What is love? It may be easier to describe what love is not. Love is not a constant stream of perfectly candid, over edited, cheesy captioned shiny, happy, couple selfies. Love is not taking a picture of your significant other while they're unaware and captioning it "bae so cute when he's sleeping." Love is not endless tweets of appreciation. Love is not a perfectly crafted post for every significant holiday or special occasion. Love is not sharing articles with "this is SO you babe." Love is not mile long Facebook posts filled with "love yous" and "honey/baby/sweethearts." Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

I'm tired of people thinking that they're not loved if they don't have someone who constantly posts of how "blessed by the best" they are. An Instagram feed full of shiny happy couple selfies does not equate to a life long commitment of love; it is simply an attempt to try to show love and feel it in return.

I'm the first one to admit that I used to equate prideful posts of my boyfriend to how much I loved him. I don't think there's anything wrong with an occasional appreciation post, the pictures of your adventures of growth, and documenting all the fun you have together so you can look back in reminiscence later. But, it does not matter how many likes, comments, and shares you have on any one of these posts; if your relationship is not rooted in real love, these pictures and posts won't create it. I know now that the number of pictures I'm tagged in does not increase or decrease how much I'm loved. I want to be loved for me, not how many followers I have or how many times I can get someone to double tap a picture.

We live in a world where the most private part of our lives is our ability to set our Instagram profile as such. Once we are in a relationship our lives go from publicly proclaiming how upset we are that we are alone to an extreme overuse of "boyfriend," "my boy," and "love." There is nothing worse than keeping your 10 thousand followers updated through every high and low of your relationship. You want love? Keep it to yourself. You're not dating your followers. They don't need to know what your boyfriend had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You don't even need to know that.

We scroll, scroll, scroll through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to see the lives of others who are "in love." We see their shiny happy couple selfies, we see their fitting country love lyric caption, we see the hundreds of people who comment "so cute" and "heart eyes." We see this as love. We envy this. This is not ok.

Love is not a public proclamation of surface level feelings. Stop equating the number of posts you're tagged in, the number of happy shiny couple selfies you take, and the number of likes on each of those to the love of another person. Love is real. Love is so much more than we've made it out to be