MAGAZINE

“Social media kills love”… really?

A T-shirt spotted on the street — “Social media kills romance” — reminded us of flirting before screens. A nostalgic investigation that isn’t quite so nostalgic.

Audrey was the first to spot it, a T-shirt worn like a manifesto: “Social media kills romance.” Three words on cotton, and a whole conversation begins. Have social media really killed love? Or have they simply changed the soundtrack, replacing the slow dance with a notification? We wanted to dig into it — and stumbled on a world worth remembering.

In the seventies and eighties, it often all began with a dance. A community hall, a mediocre band, chairs lined up along the walls — and that seemingly endless walk across the floor to ask someone to dance. The risk was physical: you could be turned down in front of everyone. But a “yes” was physical too: an outstretched hand, a whole slow dance spent trying to think of something to say. No one could check the other person’s profile beforehand: you met first, then found out more.

Then came the telephone — the landline in the hallway, with a cord you could stretch all the way under the stairs. Calling someone meant accepting that their father, mother, or big sister might pick up, and mustering the real courage to say, “Hello, could I speak to…?” The phone booth on the corner was a confessional: coins lined up on the shelf, and three minutes to say what mattered before the beeps.

And there were letters. You wrote a draft first, started over because the ink had smudged, and chose a stamp. Then you waited — three days, a week — and that waiting wasn’t empty: it was room for imagination. An entire generation learned about love in the interval between two letters. The mail carrier was a character in the novel.

Let’s be honest, though: that era wasn’t paradise. Shy people stayed by the wall at the dance, distance separated people for good, and someone who didn’t dare cross the floor sometimes never met anyone. Screens gave the reserved a second chance, brought together people a thousand kilometers apart, and opened up new worlds to villages. In the United States, online dating has even become, according to surveys by Stanford sociologists, the leading place where couples meet — ahead of friends, work, and family. That’s no small thing.

So what exactly has died? Perhaps just one thing: unhurried time. The waiting, the rarity, the risk taken face to face. When everything is immediate — the message, the photo, the reply, the silence that counts as a reply — imagination has no interval left to work in. The T-shirt gets the verb wrong: social media haven’t killed romance. They’ve squeezed it, like a lemon.

The good news is that one piece is easy to save. Write a real letter — one a year is enough. Call instead of texting once in a while, to hear a voice hesitate. Ask someone to dance without an agenda. Let a night pass before replying, on purpose. These aren’t relics: they’re small adjustments. And while you’re thinking about it, our webcams are streaming village dances, squares where people stroll, and cafés where people are crossing the floor right now. Good vibes on the round Earth — those don’t kill a thing.

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