In truth, this could apply to any of the social media platforms, where people increasingly feel the need to act their lives in real time in a public format, documenting every event and incident, no matter how remarkable or mundane.
Why Display Your Love?
On one hand, there is nothing new here. Most of us seek the approval of others—even before our own, sometimes. Others’ approval, or their envy, makes our joy sweeter.Society, which complicates our lives irredeemably, introduces amour propre. This is self-love mediated through the eyes and opinions of others. Amour propre, in Rousseau’s view, is deeply flawed. It is hollow, flimsy, if not downright fraudulent. The opinions and judgment of others change rapidly and do not make for a firm foundation for honest, enduring, confident self-love and any emotions related to or rooted in it.
Curating our Life Stories
Is there a more positive way to make sense of weekiversary posts?Specifically, one aims to project a narrative structure onto life, and give it a beginning, a climax and, hopefully, a fitting conclusion. The individual also wishes to situate his life story within a greater narrative, be it social, historical, or cosmic.
Social media gives us newfound powers to curate the story of our lives, and if need be, change characters, dominant plot lines or background themes, how and when we like. In documenting everyday events and occurrences, we could even elevate them and lend them a degree of significance.
So, it might seem perfectly natural that people would like to narrate their budding romances.
I am now long and happily married, but I remember how first love is both exhilarating and confusing. It’s a mess of emotions to work out and understand.
Among the many mixed messages issued by family, society, and the media, it is often difficult to know how best to navigate romance and determine if you are doing things right or if you have found “the one.”
Love and Insecurity
Social media, on the other hand, is not designed for introspection or soul-searching: Posts must be relatively short, eye-catching, and declarative. Twitter emissions only tolerate 280 characters.Ambiguity has no place there. Social media isn’t the place to hash through a host of conflicting emotions. You are either in love, or you are not—and if you are in love, why declare it if it isn’t blissful?
It’s hard to see how this phenomenon contributes to or makes for lasting and fulfilling relationships. If, for example, as Ricoeur says, social media effusions are an attempt to elevate the mundane, the simple, the every day, and lend it special meaning, it begs the question: Why might one feel the need to do this repeatedly, persistently?
True Love
There is an understandable need for young lovers to pronounce their joy in public. But love, when it matures, does not live publicly.Loving couples are not necessarily easy to pick out in public. I think of my parents, and my in-laws, married for nearly 50 years. They can sit with each other in comfortable silence for long periods of time. They can also communicate with each other without saying a word.
Love is largely a private relationship and demands intimacy. Only in intimacy does the inherent ambiguity or complexity of love emerge. Only in intimacy are you and your partner fully seen and known, with all your shortcomings or contradictions—and they are forgiven.
It is in these intimate moments that lovers learn to tolerate ambiguity, negotiate differences, and endure.