Love-lost Online

We’ve all been there: You open Instagram on Valentine’s Day or maybe National Girlfriend’s/Boyfriend’s Day, and instantly regret it. Your feed floods with meticulously crafted stories, posts, and soft launches of seemingly flawless couples. If you’re single, you might feel like an outsider looking in, scrolling through endless pictures that aggressively rub this love in your face, and it’s hard not to take it as a personal attack. You might find yourself asking questions like, “How do they have a partner and I don’t?” “Am I that unlovable?” “Is there something wrong with me?” For those in relationships, you might consider the state of yours: “Am I doing enough for my partner?” “Do we seem as happy as that couple?” “I wonder if they fight as much as we do.”

On these “holidays,” we blindly follow the unspoken rules social media has outlined for us. If you’re single, you avoid the apps altogether. If you’re in a relationship, you’re expected to post. To stay silent is to risk assumptions: maybe someone’s cheating, maybe someone’s embarrassed, or maybe a couple isn’t together anymore. Posting is a performance that invites the public to judge your relationship, your partner, and also your self-worth. It isn’t just a celebration of love or your happiness anymore — it’s proof that you did it! You won! It’s a way to show the world that you are worthy and deserving of love. Because today, being in a relationship isn’t just personal — it’s a status symbol, attributing self-worth to romantic success. Who can you “pull,” and what does that say about you?

We’re all familiar with the fact that social media thrives on selling false perfectionism. We’ve had countless conversations about how apps like Instagram distort our perceptions of beauty and body image, but it seems to me that we rarely talk about how they also distort our perceptions of love. Just like we see the most perfect version of people’s faces and bodies, we see the most perfect version of their relationships as well. Whether we mean to or not, we constantly mimic what we see online, inheriting humor, style, and music taste all from social media. We internalize an idea of what love “should” look like, leaving us comparing real and complicated relationships to the posed and polished ones on our feeds.

It’s not that people haven’t always been obsessed with love — romantic tropes have long been commodified for public consumption whether it be Disney happily ever afters or Hollywood romantic comedies. However, what’s new and uniquely toxic about love portrayed on social media is its “authenticity” and interactivity. As viewers, we understand movies as fictional storylines with fake characters, but what we see on social media is presented as candid, casual, and real. And unlike movies and books created for a mass, general audience, posting on social media is a performance to peers who personally know and judge you. Our consumption online isn’t passive — there is a literal scoreboard quantifying romantic success through likes, comments, and shares. We’re not just watching love, but actively competing in it — a huge difference from the romanticization of love depicted in traditional media.

At the same time, a strange, lonely and normalized activity complicates things further — doomscrolling through an endlessly contradictory digital world while “rotting in bed” alone. There are all types of love outlined on social media ranging from the hyper-curated Pinterest love to the casual, nonchalant “hook-up culture” love to the dreadful love shown through TikTok break-up rants and the viral #Ihatemyboyfriend memes. We are told to find “the one” and settle down, but also to keep sex casual and denounce commitment. The user isn’t guided at all in this process but, instead, ends up feeling overwhelmed and entirely confused. We’re caught in between two extremes — glorified relationships and glorified detachment — and trying to exist in a middle feels impossible.

What’s left behind is a generation of hopeless romantics, but not the kind who believe in epic, enduring love like Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice.” Instead, a new kind of hopeless romantic has emerged — one that craves a very specific kind of love that doesn’t exist outside of their iPhone screen. We long for the effortless relationship that doesn’t require the inevitable work, compromise, and discomfort that any real partnership can demand. It’s no wonder why people are so quick to give advice like “screw them” and “just break up with them” at the first sight of trouble.

This pressure isn’t new. Growing up with unlimited access to technology and social media has taught us to yearn for a convincing version of romance from an early age. I remember watching looping videos on VSCO, a social media platform used to edit and share photos, of boys twirling girls, surprising them with flowers, and kissing them on the forehead. I remember my middle-school self, and many other girls my age, clinging to and longing for a relationship that encompassed these short, silent, and perfect images. At 12 years old, I had no idea these were fake.

The toxicity doesn’t entirely lie with the poster; in fact, sharing the people we love can be a beautiful thing. We don’t need to log off completely, but we do need to resist the impulse to measure our relationships and relationship statuses against carefully constructed couples online. As viewers and users, we cannot internalize and accept the fake love we’re being sold and allow it to make us feel unworthy; it’s unfair to ourselves to chase an idea of love that was never real to begin with.

Real love isn’t curated for likes or cropped to fit specific aspect ratios. It’s not always photogenic or pretty — it’s private and imperfect. Real love is never as easy as smiling for the camera and snapping a quick pic. It doesn’t live perfectly in a still image, but in the in-between moments when no one is watching, and there’s nothing to prove.

We cannot afford to lose something so human to an algorithm designed to keep us longing for more love without actually helping us find it for ourselves. We cannot lose love to a screen it was never meant to be projected through. We cannot become love-lost online.