For us millennials, we heavily rely on social media. From Facebook to Snapchat to Instagram to Twitter, it would not be rare to see us switching from app to app keeping updated on each other’s lives. Social media can connect people all over the world, and that is a beautiful thing. However, social media has a very dark side. Social media has changed the romantic relationships we know today.
Our parents used to wait hours to speak to their significant others on their home phones. Could you imagine not having constant contact with your boyfriend or girlfriend? Our parents relied on dates and probably school to see theirs, and now we can just text ours all day long. We are so tuned in that we can barely communicate with each other in person; even in front of one another we are always checking our phones for new Tweets, Instagram posts, Snapchat stories, and Facebook posts. The internet has made a generation of people who are dependent on social media to reach out to others. We lack true communication skills necessary to maintaining meaningful relationships with not only our significant others, but in our relationships in general.
Trust is one of the main issues in relationships today due the overexposure of social media. That’s where snapchat comes in. When the developers of the app decided to make a person’s three best friends visible to the rest of their friends, many issues arouse. Best friends leave a lot of room for interpretations; especially if they are of the opposite gender. Personally, I have never encountered a problem with this, but I know many friends who have. A few months ago, I was discussing the best friends feature with a friend. “My ex girlfriend would always get mad at me whenever she saw there was another girl on my best friends list, even when she knew I was only friends with them,” he told me, “It would always start fights between us.” Luckily, Snapchat has since removed this feature, probably due to the amount of strain it caused.
Instagram also has its quirks. Instagram allows anyone to see the amount of likes a photo gets and who exactly those likes are from. There are countless tales of girls flipping out on their boyfriends for liking another girl’s photo. This is true with liking Facebook posts and tweets on Twitter. Even worse with Twitter is the Direct Messaging feature, which lets two people communicate privately and has coined the term “sliding into eachother’s DM’s,” which comes with a sexual connotation.
Maybe this is our own faults. Has social media made a generation of untrusting, paranoid people? The answer is shaky. Jealousy is not a new emotion; it’s been around for as long as human kind, and it is incredibly evident in our society today. Even the more loyal of partners can come under fire by their significant others if they suspect something is strange. Yet, maybe trust issues are a very well thing thanks to the advent of social media sites- maybe, some people are not at all who they say they are.
The internet has been a way for people to take on a new personality- no one needs to tell us that some one can act completely different on the internet than in person. On the web, they could be loud and opinionated while not realizing the affect their words may have, while being reserved and quite around people. Even worse, a person can adapt a new persona- or, just become a new person altogether. This is a catfish, which according to the popular site urbandictionary.com, is ‘someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.’ Catfishing is so prominent in our society today that many are beginning to call it an epidemic, with posts all over the World Wide Web giving people advice to spot the warning signs. Not being able to have this person agree to video chat with you, having this person make up excuses as to why they cannot meet in person, and countless more. A computer monitor and a keyboard pave the way for some one to create a fake identity on the anonymous dimension called the internet. It is hard to refute that catfishing is not a problem sweeping across the world, but some people do argue that people who get catfished set themselves up for it. In the grand scheme of things, it is evident that catfishing has become a gigantic issue; just one of the many associated with the issues the internet causes involving relationships.
We will never be able to travel back to the days when our parents were adolescents and see how our societies contrast. Their relationships rested on landline calls (which often had to be used by the whole house so they were often cut short) and face-to-face communication. Today, our relationships are based on the platform of social media and constant contact. This is the dangerous part- the fact that we are always so accessible to one another that it leads to issues. Snapchat has caused problems with its poorly thought-out best friend feature. Instagram allows anyone to see who likes a photo. Twitter is notorious for their direct messaging option, in which people can “slide into each other’s DM’s.” Facebook can lead to issues with what is posted and even worse- catfishing. The aura of mysteriousness is completely gone and we are able to know what one another is doing at all times. All these factors have lead to failed relationships filled with fights and lack of trust over things that probably seem to miniscule to earlier generations. In retrospect, the advent of social media, the fact that we are so easily accessible at all times, and the notion of creating some one we are not has taken a toll on what we today know as a romantic relationship, which completely gains a different definition to what our parents would have defined it as at their age. I would love to go back and see what it was like to pursue a relationship like they had, without all the stress of social media. It seemed more classic, and less stressful. Unfortunately for me and my generation, we know nothing but social media to pursue our own relationships.
