The Daily Life of Gods, Ukrainian artist Alexey Kondakov

It’s 2016. Now more than ever, our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds are filled with lots and lots of memes ranging from a trivial Leonardo DiCaprio non-Oscar win to the weekly “It’s Monday” comics featuring faces of grumpy cats and less-than-excited beavers who allegedly dread coming back to school/work after a weekend of drunk dancing at the club.

Another thing that has made its way to the social media stardom recently is the hashtag “relationshipgoals” or, as people are typically visually familiar with, #relationshipgoals . And while having goals in life is undeniably essential and even attractive to a degree, relationship goals are a completely different story. In fact, these relationship goals of yours may be the very reason you are still internally unhappy (regardless of your relationship status). I personally think that relationship goals are exponentially nonsensical and downright useless. Here’s why:

Reason #1: A relationship is an experience to partake, not a job to get hired for.

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way: at the end of the day, a relationship isn’t exactly something that makes for a palpable goal. It’s not like a job interview that you can train for, prepare for and eventually ace. Relationships are foremost experiences, and they are on-going. You don’t just dream of a holiday in Maldives with your Special Someone and call that your goal. Because that would just be totally short-lived and sad.

What about after your Maldives vacation? What happens next? Does your goal end there? Will you then be super contented with your white sand beach getaway and go, “Wow, my hashtag goals just happened. I knew Dylan’s the right one for me, I just knew it!”?

MAZZOLA, Francesco (Parmigianino) (1503-1540)

Being with someone is more than just the vacations you take. There is a fine line between having an actual relationship and having a mere summer fling. So if you feel that crippling sensation of discontentment in your body each time you scroll down Instagram and see the strangers you follow post their 29th photo in Bora Bora, then you should probably reassess the label you and your partner wear around your necks.

Reason #2: Your #RelationshipGoals are giving you anxiety, and you don’t even know it.

Maybe you are already committed to someone at the moment, or maybe you have been single af your whole life. Either way, each time you share that photo of “The Cutest Couple To Ever Walk On Earth”, you are unconsciously allowing yourself to succumb into a severe case of insecurity-induced anxiety.

I’m not here to throw shade at you for admiring other couples out there, but I am here to remind you of your worth. So listen, here’s the thing: so what if you and your lover are not master chefs who go to the gym eight days a week and eat salad instead of popcorn when binge watching Netflix? So what if the man you love doesn’t have six-pack abs or if the lady you are with doesn’t skip bonding with her friends to play DOTA 2 with you? You need to remember that everyone’s different, and there should not be one exclusive model of what a relationship should look like.

It shouldn’t look like anything! Hell, it can even be faceless. Learn to focus more on what it feels like for you, rather than what it should look like for you…

COPLEY, John Singleton (1738–1815)

Reason #3: Such goals take you away from the present moment and put you in a pretend place.

You are with who you are with right now for a reason. You fell in love with that person because that one fateful night (or day), you looked into his eyes and felt like you could get lost in them. You were there, in the present moment, as he held your hand in the cab on your way to grab dessert at your favorite local bakery. You felt every centimeter of his lips as you kissed him goodnight. And then you both broke away from the kiss, stared into each other’s souls, and smiled. And it was magical. You wanna know why it was magical?

Because it was real. And you were both there, right as everything was unfolding. You were the players in your own love story, not mere spectators or some highly-sarcastic romance novel critics.

I don’t know if you’ve already noticed, but relationships are only made possible when two people are present. The minute either one of you goes off into some daydream that highlights a perfect world for yet another perfect love, that’s when your relationship gets taken for granted. You are not obliged to be like other couples. You are not supposed to be where they’ve been, to see what they’ve seen or to hear what they’ve heard. None of us is sitting in our sturdy futons rooting for you and your hubby to look just like Brangelina.

You are who you are. Your relationship is what it is. And you should be very proud of that, because you are writing your own story.

Come back into your own reality ASAP. You belong nowhere else but there. For you and for your lover, it is the only place where magic can happen.

Reason #4: RelationshipGoals photos/videos/articles are aggressively deceiving.

Nothing screams “LIES!” louder than #RelationshipGoals posts all over social media. I’m not saying that these posts aren’t real or didn’t actually happen in real life. What I’m saying here is that these posts do not determine how real or successful anyone’s relationship is.

We have to remember that these posts feature the highlights of other people’s lives. What’s sad is that there are lots of people who see these highlights and compare them to their regular day-to-day living. When you do this, you are basically comparing someone else’s annual 2-week vacation to your normal Monday morning at the office. Of course you’re gonna be jealous and of course you’re gonna wanna do what they are doing in those photos and videos! Because I mean, who loves Mondays, really? Nobody.

BERNINI, Gian Lorenzo (1598-1680)

You have to remind yourself that you, too, have your own highlight reel. You do have your weekends and you do have your annual 2-week paid leave. You will have weddings to attend, high school reunions to be a part of and concerts to watch, eventually. Needless to say, NOBODY (and I mean nobody) sips on Grey Goose cocktails in a private jet plane on the way to Cancun every single fucking day of his or her life.

Ponder that.

1. The cocktails are eventually gonna run out.
2. The person is probably gonna get shit-faced hammered by the end of the day if he doesn’t stop drinking the beverage.
3. The trip is obviously gonna end as the jet plane reaches the destination (Cancun or whatever).
4. And, most obviously, nobody in the history of mankind has ever reached Cancun via a private jet plane, and took the flight back to his origin right after, just so he could keep on posting photos and Snaps of him in the plane.

Bottomline: It doesn’t matter how awesome and rich someone is. NOBODY LIVES THE ENTIRETY OF LIFE VIA A HIGHLIGHT REEL.

Even the sun goes down when it’s time for it to go down (i.e., 5:30PM Philippine Time).

The relationship goals posts you see aren’t to be compared to your life. These are people either on vacation or a boredom-induced photoshoot with the help of VSCO filters. It ain’t got nothing to do with you or your love life.

Reason #5: By obsessing over your #RelationshipGoals, you are sabotaging your future with your partner

It is already bad enough that we live in a society that enjoys constantly dictating how we should act, where we should live, and even what we should wear; now we’re voluntarily dictating our relationships how they should be?! It is pure madness.

I am not a relationship expert, nor am I a life specialist, but I do know this: when you truly love someone, you aren’t gonna need a guideline or an instruction book on how to do your relationship. When it’s real, things should just flow, naturally. Un-premeditated. Un-rehearsed. Unexpected. One of the things I dislike the most about these hashtag relationshipgoals is that they take away from young couples nowadays the spontaneity and the surprise factor that come with every relationship, with every human to human connection. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be in a relationship where I have no fucking clue how it’s gonna end up ten years later, or even how it’s gonna end up five minutes later. I think that it is important to experience the rawness of a genuine relationship. The candidness of every kiss. Those moments when you wake up right next to the person and see his face light up as he sees your face light up. Those moments when you see someone for what he truly is, without any filter, without any inhibitions. Just you and the person, in this crazy mad world that we all live in.

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Written by Kenn Edward Tenorio

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