Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna's Fight Was Hardly the First Cryptic Hint of Celeb Couple Dr…

Whatever happened to fighting among ourselves?

Or at least having a savage email or text exchange with your significant other and then doing a dramatic reading of the back-and-forth for your friends over drinks.

But we live in a new era, one where social media often holds the key to how our relationships are doing. If they’re full of sweet PDA pics and gushing tributes to “the best boyfriend ever” and whatnot, all is well (or not, according to some, but that’s another story). If pics of a partner all of a sudden go missing, that could be an indicator of trouble in paradise. If there’s a big lag between posts when once there were many, that also could mean something’s amiss—or the couple’s just too busy getting engaged or making babies to publicly document their relationship.

And then other times, tweets or Instagram pics don’t necessarily mean anything at face value—but just below the surface there could be a lot of feelings about to boil over.

As it turned out, Rob Kardashian‘s decision to scrub his Instagram—not just of photos of his pregnant fiancée, Blac Chyna, but of all pics—did not spell the end for them as a couple, as it did when Kaley Cuoco‘s Instagram was all of a sudden devoid of then-husband Ryan Sweeting right before she filed for divorce.

But Rob and Chyna did have a fight. And would we have known about their fight if Rob hadn’t deleted all those pics? Most likely not, just as no one really knows what’s going on behind closed doors with celebrities, even if their lives look like an open book thanks to Instagram and Snapchat.

What Rob did wasn’t really that different from anything some average guy would do, give or take 6.9 million followers. He’s certainly hardly the first to use social media to up the ante in a fight. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time Rob had done it.

Usually it’s a pair of exes (and the occasional third party chimer-inner) who really go at it on social media, from Chris Brown and Karrueche Tranand their infamously explosive moments on Twitter, to Amber Rose and Wiz Khalifa‘s nasty jabs, to Shanna Moakler and Travis Barker arguing over parenting matters online, to Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold trading barbs 12 years after their divorce.

Iggy Azalea and Nick Young, Calvin Harris, Chris Zylka (twice makes a pattern for the ex of Lucy Hale and Hanna Beth), Kat Von D and even Britney Spearsare among the celebs who alerted the Twitterverse to nearly the exact moment when all was said and done. 

But sometimes a couple is still mid-relationship when they decide to inform millions of people that something’s up.

Lindsay Lohanwas still referring to Egor Tarabasov as her fiancé a day after she revealed via Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram that they were having issues, seemingly caused when Tarabasov wasn’t home yet on a Saturday night. Even without the tabloid video of Lohan screaming at him on the balcony of their London flat, prompting someone who was getting an earful to call the police, the not-so-cryptic messages said it all. 

Lohan on Tuesday apologized for losing her cool on social media, admitting that she was “acting out of fear and sadness”—which may be the most honest explanation ever given publicly for the reason people reliably air their relationship grievances on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and beyond.

Liam Payne and Sophia Smith didn’t break up till October 2015, but it was more than a year before that actually happened when, thanks to Liam tweeting some wistful words, everyone started thinking they’d broken up. 

“Can’t be without you,” the One Direction heartthrob wrote in May 2014. “Worse thing I ever did was let you go…No [sic] all I got left is the thought of you.”

Their relationship chugged on, but perhaps that was a rough patch.

Meek Mill and Nicki Minaj, meanwhile, are a couple who remain very much together and yet have driven their fans mad with their social media musings.

“Even bosses got feelings ya know?” Meek wrote one night in late May 2015, followed by Minaj hours later, quoting Beyoncé: “Thank God ya blew it!!! Thank God I dodged the bullet!!!!”

A night later, Nicki tweeted, “Love my baby ♥.” Fast-forward to March 2016 and all was still well, although the persistent ring-buying on Meek’s part hadn’t yet resulted in an engagement.

And that brings us back to Rob and Blac Chyna, who are expecting a baby together and have for all intents and purposes kissed and made up since a war of words prompted Rob to hit re-start on his Instagram accumulation once again.

Rob did as much back in March, and at the same time Chyna captioned an Instagram pic: “When you just get out of a relationship & your hoe friend welcomes you back into the World of Hoe.”

But then she deleted it. And Rob proposed. So a lot of the time social media posts (and deleted social media posts) don’t amount to much in the long run. But celebs can bet that every whisper of trouble that they choose to share will be scrutinized to no end. Even if the couple bounces back to normal in no time, screengrabs and the stories written about them are forever.