JUNE | 2020 | LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS

UNTAINTED  

The only thing we love more than our kind of love is public displays of our kind of love. Some do their best to convince us that our love isn’t part of the whole black love movement, but fuck them. Our love is just as valid (and probably more spicy) as theirs. Some of us can attest to what it's like to follow a couple who’s every moment is shared on social media. We follow their every picture and post on Insta, and double tap as if our own love lives depend on it.

We love how open and honest they are with each other, the way they publicly post cute messages on each other’s timelines, and oh, look! They just got a dog! One of the best ways to chill after a long day of social distancing (alone) is to endlessly scroll through the photos that tell the story of their love. 

Their love keeps us hopeful as we navigate through the landfill of dating while SGL. Their love  always seems so positive, so reaffirming, and most importantly, it sooo seems real. The only other people who are as invested in their relationship as they are, is us. Their public gestures fill us with warm fuzzy butterflies. We make mental notes of them, notes that we one day hope to use as inspiration for what we’ll do in our next relationship. 

Don’t take this the wrong way, because we (again) love the visibility and representation of black, SGL love. Its displays are as relevant as they are heartwarming, but we’ve gotta remember that what works the goose won’t necessarily work for our gander asses.

Disclaimer: we’re not criticizing those who are comfortable displaying their love and aspects of their relationships online, but are going to spend our third annual Social Media Issue discussing the importance of keeping each and every aspect of your future relationship offline. 

Sharing and caring are synonymous, but that doesn’t mean we have to share everything about the Beaux we’re caring for. Playing our relationships close to the vest prevents others from becoming over involved in it just as much as it keeps us involved in it. The moment we start accepting or expecting applause for the things we do for our Beaux is the moment we degrade the value of something that’s potentially priceless.

Insta doesn’t need to know about each and every time he surprises us with flowers, about the new shoes we bought him, or about the notes he leaves us every day. Sharing too much about the man we’re spending our most intimate moments with is cheapening, to say the least. Again, this is about balance, so it doesn’t mean share nothing, but we don’t have to share everything.

It's easy to understand why we sometimes overshare the aspects of our relationships, especially when we feel  we’ve found the perfect match. We wanna tell the whole world about our Beaux. We want people to know about the things he does to and for us, and the way he makes us feel, but we’ve gotta know when to pump the brakes.

The best way to keep ourselves from oversharing is to keep the number of people we share with as small as possible. We can do so by sharing our experiences with our real friends, the friends we know outside of social media. We’ve gotta be careful with this though, because even our closest friends aren’t gonna want to hear each and every detail either. 

The struggle of not oversharing can be very real, but there are a few questions we should ask ourselves to prevent ourselves from doing so. Why are we sharing what we’re sharing? Is it relevant to the conversation, or the response to a question we were actually asked? Why are we choosing to share what we’re sharing with the person we’re sharing it with? Are we looking for answers, approval or both? 

These are but two of a limitless number of questions we should ask ourselves before opening the floodgates of our relationship, and their answers well go a long way in helping us decide whether we should or shouldn’t discuss certain parts of our relationships. 

The sooner we overcome the sometimes unconscious act of oversharing the aspects of our relationships online, the sooner we’ll notice the benefits that follow. The greatest benefit in not posting about each and every part of our relationship is that we don’t have to live up to the expectation of being one half of the perfect couple.

The inevitable fate of many of the relationships we see plastered across our timelines is that they will end as publicly as they began. Remember how in love we were with Rico and Kash and Kordale and Kaleb? 

Both of these couples gave us hope, and we constantly found ourselves more involved than we should have been, but we only did so with their permission. This should be seen more as a lesson and as less than an attack. Both couples were viewed as the pinnacle of success, and their exploits were sometimes accompanied by the relationship goals hashtag.

None of the praise and admiration were enough to fix whatever problems they were having, and many of us had front row tickets to their relationships’ demise. Many of our expectations of these relationships weren’t met, which is fine because we weren’t involved--but imagine how we’d feel if we actually were involved. This is why its best to keep our business out of the streets. 

Less is more when it comes to sharing our relationships online. A conservative approach to sharing our love makes it authentic.The path to this approach is paved with altruism, and our journey down this path allows us to spend more time with our Beaux.

Here we’ll find that every date isn’t a photo op, that the intimate details of our gestures become more sacred when less people are involved, and that we spend more time feeding off the energy of our Beaux than we do checking to see how many retweets the picture we posted of the two of us gets. 

An authentic relationship doesn’t serve as a crutch for our happiness and well-being. It shouldn’t exist under the weight of being our primary source of joy and validation, and it most certainly isn’t something we should base the totality of our identities on.

Our relationships should be about the moments we share and the memories we create, and should center around our relation to and with our Beaux. Evidence of the authenticity of our relationships should be found in the value we find in them, and none of this value should be based on the attention we receive from others.