Fall in love with someone who doesn’t have social media.
Catch their eye at a party or a coffee shop and strike up an actual conversation – one that doesn’t start through text messages or chat screens. Wonder what their last name is and where it is they come from and whether or not their taste in music matches with your own. Attempt to stalk them when you get home and realize you can’t – their cyber presence does not exist and your burning questions have to go unanswered. Hope to run into them again.
Get to know someone who doesn’t have social media. Let them reveal themselves to you bit by bit – who they are and what they’re into and what they are looking for in life.
Let them reveal themselves to you in pieces and enjoy the ever-growing puzzle of discovering who they are. Realize the freedom of revealing yourself in the same way – of existing outside the realms of the shining online presence you have cultivated.
Fall in love with someone who doesn’t have social media. Let the moments you share go undocumented – passionate nights fading into lazy mornings without Instagram filters or likes lingering over the memories you craft. Forget about photo tags and favorites. Forget about love’s ideal aesthetic. Trust yourself to keep the memories alive, inside the brilliance of your photogenic mind, inside the stories that you re-tell to each other.
Plan a life with someone who doesn’t have social media. Don’t worry about finding the perfect apartment matching your outfits on dates. Let your love look a little bit messy, let your aesthetic be way out of line. Do not come home from a long day of adventuring and upload your pictures and videos – simply sink into each other and recount the day’s events. Let your life develop freely and authentically – planning a future around what you want, not what it’s going to look like from the outside.
Don’t go through and untag every photo, erase statuses and messages, hover your mouse over the ‘block’ button and wonder how it got to this point. Just let love go slowly, in any form you need to. Visit family and friends. Take the time off to work on yourself. Free yourself of the crippling pressure to upload pictures where you’re happy and thriving. Allow yourself to heal and slowly and authentically, in a way that requires no recognition.
Leave someone who doesn’t have social media and actually let yourself move on. Don’t stay up until 3am obsessing over that girl whom they just became friends with or that club they checked into two weeks ago. Let yourself focus on your life and your happiness – what you’re building and what you’re cultivating and what you’re creating with your own two hands. Let the focus veer back to your wellbeing, whether it looks glamorous online or not. Put yourself back together and be proud of that. Be proud of who you are when no one’s looking.
Grow apart from someone who doesn’t have social media but keep a tiny part of them alive forever. Don’t watch them change from afar into an older and altogether different version of themselves. Simply remember them as you once knew them – as the fierce and free and vivacious person you loved. Keep their memory alive as only old lovers ever truly can – remember all of the best and the worst of them.
Fall in love with someone who doesn’t have social media at least one time in your life. Realize how much there is to experience in the world that exists outside your cell phone and never let yourself forget it again. Never let yourself get so lost in the cultivation of your online persona that you forget to look up.
To see a stranger.
To smile.
And to say hello out loud. 
