A hashtag has been trending in the social media world: #relationshipgoals. Together with this hashtag are pictures of couples positioned in fitness poses, traveling to the most exotic places and receiving lavish gifts―mind you, these couples are flawless, from their angelic faces to their perfect bodies. But these pictures don’t truly grasp what a relationship is.
When absorbed inside the world of social media, viewers are constantly comparing their lives to the ones depicted on their phone screens. Suddenly, their relationships become insufficient―unable to measure up to the picture-perfect relationship, or what seems to be.
The problem is most of the time what a person is viewing isn’t nearly as close to being accurate. We are trapped behind the idea of unrealistic expectations. Who defines what a “relationship goal” is anyway? Humans should be the very last ones to define what love is because we have broken what love was intended to be. Many are just infatuated with the idea of being in a relationship and being with that one person who claims to love and adore every facet of the other. Humans have made it so hard to love; we’ve made it impossible to believe in love, in its truest form.
Social media and its impractical hashtag has turned the idea of love into a fairytale in which perfect relationships and unachievable physical looks always end in happily ever after. It’s funny that people still haven’t realized that beauty is only temporary and makes for an equally fleeting form of love.
People have lost the idea that one can’t fall in love with beauty, looks, money or materialistic items. As individuals get to know one another, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. They begin to dwell in each other’s energy, recognize the scent of their skin. When one really connects with a person, any physical imperfections become irrelevant.
A relationship should be based upon trust, admiration and pure happiness between two people, whether that compares to what a hashtag portrays or not. Love is a feeling, not a superficial meaning. Clearly, society is imprisoned in an era of comparing―a non-stop, constant competition with one another. Couples must find their own happiness and let go of what they think their life is supposed to look like and celebrate it for everything that it is.
Love and relationships should be desired, but there is more to a relationship than that. Maybe our culture isn’t guilty of shallow love. Maybe our culture is guilty of cheapening what a relationship truly should be: truthful, continuous, unconditional and sacrificial. Show that in a hashtag.
