day you get to be in touch with them.”