A couple of weeks ago, a story from the fashion magazine Vogue broke the Internet. While Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines have always appeared to align with traditions of relationships, often giving advice on how to spice up relationships, it appears they, too, have started seeing the world for what it is.
The article, titled Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? went on to be discussed on multiple platforms. No one can deny that the wheels of traditional norms in society are dying out. Not because they are being replaced by some new trendy thing, rather they are dying because people are tired of the same recycled nonsense.
Since my early teens, I had seen nothing of great marriages in my own society. I saw people rushing to marry their children off. I saw families trying to do everything to hold marriages together and fail. I saw nothing else but a failed cultivation of traditional norms in a society that is past that era. What is left behind is a landfill of sham marriages, broken homes and single-parent families.
It would appear that many around the globe have been exposed to societies full of such pathetic relationships that no one finds it nice anymore. The days of ‘launching’ a partner on your social media to applause and streams of congratulations are long gone. When a person posts about their new relationship on social media, they are more likely to encounter comments like “Ugh, why?” than congratulatory comments.
The worst part about going public with a relationship on social media is the unleashing of unpaid Internet private detectives, who will uncover hidden truths and dirt about your significant other that even he or she may not know about.
The reason most of us no longer buy the perfect picture of a relationship or marriage is the long-term exposure into the reality behind the scenes. In the beginning, by posting their picture-perfect relationships, people would often have others fooled about the reality of their situations. Then we slowly began to realise that nothing is ever what it looks like, which is why we have all been desensitised and cynical towards any relationship that is highly publicised.
Take your ‘trad wife’ influencers, for example. Everyone is well aware that this is not how these influencers actually live their lives. That this person they portray as a dedicated mother and loving housewife who makes bread and cheese from scratch is simply a persona curated to represent idealism to the simple minded in society. In real life, these women will not be caught dead in these outfits up at the crack of dawn, cooking while flocks of children fluster about her feet.
We have all learnt to look at the lifestyles of the rich with narrow skeptical eyes. The grand weddings, the mansions and top-of-the-range vehicles. All of these are theatrics that hide strange and disturbing secrets. Even those that were relatively normal were just shams that look very different from the outside than what they really are behind closed doors.
Take a look at what happened this weekend, for example. We all woke up on Monday morning to viral videos out of Mike Sonko's account. Sonko, who has made his name as a street hustler millionaire, had to endure the scrutiny of exposing his daughter's less-than-perfect marriage. According to the videos, Sonko’s daughter has been going through abuse at the hands of her no-good husband for quite some time.
The phrase ‘no-good husband’ is not figurative because he is a wife-beating loser. No, the guy is an actual loser who Sonko himself exposed as a mooch who does not work since his in-laws provide for everything. Now you see a story like this and wonder to yourself, “Aii, surely.” To have a rich father like Sonko while being married to a parasite, to have a thug father like Sonko but be married to a daring man who beats you behind closed doors? Isn't it just a little embarrassing?
