What is it that we are all chasing? Is it a million followers? Is it a million likes? Is it social acceptance? Whatever it is, social media has distracted us from what really matters.

As I scroll through Twitter and Instagram, I find that just about every post is similar in one way or another. Everyone posts with the mindset of "will this picture get me the likes and the attention I'm going for?" Rather, our mindsets should be "does this picture truly represent who I am?" Instead of using our social media pages to portray who we are and show off our personalities and our lives, we instead use it to gain attention from other people. Somehow "just be yourself" turned into "be whoever you want to be as long as you fulfill the expectations of a trendy, aesthetically pleasing, Instagram photo."

Social media creates this image of what the "perfect life" looks like or what the "perfect relationship" looks like, but what everyone seems to forget is, all of that isn't real. Think about all of those candid photos you've tried so hard to capture. During the process of taking one of these trendy candids, you look at your friend and just act like you're laughing.

Or what about all of those beach pictures you post just because you look like what everyone else says you should look like. You post those pictures because those are the kind of pictures that everyone else posts.

All over social media, you find people who post things just because they're fulfilling the trend. Not a single Instagram page accurately portrays someone's life and that's because we only post the happy stuff, the trendy stuff, the stuff we know will gain a lot of attention. We don't post what happens in our actual lives. That's why "Finstas" were created, so we could be ourselves, but only allow a limited amount of people to actually see what we're like.

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Then there are the unrealistic relationship expectations that social media has created. All over Twitter, you see "relationship goals" and the ideas of what a perfect relationship should be like. All that does is fill people's heads with expectations that will never be met because none of the stuff online is anything like what a true relationship is. Not to mention the fact that social media has now become an outlet for people's feelings when something goes wrong in their relationship. Instead of talking things over with your significant other, we instead resort to tweeting our feelings.

Oh, and did you know that if you don't post pictures with your significant other on social media that it apparently means you're hiding them? In reality, it just means that some people don't give social media the power to validate their relationships. Why does it matter if your relationship is all over the Internet or not? What really matters is how happy you are with your significant other. You can post all the pics you want of you and your significant other traveling and acting like you have it all, but then at the end of the night, you still scroll through someone else's page wishing you had what they have. It's a revolving door that never seems to end.

The only reason social media has as much control over us as it does it because we let it. We seem to think our relationship is failing because it doesn't match up to Twitter's expectations and that we're not good enough because there are people that portray their lives better than us on Instagram. We're all trying to be like everyone else and fit into the aesthetic of social media that we're losing our individuality.

Our relationships are failing because we expect them to be like any other cookie cutter relationship. We owe it to ourselves to forget about the norms on social media and to embrace what life is really like. There's more to life than those perfectly timed candid pics and the relationship advice you received from a tweet, although scrolling through social media would tell you otherwise.