It hit me like a 15-carat princess cut diamond ring. This past summer, I opened my Facebook newsfeed to pictures and videos of my college-aged friends getting engaged, or at least proposed to.
I was happy for them, but something about the posts seemed wrong. They were too perfect, too well-thought out.
In short, they just looked staged, not for the posters, but for the audience, their Facebook friends.
The idea of announcing an engagement so lavishly on social media exposes the couple to the extreme levels of negativity and judgment the online world sometimes produces.
Even more so, by posting videos and photos of an engagement, it seems like less of a decision and more of a show.
That’s not to say I don’t like hearing about my friends’ big life events. Getting engaged is one of the most important steps of a person’s life. It is a wonderful and incredibly intimate decision.
But this new Pinterest-inspired trend of professional photographers, perfect nails and Instagram-worthy clothing for the photo can cheapen the moment and make it about appearances.
Intimacy is vital to the well-being of a relationship and a marriage. By over-exposing your relationship, you lose much-needed privacy. You begin to qualify the healthiness of your ?engagement by how many “likes” you receive.
Is it absolutely necessary to have a photographer or a family friend capture this intimate moment just so it can be posted on social media to be exposed to the world?
It is important to remember that anything and everything you post, up to and including your most personal material, will be used as a tool of comparison. If you allow overexposure, you risk destroying the intimacy of your personal life.
On top of that, it can simply be risky to put your most intimate decision out into the world, to be judged by others who in all honesty do not care about your relationship.
In this world of constant and continuous connection, sometimes it’s important to remember that keeping a bit of your life to yourself is not a bad thing.
It fosters healthy relationships, shields you from unfair judgment and allows you to focus on this next step of your life without a thousand little voices gnawing away at you.
At the end of the day, every important life decision has to be about you, not about how many views your engagement photo will have or how many people are going to “like” your marriage.
If they love you, they’ll like it anyway.
eshrack@indiana.edu
