The Fantasy of Love In The Digital Age

Image by DESIGNECOLOGIST via Unsplash

Nostalgia is often framed as a tender and sentimental comfort; a rose-tinted radiance and warmth that flushes our cheeks in the hours of discomfort. It offers cordial protection from addressing our present thoughts and surroundings.

Multiple studies show that nostalgia protects us from the perpetual black hole of cold existential anguish. From death anxiety, boredom, and feelings of meaninglessness. It’s an ancient, universal emotion, and in much scientific literature, it’s seen as a force for good. More specifically, it has been found that feeling nostalgic in relationships can increase intimacy, satisfaction, and passionate love.

I want to argue the contrary. When nostalgia creeps beyond the boundary of personal affairs into a question for the culture, it gets lost in a haze of becoming a collective habit of looking backwards instead of forward.

Cultural and social nostalgia is marked everywhere: in the daily media we consume, in the aesthetics we proudly portray, and in the conversations with friends where we idealise “simpler times”. Nostalgia lullabies familiarity, serenading feelings of belonging into our essence. Fuelling emotional safety by feeding our souls,

One of humanity’s most primitive features is the chase for a sense of belonging. It gives us purpose and existential relief. We build a sense of identity through how we perceive our belonging to a group and their ideas. 

Our generation has constructed a large portion of shared identity around digital memories. From TikToks to couple channels on YouTube to celebrity couples, we, as a generation, have become engrossed in relationships beyond our social circles. The parasocial relationships formed via these digital spaces have led to a distorted view of access and connection. Being in love, craving love and discussing love occupy a significant portion of our adolescence. In addition, its profound online presence crystallises how we connect and see ourselves within a group. We look back on digital moments with a collective nostalgia and get lost in the cliché longing for a cinematic relationship. 

Over time, repeated online images and reactions meticulously form schemas (a mental framework) of what love should be, illustrating the design of our personal internalisation of how they should feel and look. Of course, these are also underlined by our culture, upbringing, and what we’ve been shown and agreed to admire as a collective.

Unconsciously, we have become conditioned to seek familiarity over gushing romantic authenticity, to subside into complacency rather than plunge into depth. True connection in romantic relationships has been mishandled by fantastical imaginings - we are nostalgic for a love we have curated over the past decade of our lives. It’s not necessarily based on real experience, but on a version of love we’ve been digesting, reposting, and collectively worshipping.

Collective nostalgia is a result of inserted online ideas of what relationships should look like. It feels like a fantasy that can make real relationships feel less euphoric by comparison. Even from childhood, Western culture has fed us romantic narratives, implanting the idea that love should feel like a salvation of the self; that stability equals happiness. On the other end of the scale, collective nostalgia in relationships is used to escape the present state of our beingness. Everything seems to be a reference nowadays - even love. Love, the most fundamental and anthropological grounding. We attach ourselves to imagined versions of love, past relationships, and constructed media romance tropes because it simply feels safer to label ourselves.

For example, in past generations, the notion of the damsel in distress was one of the most prominent movie tropes. A  vulnerable woman whose fragility demanded saving, and ultimately her script terminated when a man arrived to save her. For example, Audrey Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or Rose in Titanic (1997). Even Mary Jane in Spider-Man (2002) carries remnants of this trope.

The ‘damsel in distress’ was also deeply rooted in older Disney films, which a lot of us were raised on. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) both portray ‘damsels’ who are swept away from eternal sleep (death…) by a prince's loving kiss, even Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991), arguably one of Disney’s more “intellectual” heroines, still seeks and welcomes the romantic transformation of her captor. These films have reinforced the empty promise that our happy ending is folded in the pursuit of a heroic man. Fulfilment has been shown time and time again as something found in another person, not in oneself.

It wasn’t until much later that cinema trickled down the path of challenging this script - not as radically, however. With the rise of the ‘femme fatale’, a contrasting archetype to the ‘damsel in distress’. This sultry, seductive woman uses her beauty to seduce men into traps and trouble. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle in The Batman (2022) and every Bond girl, ever. They all embody the dangerous allure of autonomy and the hazard of logical complexity. But all in all, the femme fatale remains a side character to a male protagonist, and more than anything, represents temptation rather than self-sufficiency, as she remains centering her strategy around a man to get what she wants.

I  finally feel like our generation has the equipment, the personality, and the space to find love for love.  We are blessed with the opportunity to dismantle the monogamous, male-female relationship scripts, as there is less fear of being judged. We have the language, the audience, and the attention to challenge heteronormative ideals that our grandparents couldn’t question and our parents could only half escape. For them, love was a transaction, sealing financial stability or status. It’s strange to think that the independence that we have now was once radical and taboo. 

We have proved to be more fearless in our identities. Several generations of mothers and grandmothers have warned us to marry for love rather than for money - a vehicle to live vicariously through us, to drive away from the longing contaminating the strained romance they experienced

Today, we have the power to use the media as a tool for progress. The privilege of deconstructing historic and repressed stereotypes and model relationships that are authentic, colourful, and emotionally literate. And yet, even as time progresses, an almost evolutionary nostalgia creeps in. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the “tradwife” aesthetic has been upsettingly and easily resurfaced by influencers such as Nara Smith or Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm), who tediously reiterated a part of history women have tried to eradicate. Old ideals seasoned in cottagecore kitchens and blended in homemade Twix Bar Recipes. A domestic ideal that programs “fresh” young women that their highest value lies in nurturing and performing rather than simply becoming.

It is frightening to ask yourself whether you’re in love or simply avoiding being alone. Whether your relationship is real or just a carefully curated aesthetic. Well, what about the whirlwind of emotions? What about the thrill of affection, the ecstasy of being seen? Dare I say, the heartbreak.  In simple terms, true emotional authenticity. I believe it’s a privilege of today's human experience to be able to liberally delve into the chaos of romantic exploration without fear.

Use the opportunity to love for the tangles of complication and authenticity, as complication can be beautiful and exhilarating. I know that I want to overdose on the dizzying warmth of closeness.  Yet, I find that it is challenging to do so when this shared history doesn’t exist beyond the scope of memory; it sits tucked away in the archives of both our phones and our minds, but still, I yearn and hope for it to exist again, if not for all, then for me. 

So maybe the real question is this: What does love look like when it’s ours to define? 

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Edited by Zarah Hashim, Sex and Relationships Editor