I, and many others, use social media as protection from the messy, unpredictable nature of an honest conversation about my feelings. We need to stop confining modern relationships to the rules social media dictates. Social media conveys the impression that a relationship’s worth lies in the amount of grand gestures that occur. By clinging on to social media’s rules instead, we’re saving ourselves from the emotional, messy work of talking to the person we are supposed to trust the most. We treat social media like a manual not because it works, but because if the relationship fails while we’re following the rules, we can blame the script instead of taking responsibility.