The true meaning of love has vanished in today’s society, by having virtual lives on the social media. Shakespeare wrote that “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”, but what if we as a generation are focusing too much on looking with the eyes, rather than our minds?
We live in the era of virtual lives. We throw ourselves into taking the perfect Instagram pic, articulating the perfect Facebook status, and coming up with the perfect Tweet. Our online personas are exactly how we want them to be because that is how we want people to see us, but we as humans are inherently imperfect.
There is a growing problem among our generation: we are confusing the people we see online with the people we meet in real life, and in turn, we make little effort to develop a relationship with the person they truly are.
No one can live up to the image they portray on social media, we set ourselves impossibly high boundaries by basing our standards on the actors and models that we see all over television and social media, and as a result, we can never live up to the alter ego we portray online.
Gone are the days of dating, love letters, and meaningful gestures; instead they are replaced with a like, a poke, and if you’re feeling daring you may even ‘pop up’ and this has affected our relationships in so many ways.
The desperation to portray a perfect life on social media has started to include our relationships, which we also try to portray as perfect, and this puts undue pressure on the relationships we have.
Relationships are naturally imperfect
We make mistakes and we learn from them, we do better the next time, but when we put pressure on our relationships by plastering them all over social media, we are forcing ourselves into a kind of relationship we aren’t ready for. This includes saying the L word before you’re ready for it and spending all of your time together taking ‘cute photos’.
We no longer make time to talk and spend quality time together, and it threatens to deteriorate our relationships altogether.
So how do we fix it? How can we find again the true meaning of love?
There is an ever so simple remedy to this problem, and it’s simply to make time for each other, talk to each other, and learn to love each other with your minds.
