The High Cost Of Loving
Or How Instagram Changed Valentine’s Day
Instagram done fucked up the game. Things haven’t been right, they haven’t been the same since Instagram became a thing. If you aren’t willing to put in considerable time, thought, effort, energy, and most importantly, money, you’re going to lose at the game of love.
Valentine’s Day has always been the manufactured holiday to spur the floral, card, and chocolate industries, and we willfully went along with it. The concept of a day dedicated to love is a quaint one. Who would actually oppose to such a day despite its obvious capitalistic/materialistic roots? What’s not to love about love regardless of its guise? But in 2015, a simple card, flowers, and chocolate just ain’t cutting it. If your gift isn’t Instagram-worthy, there’s no point. If your girl can’t come up with a clever hashtag to make other women envious of her, her man, and her gift, you’re not even trying. If she can’t get a hundred-plus likes, you didn’t try hard enough. If some basic bitches don’t hate, you don’t really love her.
Instagram is not a social media platform: it is the 13th grade with its own economy – social currency. Multifaceted, the main purpose (not intention) of Instagram is for people to capture, share, and stunt off of their Most Valuable Moments. If you’re in the bleachers of the latest, greatest concert at Madison Square Garden, just being there isn’t good enough. Zero fucks. You need to be backstage taking an unintentionally blurry picture with a bunch of hashtags making sure people know that you are one of the blessed few backstage and your moment is better than everyone else’s. The notion of capturing Kodak Moments for the sake of prosperity and maintaining fond memories is laughable in the 13th grade. Now you need hard evidence that your life is the muthafuckin’ greatest. And Instagram is the perfect tool to accomplish this.
[intense_blockquote color=”primary” font_color=”#ffffff” border_color=”#000000″ width=”100%”]If it isn’t Instagram-worthy, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist. It is the tree in the forest with no one around.[/intense_blockquote]
Nothing is sacred. Every aspect of our lives needs to be “documented” and shared. The one day of the year dedicated to love is the perfect time to showcase to the world how incredibly loved you are by taking a ton of selfies with the incredible gift(s) you received either by bae/boo/babe or allllllll of your suitors/followers/stalkers because you are so incredible. She is so shocked and surprised by these genuine tokens of love, she has to share it with everybody on her timeline. If it isn’t Instagram-worthy, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist. It is the tree in the forest with no one around.
If you love your woman and want to win on Valentine’s Day, this is what you must do:
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Acknowledge and reconcile the fact that your woman is a bird, because her whole existence is rooted in Instagram and what people she doesn’t know think and feel about her.[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Remind yourself that she is your bird and keep repeating the mantra – “a happy wife is a happy life.”[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Around Christmas time, start planning Valentine’s Day. This will give you time to save up your money.[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Understand that you have to give her something and give her an experience. Yes. At least two gifts. Double Jeopardy.[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Do research. See what other women have gotten on Valentine’s Day and see how many likes, comments, and hate they’ve gotten. Whatever got the most, use that as your baseline to base your gift off of. If it’s an item, get the newest version of it or whatever has replaced it as the new “it” item. If it’s an experience, what element can you add to it to one-up that moment? Is it exclusive? How rare is it? Can it fit in a 1×1 square photo? What music can you add to it? Can you make a photo grid out of it? What filter works best for it? How about hashtags? Have you thought of some clever, unique, one-of-a-kind obnoxious-and-too-long-to-read-and-understand hashtags? Do your homework! Social media is a job. You didn’t know?[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Critical mass. Whatever you do, it cannot be in a vacuum. It has to be seen by as many people as possible. Valentine’s Day gifts at work is the absolute bestests. It’s a Daily Double, she pisses off her haters (every woman has haters, especially at work, real or imaginary), and has witnesses who can also Instagram her gift amplifying the magnitude of the love (hate and envy, which secretly all women crave for as much as they look for love).[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
[intense_icon_list] [intense_icon_list_item type=”chevron-right” size=”2″ color=”primary”]Come to grips with the aftermath. You’re going to have to sit and watch as she takes photo after photo of the gift and furiously pecks away on her phone. Valentine’s Day isn’t going to be about us (you and her), rather it’s all about it (whatever you got her, wherever you took her) and her timeline/feed/followers/ghost followers/lurkers.[/intense_icon_list_item] [/intense_icon_list]
Listen… don’t fight it, it’s fruitless. Valentine’s Day isn’t going away. And Instagram is only going to grow ever more immense and a woven into more than just pop culture, but the entire fabric of humanity (I’m being dead ass serious). The `Gram has reprogrammed the minds of society. Although the social media platform is open to all, like all things in life – it isn’t free. The cost is your time, thought, effort, energy, piece of mind, money, and depending upon if you came correct this February 14th, it may cost you your relationship.
[Sidebar: I typically don’t do Valentine’s Day for way too many reasons, but this year I went in and dropped way too much money for the type of gift I got. I had to gift the gift a week earlier as the recipient of my heart-shaped arrow was going out of town for the week on V-Day. Don’t expect her to Instagram a picture of it, because she doesn’t display birdbrain behavior. And I won’t share it myself, because if you want your relationship to actually be successful, sharing on social media isn’t caring, it’s costly.]