SIDE by side, their wrinkled hands intertwined, warmly embracing as they meander through the fields of love with an unmistakable sparkle in their eyes.
Their eyes twinkle, and their love shines bright as they exchange comforting words of affection. As the days turned to months, the months turned to years, and the years turned to decades, their love for each other aged like a fine wine in an oak barrel - smoother over time, flavoured with profound understanding, rich aromas of kindness and compassion and the dewy notes of affection. These heart-tingling sightings of love are the dodos of our time.
Instead, it's greetings from the front lines of the battlefield of love, where hashtags replace heartbeats and emojis are the new love letters.
In the narcissistic era of social media, grand, overtly cheesy, cis-heteronormative representations of love are littered across our feeds and FYPs. It's found in every corner of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. I often ask myself, who are these performative charades of social media romance for?
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Navigating the treacherous waters of modern romance, I find myself in a world where love isn't just in the air; it's on every timeline, story, and feed. Welcome to the narcissistic era of social media romance, where performative love is the name of the game, and authenticity is as rare as finding a needle in a haystack made of recycled engagement rings.
Don't get me wrong, and I love a highlight reel - a carefully curated collection of moments that I can return to when I want to look back on my adventures. For the performative lovers, it's a showcase of love and happiness. Because if it's not on Instagram, did it even happen? Forget about the random movie nights and game evenings after a long day's work or returning home to a kitchen fragranced with the aromatics of a perfectly spiced curry after hours of brainstorming, typing and creating. True love in this era is about perfectly staged photoshoots in picturesque locations and thoughtfully choreographed TikTok challenges in matching outfits.
The intimacy of love is dead.
If you check your screen time, you may find that you spend more time on your device than you do with your loved one. Opportunities for deep and intimate moments have all but disappeared. This era is in a relationship with their phones and their followers, hungry for likes and affirmation. Social media has created a breeding ground for jealousy and competition. It's a race of who received the greatest and largest bouquet of flowers or the grandest proposal. I do love seeing couples celebrate their love - it warms my heart because I love love. It's the performative romance I have an issue with.
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I've come to the conclusion that love in the narcissistic era is like a pop-up shop - here today, gone tomorrow, but not before you've taken thousands of selfies to prove it. There is a great amount of pressure to publicly declare love - the idea that your love for someone must be yelled at from the digital rooftops.
Forget about enjoying and living in the moment - it's all about capturing the perfect boomerang of clinking champagne glasses while maintaining just the right level of fake, I mean candid, laughter.
