When love is a hashtag and loneliness a PR crisis: Algorithm’s guide to your heart

My feed was a carousel of engagement shoots, honeymoon vlogs, and “soft-launch” couple selfies. Rarely did I see anyone just single and content. Everyone seemed to be either deliriously in love or dramatically healing from it — there seemed to be no in-between.

The Instaverse tells us that we can’t be just single anymore. We have to be strategically single. Online, solitude has a brand identity. There’s the “healing era” single, the “hot girl summer” single, and the “main character arc” single. Loneliness now comes with filters and affirmations. Somewhere between #CoupleGoals and “I’m focusing on myself”, the idea of simply existing without an explanation or aesthetic has gone extinct.

These hashtags turn emotions into clickbait and dictate how we feel about love or the lack of it. Whether love or loneliness, we must now optimise our feelings for the feed.

How we brand singlehood

After my seven-year relationship ended, and the initial despair of being unattached for the first time as an adult passed, I often felt the need to romanticise my singlehood. I was supposed to take solo trips, enter my ‘healing phase’, buy flowers for myself, and “be a baddie”. It’s not that I didn’t want to empower myself. I just didn’t realise that empowerment came with a moodboard.

Even being single is now its own brand. You’re either the “hot girl summer” type — loud, liberated, and unapologetic — or the Taylor Swift-coded ‘Reputation’ era — bold, dark, and edgier. Instagram, however, pushed me towards the most acceptable outcome right after a breakup — the ‘healing phase’, where I sip matcha, go on solo dates, and journal in cafes with pastel walls. That is when I realised that every version of solitude had its own aesthetic. You can’t just be alone; you have to look good while at it.

Somewhere between Barbie’s existential monologue and TikTok’s ‘healing era’ videos, the idea of existing quietly without a narrative vanished. Self-love now feels like work. There is a pressure to prove that you are doing just fine, that your sadness is productive, and that loneliness is just a chapter in a larger growth story.

It reminds me of Fleabag, where the protagonist says, “I want someone to tell me what to wear every day. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to hate, what to like, what to rage about.” Beneath her deeply relatable wit and chaos was something human — the fatigue of always performing. That is what singlehood feels like online: you’re applauded for your independence, but punished the moment you admit you’re lonely.

Even the internet’s ‘sad girl’ culture — listening to Lana Del Rey and posting qawalis of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (now reborn as NFAK) — romanticised melancholy so beautifully that it just becomes another filter. Because algorithms, after all, reward emotional clarity as long as it fits neatly in 15 seconds.

 

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Messy feelings, the ones that don’t resolve into empowerment, rarely go viral. And that’s the tragedy of modern singlehood — it’s no longer about simply being with yourself.

But being in a relationship is no better. If singlehood has become a wellness campaign, love has turned into a content strategy.

The algorithm of affection

I was never the one to post about my relationship. I didn’t need to prove to my feed what I felt. But when the relationship ended, something shifted. The feed began telling me what to feel. Every scroll felt like surveillance, and my singlehood stood out like bad lighting.

Friends who were also single fell into the same propaganda. They sent me those perfectly colour-graded reels with couples and their gingham picnic blankets, polaroids, and vintage filters, followed by a wistful “me and who”. Even though I never wanted that before, I began to feel the absence of something I never craved. I wasn’t missing companionship, but the sense of belonging that comes with being in your “lover girl” era.

Relationships now have an audience. Influencers now capitalise on being in a relationship. Their ‘couple’ photos get more likes, comments, and saves. Their content slowly changes from their own niche to what being in a relationship is like. Couples turn themselves into brands, and their anniversaries into campaigns.

Love as a marketing campaign comes with certain metrics and steps — the teaser or ‘soft launch’; the ‘hard launch’, aka the official reveal post; and the eventual success party, the wedding. The internet smiles on those who share, who let the algorithm feed off their affection.

The online world considers being in love as proof of stability, desirability, and normalcy. And when you’re not in love, the silence of your feed feels like failure. Singlehood by default feels like bad PR.

The quiet rebellion of just being

You may be happy being single, but people will look at you with pity — like you’re trying too hard to be okay. You should either be healing from someone or preparing to be someone’s upgrade. God forbid you’re just fine by yourself.

For the longest time, I wasn’t. After my breakup, I did everything the internet prescribed — journaling, affirmations, soft girl aesthetics, the revenge era, and even the online dating circus (10/10 would not recommend). None of it fixed anything; it only made me feel like I was constantly lagging behind some invisible timeline of emotional productivity. Healing became another thing I was supposed to be good at.

So I just stopped. I stopped romanticising my singlehood and just lived it, all the boring and the brilliant parts. I went out when I felt like and and stayed in when I didn’t. I stopped searching for a potential suitor in the men I interacted with and ended up making some good friends. I didn’t turn every experience into a core memory. I just existed, and that’s when things started to feel good.

We talk so much about self-love online, but rarely about how tiring it is to keep proving that you are fine. The quiet pressure to process everything fast, to move on beautifully, to never look like you cared too much, is actually PR damage control after your relationship goes kaput.

Honestly, relationships aren’t doing much better. Couples seem to be losing the plot, putting messy feelings aside and trying to live in a funhouse mirror image of the relationship that social media sells.

Truth be told, social media made both love and singlehood look exhausting. Perhaps it’s time we realise, maybe the real glow-up isn’t about being single or taken. It’s about being unavailable to the performance altogether.