NASHVILLE — By now, whatever time of day you read this essay, your Facebook and Instagram feeds are most likely filled with hothouse flowers and lovely hand-dipped chocolates and stories of the funny way two people met, how lucky they are to have found each other, how grateful they feel, on this day of love especially, to be moving through the world together. Such stories can be incredibly sweet, but their cumulative effect is … not.
There are worse crimes than loving your partner and writing about it. How can it hurt to tell a long-burnished love story one more time, or share a photo of the Valentine roses from a new sweetheart? Public discourse is so troubled these days, so beset by fury and despair, that surely there’s no harm in sharing a little joy.
Thing is, it makes a lot of people feel awful. They’re already lonely, and along comes Valentine’s Day to rub their noses in it. Or they’re perfectly happy in their own relationships, but everyone else’s relationships suddenly look happier somehow. Sweeter. Tenderer. Filled with better chocolate.
It doesn’t matter that the fiction underlying every “happily ever after” tale is universally understood. The truest love stories still include a fair number of pointless misunderstandings and nights spent back to back on opposite sides of the bed. And even if by some miracle they didn’t, there are still no lasting happily-ever-afters, as the musician Jason Isbell writes so hauntingly in his song “If We Were Vampires”:
It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
Death isn’t something we talk about much on Valentine’s Day.
None of this is new, of course. People have always been hurt, and people have always been lonely, and Valentine’s Day has always exacerbated those feelings. When I was in high school the student government raised money by selling color-coded carnations for Valentine’s Day. A red carnation meant love, white meant friendship, another color, maybe pink, meant someone wanted to be more than a friend. To send a flower anonymously, you could pay extra for “insurance.” The popular kids walked around all day with great bouquets of carnations in their arms, a visible reminder of their social currency in that time of life when social currency is everything.
And now Facebook and Instagram — and probably TikTok, though I’ll be damned if I’ll add yet another possibility to my time-wasting options, so I can’t say for sure about TikTok — has turned the entire 21st century into high school, and once again the popular kids are holding out their bouquets and exclaiming, “Smell these; aren’t they divine?”
There are many reasons to hate Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram: its predatory business model, its role in spreading false election information and false vaccine information, its exacerbation of political polarization, its sucking up the details of our personal lives and turning them into a commodity.
But much of the unhappiness engendered by “social” media doesn’t come from its poisonous effect on society. It comes from its poisonous effect on us. Other people’s beautifully curated Facebook and Instagram posts are no closer to real life than reality TV is, and maybe we even know it, but it still makes us feel bad. “I don’t know very many people that come away from 30 minutes on Instagram feeling really good about who they are,” the designer and podcaster Debbie Millman told Kara Swisher last week in an interview on Sway.
No wonder loneliness is an epidemic now, and the loneliness of the 21st century isn’t like the loneliness of the 20th. Now it’s exacerbated by however many hundred — or thousands — of “friends” we have online. All Valentine’s Day long, it’s love notes and jewelry and heart-bedazzled pajamagrams. All day long, it’s candlelight and candy and flowers thrust under our noses. Don’t they smell divine?
Romantic love is a beautiful thing, but it is not the only way to feel connected, to feel seen, to feel loved. It’s not even the most important way to feel those things. The fullest happiness comes from a community — a real community of real people. Whether or not that community includes a partner, it definitely doesn’t arise from an online platform that sows discord and sorrow, an algorithm that only deepens human despair.
That’s what I used to write on Facebook at this time of year, though I don’t do that anymore because the less time I spend on Facebook the happier I am. But if I still posted Valentine’s Day greetings on a site swarming with public declarations of love, here is what I would write to anyone who is lonely, whose heart is broken, or who grieves a love gone too soon from this gorgeous, temporary world:
Whatever the world seems determined to tell us on this day for love that shuts so many people out, no one is alone. We are, all of us, made for one another.
You were made for me, and I was made for you, and we were both made for the grieving widow and the friendless child and the old man sleeping in the sunny library chair and the tired barista just barely leaning her hip against the counter and the teenager sneaking a smoke in the parking lot and the woman in high heels pumping gas and the cyclist pedaling head-down in the whoosh of passing traffic and the bored checkout clerk and the irritated mother whose child will not put on her shoes and the fog-breathed lineman in the bucket high above branches just on the verge of breaking into bud.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”
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