Sleeping together is Not love.
Talking 24/7 is NOT love.
Laying up is NOT love.
Going on dates is NOT love.
Love is someone seeing the absolute worst side of you & still loving you the same. It's someone making stuff happen for you when you can't. It's someone holding you & calming you down while you're pouring your eyes out. It's someone voicing all the good things about you when all you see is bad. It's someone making sure you're okay, someone praying for you every day & night. It's someone that makes you laugh/ smile when you feel down.
Can we NOT normalize women having a bad attitude toward their man? I always see TikTok videos captioned with "I'm a woman, so I'm automatically right" and "a real man handles your attitude." Like, no girl, communicate properly, don't play the victim, and don't turn every argument against your man. They feel things as you do, even if they don't talk about it.
Basically, it's pushing back on the idea that women's emotions get a free pass while men are expected to just 'deal with it.'
I had a massive reality check last night about how Instagram is actively destroying long-term relationships by convincing us that love is supposed to be a 24/7 "soft life" aesthetic.
It was late, the apartment was stifling, and the power had randomly tripped. I was lying in the dark, scrolling through IG, watching a reel of some influencer getting surprised with a Cartier bracelet and a baecation. The caption was: “Never settle for less.”
Honestly, I let the internet poison my mind for a second. That familiar, creeping panic started settling in. I started wondering if my own relationship had lost the "spark" because we hadn’t done any grand romantic gestures lately. We were basically just splitting the crushing weight of adulthood.
Then I looked over at my man. There was no curated aesthetic. No cinematic background music. He was completely exhausted from his own day, but there he was, sitting on the bare floor in the dark, using his phone flashlight to help me count and sort out my ID Vogue orders so my morning deliveries wouldn't be delayed.
The entire Instagram illusion just shattered for me.
Social media has gaslit us into believing that if a relationship isn’t actively triggering your anxiety with constant highs and butterflies, it’s "dead." We mistake peace for boredom. We want a burning fire, completely forgetting that fires eventually burn the house down.
The harsh truth? Most long-term relationships aren't held together by overwhelming passion. They are held together by a VOW to look at each other in the middle of a brutal economy and say, "I am not going to let you drown today."
The internet will call that "settling." But the internet doesn't know a damn thing about what it actually takes to keep the water out and the house warm when things get dark. Stop letting a 60-second PR campaign ruin your real life.
My man said something to me that really stuck.
He told me, “I’m not here to control you. I’m not your dad, I’m your partner. You’re free to make your own choices. Just understand that every choice has consequences. If you choose something that damages what we’ve built, that’s on you.”
He said, “I’ll always tell you when something hurts me or crosses a boundary, because that’s what healthy communication looks like. But if you keep stepping over the line after I’ve shown you where it is, then you were never really protecting us to begin with.”
And honestly, that’s what accountability in a relationship sounds like.