Social Media: Love in the Age of the Feed

There is a fantasy of relationships that exists almost entirely online. It appears in the feed as the laden breakfast tray on crisp linen, the carefully planned anniversary dinner, the long weekend away. It is everywhere and, in a sense, nowhere — because what we are seeing is not a relationship, but a version of one.

This distinction matters more than it might first appear.

A Version of Things

What we encounter on social media is selected - sometimes for commercial gain, sometimes simply to share a small part of one’s life. And, of course, people are entitled to share what they wish.

But the cumulative effect of viewing other people’s relationships - their homes, their gestures of love, their domestic lives - can be quietly powerful. We scroll to fill a moment, without knowing the impact it may subsequently have. For example, you scroll through your phone and see the breakfast in bed; your lukewarm cup of tea may suddenly feel inadequate. You see the long weekend away, and suddenly your quiet evening on the sofa, which felt comfortable and companionable, seems dull. Nothing has changed, but something has shifted.

What Comparison Does

Roosevelt observed that comparison is the thief of joy. He could not have anticipated the scale on which social media would organise that theft. Never before have the intimate details of people's lives been displayed quite like this.

What makes this so difficult is that the standard being measured against is not any single real relationship. It is a composite, assembled from the best moments of dozens of curated lives. No actual relationship can compete with that, because no actual relationship consists only of its best moments. We may know this, but knowing is not the same as feeling it.

People differ in how porous they are to these external narratives. For some, such images pass through lightly, skimming the surface. For others, they are absorbed more deeply, gradually shaping expectations about what love should look like, how it should be performed, and what a partner ought to provide. Social media can heavily influence our aspirations.

The Ordinary, Reconsidered

What social media cannot capture - what it is constitutionally unable to capture - is the texture of a relationship that has lasted: the shorthand of two people who have built a language together; the quiet resilience of repair after rupture; the quality of presence that comes from years of accumulated knowing.

These moments are not glossy. They are not perfect from the outside in. But they are in many ways the bedrock of intimacy since the relationships that last are not, in my clinical experience, the ones that look most impressive from the outside. They are the ones that feel most sustaining from the inside. And those two things are not always the same. The couple who appear to be doing everything right - the gestures, the holidays, the public warmth - is not necessarily the couple who feel most known to each other. Conversely, the couple living an ordinary, un-instagrammable life may be navigating something richer: genuine emotional attunement, and a desire to remain connected through the unremarkable passages of a shared life.

When It Enters the Room

In clinical work, social media rarely appears directly as a presenting problem. It tends to arrive embedded in descriptions revealing increasing dissatisfaction, a growing sense that something is missing. Sometimes, however, it is more explicit. A client may describe what someone else's partner arranged, where someone else spent the weekend. The implied comparison is rarely far behind: ‘x did this’. What strikes me in these moments is not the comparison itself, but the difficulty clients often have in recognising their own vulnerability to it. Most of us are less immune to the external world than we would like to believe.

Part of the clinical work becomes helping cultivate genuine curiosity about this - not self-criticism, but inquiry. Why do other people's experiences land so heavily? What is being stirred? What function does social media play in our lives? And what role does the wish to be seen - to appear a certain way, to perform a certain kind of life - play in how we relate to others, and to ourselves?

The Harder, More Sustaining Thing

A relationship is built in the unremarkable moments: the conversation that leads to repair, the warmth of a look, the hand held in a waiting room, the silence that feels comfortable. These are private moments, which build a connection between two people. And it is this connection, in all its quiet ordinariness, that no carefully curated breakfast tray can capture.