We’re Compromising Connection for Performance

We're following a script instead of our values.

“The more we fought, the more beautiful pictures of us I posted,” my friend confessed to me one day. “Every time I declared my love online, I was trying to make things better offline.”

He broke up with his girlfriend after he discovered she had cheated, but their relationship had been rocky even before that. If you followed him on Instagram, you never would have guessed. They seemed like the perfect couple. Happy. In love. Enviable, really. But it was all for show.

Every time they posted a beautiful picture with a loving caption, they were fooling themselves. Wallpapering over deep termite damage. Telling themselves it was going to be ok without doing the work to make it so. Shaming each other into being a better partner by painting a public picture of everything they were not, or desperately asking for things to go back to what they used to be when they first met, and the romance was fresh and new.

I once went out with a man who couldn’t show me who he was, only perform as the man he thought I was looking for. He was obsessed with everything the internet told him was “masculine,” and his speech reproduced influencer talk to the letter. Instead of opening up and getting to know each other, I felt he was playing a part and expecting a performance from me in return. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.

The performance he expected was one I’ve seen countless times on social media. He was looking for the “feminine” woman who would be the perfect pair to the “masculine” man he was trying to portray. I put feminine and masculine in scare quotes, not because there’s anything wrong with those traits, but because the version of masculinity and femininity he was looking for is highly stereotyped and constrained. It’s not genuine, it’s performative. It’s women pretending to be helpless when they aren’t and men puffing up their chests to make themselves appear bigger. It doesn’t allow for any variations inside the masculine/feminine spectrum; it assumes everything will be ok as long as everyone plays their part just right, draining spontaneity out of the relationship almost entirely. It places performance above genuine connection.

It’s tempting to compromise connection in favor of performance. When you perform, you follow a script. It feels safe. Especially when there are so many voices out there repeatedly telling (and showing) you exactly what to do.

When celebrities and Instagram influencers decorate entire five-star hotel rooms with balloons and gift their girlfriends gigantic rose bouquets and expensive designer bags, when destination weddings in Lake Como take over your social media feed, when lenghty posts declaring the full extent of your feelings at every birthday, anniversary, and Valentines Day become the new standard, your frame of reference for what’s “normal” in a relationship is skewed.

When online gurus tell you to expect “princess treatment” and look for masculine and feminine “energies” in stereotyped gendered behavior instead of taking the time to get to know your partner, you lose touch with your standards — you replace them with someone else’s arbitrary rules.

And you learn to perform, too. You learn to stage beautiful pictures and write moving captions. You learn to calculate your actions, so they become beautiful gestures you can upload to your Instagram stories. You judge people based not on your values but on whether or not they follow the same script, and you feel shortchanged when their actions don’t match your expectations.

It’s no wonder so many of us are unhappy in love; we’re measuring our happiness by the metrics of a social media performance that’s so far from real it might as well exist on the moon.

Romance is nice. Going to a nice restaurant to celebrate an anniversary is nice. Gifting your girlfriend flowers is nice. Dressing up for your boyfriend is nice. Taking a beautiful couple’s picture is nice. You need those moments of tenderness, romance, and beauty in your life. But you don’t have to turn those into a performance. Especially when you’re using performance to compensate for a lack of connection, or to mask how deeply miserable you are in that relationship.

No amount of flowers, romantic trips to Paris, or lengthy declarations of undying love on social media can replace vulnerability, emotional connection, and a genuine desire to grow together.