See if your boyfriend will peel an orange for you. Call your boyfriend your husband and see how he reacts! Pretend you’re ignoring your girlfriend and see what she does. Ask your partner what their love language is, but be careful, because there’s a right answer! Ask your boyfriend if he’d still love you if you were a worm, and then ask him to name a woman, any woman at all. Pick up your girlfriend’s phone and watch her reaction. Make sure to record all of this and upload it onto the internet so random strangers can decide for you if your partner is worth keeping around!
Everyday I wake up to another trend on social media revolving around testing your partner on a secret question or experiment only you know the correct answer to. While I think social media can be a fun platform to share funny relationship stories or experiences, the idea of coming up with trends to test your partner has never sat right with me. Whether it’s something as simple as seeing if they’d peel an orange for you, or gauging their reaction by pretending to accidentally call them another person’s name, these relationship test trends are bad news. While they may seem harmless most of the time, I think the evolving way we treat romantic relationships based on how social media tells us to is a problem, and these tests are the most common trait. By constantly recording our partners, especially without their knowledge or permission, we are turning relationships into something performative and disingenuous. I don’t think many people are participating in these trends because they think it’s a valid test of love, but rather to gauge a reaction from a larger audience online. It’s almost a way to see if thousands, sometimes millions of strangers approve of your partner based on a 20 second video.
Social media in general has caused major harm to the way we view romantic relationships in today’s age. Loyalty is now an evolving term because partners have to define their own boundaries around what they can and can’t look at online while in a relationship. Couples have to deal with following other people on social media and whether or not liking another person’s posts (especially ones considered scandalous or revealing) is considered cheating, or at least disrespectful. Social media has normalized commonly gaining insight into private details of total strangers lives, so much so that we often forget that it has never been normal to do that. And by gaining that much insight, we are more often comparing what we have to others. This is especially true in relationships. It’s normal to find what looks like a picture-perfect couple on platforms like Instagram and TikTok and look at your own relationship with disdain. Of course, we’ve been taught that nothing on social media is entirely real, but as content gets more and more personal and invasive, it gets harder and harder to see the line between authentic and insincere.
Get Ready With Me (GRWM) storytimes have become one of the most popular genres of content uploaded on TikTok, where people sometimes share very intimate details of their lives, which can lead to a parasocial bond between the creator and the viewer. This leads to the line between the genuine and disingenuine getting incredibly blurry. When it gets that hard to discern between what might be completely real and raw and what is a filtered and glamorous version of someone’s life, people begin to compare their own lives to the perfect ones they may see online. This form of media literacy is critical for self-confidence, security, and happiness with oneself. This is especially impactful on young girls who are just beginning to form their identity. Access to this much insight on other people’s lives can severely damage the confidence of teenage girls, who now have unlimited access to videos of girls her age around the world that she finds prettier, skinnier, funnier, or cooler than her.
This comparison translates into relationships because it’s become increasingly popular to open up about past and current relationships during these GRWM storytimes, and now through trends used to test partners. If their partner responds “correctly”, whatever that may look like, the comment section praises the couple. If the partner somehow answers incorrectly, strangers on the internet will have no hesitation pressuring them to break up in the comments. This can be harmful with trends like the one where you try to get your boyfriend to peel an orange for you, without explicitly telling him to do so. If he just hands you the orange and expects you to peel it yourself, you may be met with some harsh critics in the comment section. People who have never met you or your partner before will begin giving you advice as if they know your entire life story. People in relationships may also see the videos where the partner does what’s considered the right thing to do and compare how their own partner would react. If social media has successfully convinced them that that’s the specific standard that needs to be met by their partner, and nothing else, it could have an actual negative effect on their relationship.
It’s important to constantly remind yourself that social media is not a real representation of people’s lives. Even though some people are willing to show the good, the bad, and the ugly, most content uploaded on these platforms has been designed to show the best parts of people’s lives, including their relationships. And these tests are, for the most part, meaningless. Set your own boundaries and standards in your relationship and don’t allow strangers to give unwarranted criticism. Use social media as a way to have fun and connect with people, not to find people to model your own life after. Your life is your life for a reason.