Love And Friendship Are Auditions And Nobody Is Getting Cast

A friend takes six hours to reply to your text. Your boyfriend forgets to ask how your exam went. Someone makes a joke that rubs you the wrong way. Congratulations! You’ve just discovered three new red flags, according to the internet.

The solution? Protect your peace. Know your worth. Cut them off. Apparently, we are all one tiny red flag away from a relationship crisis.

Social media has heavily changed what we expect romance to look like. Much of the dating advice flooding social media is directed at women, telling them what to look for and tolerate in a man. We have gendered so many ordinary things that even a drink or a hobby can apparently say something about a person’s worth as a man or a woman.

Consider the strange policing of masculinity and femininity. A man enjoys matcha and suddenly his masculinity is up for public debate. Women, meanwhile, get judged for being too masculine, too independent or not feminine enough. Everyone must fit neatly into one category.

With this, we have become very good at imagining what relationships should look like and much worse at appreciating what they actually are. Social media has turned romance and friendship into a performance review. Dates, gifts, anniversaries and group outings are no longer just things we experience; they are now evidence that we are loved, that our partners care and that our friends value us.

If the evidence is not convincing enough, we start wondering whether the relationship itself is worth keeping, confusing a good relationship with one that looks good online.

When our feeds are full of surprise dates, expensive gifts and elaborate displays of affection, it can be easy to measure our own relationships against someone else’s. A partner who shows love in quieter, less Instagram-worthy ways might start to seem less romantic, simply because their relationship does not look as exciting online.

But people are more complicated than a set of gender rules. A confident voice and a ring light do not turn an opinion into science. Even when advice draws on real research, a short video can strip away context and transform a limited finding into a universal law about how men and women should behave. Online dating advice packages these gender expectations as the secret to a successful relationship.

For example, there is the infamous “ick,” where a tiny habit or awkward moment becomes a reason to lose interest in someone. A man or a woman can be perfectly kind and attractive until they do something slightly embarrassing, and suddenly the internet has a new reason for why he is “undateable.”

Ordinary human awkwardness has become evidence of a fundamental flaw. When every slightly embarrassing behavior makes someone undesirable, who exactly are we expecting to date?

These expectations do not stop at romance; friendships are facing a similar problem. We expect our friends to be constantly available, remember every important detail, invite us to everything and recognize when something is wrong without being told. When they fail, it can feel like proof that they do not care. Meanwhile, we have forgotten that they have their own lives outside of us.

Social media and online self-help content have also made it easier to label people and their behavior. Words like “toxic,” “narcissistic” and “red flag” can help us describe serious problems, but they can also become labels we reach for before we fully understand a situation. A disagreement becomes a sign of incompatibility. A forgotten invitation becomes evidence of betrayal. Instead of asking what happened, we may immediately ask whether the friendship is worth keeping.

Recognizing toxic patterns is important, and it is necessary to walk away from manipulative relationships. However, there is a difference between recognizing a pattern of harmful behavior and deciding that someone is toxic because they made one mistake. Not every hurt feeling means someone intended to hurt us, and not every conflict means a relationship is beyond repair. Sometimes, the healthier choice is to have an uncomfortable conversation, explain what went wrong and see whether the other person is willing to listen and change.

Think about how a friendship often begins. It might be the girl sitting next to you in class, someone you barely know who eventually becomes the person you tell everything. You learn each other’s annoying habits and imperfections. The friendship deepens not because neither of you make mistakes, but because you learn how to move past them.

There is a difference between expecting respect and expecting perfection. If we keep rejecting people for failing to meet the standards we learned from strangers on the internet, we might get exactly what we asked for: no red flags, no drama, no uncomfortable conversations and no one left to love.

Soukhyada Waghmare can be reached at swaghmare@umass.edu.