Major Takeaways

• Social media is warping expectations curated relationship highlights are creating unrealistic standards that real-life partners struggle to meet.
• Performance is replacing authenticity people feel pressure to prove love publicly instead of building it privately.
• Real love is rooted in consistency, not visibility lasting relationships are built on sacrifice and commitment, not posts and likes.

OPINION | Love, Likes, and Lies: How Social Media Is Distorting Relationships
and Rewriting What God Already Defined
PART ONE

By Felicia Kelly-Brookins•

Let’s talk honestly for a moment.
There’s a quiet crisis unfolding in modern relationships, and no, it’s not just happening behind
closed doors anymore. It’s happening right in front of us… on our screens.
What used to be private, love, disagreements, growth, commitment,has now become something
we scroll through. It’s curated, captioned, filtered, and shared for public consumption. And
somewhere along the way, social media didn’t just change how we connect, it started changing
what we expect from one another.

And if we’re being real, some of those expectations? They’re unrealistic.
This isn’t just opinion, it’s showing up in the data. A 2023 survey from the American
Psychological Association found that nearly 40% of adults in relationships say social media has
negatively impacted their partnership. The reasons? Comparison. Jealousy. Unrealistic
expectations.

At the same time, research from the Pew Research Center shows that more than half of adults
under 50 in relationships admit to feeling insecure or uncertain because of what they see their
partners doing, or not doing,online.
In plain terms: what we see online is quietly shaping what we think we should be receiving in
real life.And if you’ve ever scrolled for more than a few minutes, you’ve seen it. The lavish gifts.
The surprise vacations. The grand, public declarations of love that feel like scenes straight out of
a movie. They get labeled “relationship goals.”

But here’s the part we don’t always stop to consider: that’s not the whole story.
Those moments are edited. Filtered. Carefully selected.
Yet many men today feel the pressure to perform how much they spend, how publicly they
show affection, how consistently they can entertain. And women? They’re often measured by
appearance, desirability, and how closely they match whatever image is trending this week.
But where does that leave the substance? Because real relationships,the ones that actually
lastaren’t built on moments that go viral. They’re built on commitments that hold steady when
nobody’s watching.
Scripture has always pointed us back to that truth:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.”
Bible (Ephesians 5:25) That kind of love isn’t rooted in visibility,it’s rooted in sacrifice.
It’s not about what gets posted. It’s about what gets practiced.