Lorde recently dropped a new album and it’s completely taken over my music library, so before I get into the rest of this piece I am going to recommend giving the album an ear.
Anyways, one of the songs, Hard Feelings/Loveless, really got me thinking about my generation and how we view love and relationships. The relationships people are getting into to these days are so warped and misleading, that they quite frankly have become as Lorde so eloquently put, loveless.
Love is supposed to be one of the rawest most deafening emotions, but it’s become this menial word or idea that is just thrown around to convey an image or provoke a thought. I asked my dad why he thought my generation was failing at relationships and he said: “cause kids are believing all the f*cking bullshit lies on the internet.” His answer as vulgar as it was, has truth behind it, the internet and all forms of social media are diluting people’s real conceptions of love and replacing them with false ideas of what love really should be. Millennials and even younger generations see Instagram celebrities constantly posing with their significant others in exotic places with expensive cars and lavish gifts they bought for one another and assume that is what love is supposed to look like. Just because they appear to have a happy and ‘perfect’ relationship, does NOT mean that’s the reality. This can be brought down to a more relatable level with ordinary people as well. That Snapchat story you just watched of the couple kissing? That is diluting the meaning of love and relationships. These generations thrive on likes or views and use the comments like “awe so cute!” or “omg you guy are actually goals” to validate relationships. The tweets that say “get you a man like this” with a screenshot of some sappy long text message is brainwashing our youth! Kids start idolizing these types of relationships and believe that if their significant other doesn’t send them a paragraph proclaiming their love, it means they don’t love them. Love isn’t love anymore, it’s likes, views, and screenshots.
Misconstruing love for social media attention is not the only way the internet is making the validity of relationships diminish. Divorce and infidelity are at all-time highs, and social media can definitely take some of the heat for this too. We have access to about everything with the internet, and this is making just about everyone mistrust one another. It’s so easy to contact anyone you want nowadays, you can talk to someone on a screen for days, and whether you consider that alone cheating or not, it’s still causing major trust issues between partners. Besides the notion of actually talking to someone over the internet, is the liking of other people's pictures. Now we most certainly are a melodramatic generation, because realistically when a guy likes another girl's picture, his significant other should not lose their mind and either assume they are cheating, or would rather be with that person, but unfortunately that is what happens. 20-25 years ago that wasn’t an issue for couples because without social media there was more trust within relationships. We can’t do away with social media, our society is too dependent on it, so we need to adapt to trusting our significant others within the presence of Twitter and Instagram, because a relationship with no trust isn’t real, and is hence, loveless.
One last reason why social media is destroying our most valuable emotion; we are using it to get back at one another. When a couple breaks up or gets into a fight, for the most part, there is always a level of angst or hostility, and that’s fairly normal, but taking that hostility out by putting something on social media to get back at your significant other, isn’t normal. Social media has created a generation that thrives on jealously, and my god does it do some damage. This comes in a lot of different forms, whether it’s an offensive tweet calling an ex trash or a raunchy snap story of a drunken make-out session, it’s all done in vain. It’s okay to be angry or hurt about a relationship coming to close or having bad fight, but it’s not okay to publicly shame someone or embarrass yourself because you are hurt. Things like that can really mess with a person's head and create serious issues.
My generation has plenty to offer the world, but it has its down falls, particularly with social media messing with people’s conceptions of love and relationships. Don’t base your relationship off of what the internet tells you it should look like, base it off true emotions, and when you do, you will understand what real true love feels like.
