We’re gonna talk a little bit about love, cool? I have plenty of thoughts about love, I recently wrote a whole article about how I’m a bit of a hopeless romantic. I know that the word “love” has a lot of meanings today. There’s the people who save love strictly for their family, while others may include close friends. I’ve heard people profess their love for places, pets, food, hobbies, clothes, movies, and such. Lately, you may have noticed that there are hearts and “love” all over social media: On Facebook we now have the option to react with a “love” instead of a “like” and Twitter replaced its old system of using stars to favorite tweets to red hearts that show love for a tweet. If we’re a part of social media then we are bombarded with “love” nearly every second of the day. But with all the love going around, are we losing the effect that love once had?

Now, I’m not here to bash on all of our favorite apps. But they give us something to think about, don’t they? While working on this very article I took a break to scroll through my newsfeed. Today, my college had its graduation ceremony and a lot of the graduates were posting pictures and statuses. Already, there were a lot of “love” reacts to the posts - I even found myself using the react feature to show my love for some of my senior friends. It’s becoming so easy to express deeper emotion in a digital world, and I personally think that’s not an entirely bad thing! Especially in situations like college graduation where I want to show something stronger than just a simple “like” it is really great to have the ability to show my feelings.

But it’s so simple to show our feelings, and I think that’s the heart of my worry. Have we become apathetic towards love because it’s so easy for us say “I love you” online? Is real love less effective and less true because we’re so accustomed to seeing it thrown around so often? Or is the digital age allowing us to connect even further? Instead of becoming apathetic, are we able to connect on an even deeper level with our loved ones?

I haven’t come to my own conclusion, and I wish I could say one view was right and the other was wrong. Love is complicated, and - if anything - I think that we’re all guilty of trying to fully understand the concept of love. It’s multifaceted and so much more complex than any app or article could properly portray. It may not be the digital age that’s messing with our view of love, it may just be us humans just getting all tangled up in emotions as we attempt to define what real love is.