NASHVILLE — By now, whatever time of day you read this essay, your Facebook and Instagram feeds are most likely filled with hothouse flowers and lovely hand- dipped chocolates and stories of the funny way two people met, how lucky they're to have plant each other, how thankful they feel, on this day of love especially, to be moving through the world together. Similar stories can be incredibly sweet, but their accretive effect is … not. 

 

 There are worse crimes than loving your mate and writing about it. How can it hurt to tell a long-polished love story one further time, or partake a print of the Valentine roses from a new squeeze? Public converse is so worried these days, so beset by fury and despair, that surely there’s no detriment in participating a little joy. 

 Thing is, it makes a lot of people feel awful. They ’re formerly lonely, and along comes Valentine’s Day to rub their tips in it. Or they ’re impeccably happy in their own connections, but everyone additional’s connections suddenly look happier ever. Sweeter. Tenderer. Filled with better chocolate. 

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 It does n’t count that the fabrication underpinning every “ happily ever after” tale is widely understood. The truest love stories still include a fair number of meaningless misconstructions and nights spent back to back on contrary sides of the bed. And indeed if by some phenomenon they did n’t, there are still no lasting happily- ever-afters, as the musician Jason Isbell writes so hauntingly in his song “ If We Were Vultures” 

.It’s knowing that this ca n’t go on ever 

 

 Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone 

 Perhaps we ’ll get forty times together 

 

 But one day I ’ll be gone 

Or one day you ’ll be gone 

 

 Death is n’t commodity we talk about much on Valentine’s Day. 

None of this is new, of course. People have always been hurt, and people have always been lonely, and Valentine’s Day has always aggravated those passions. When I was in high academy the pupil government raised plutocrat by dealing color- enciphered carnations for Valentine’s Day. A red carnation meant love, white meant fellowship, another color, perhaps pink, meant someone wanted to be further than a friend. To shoot a flower anonymously, you could pay redundant for “ insurance.” The popular kiddies walked around all day with great bouquets of carnations in their arms, a visible memorial of their social currency in that time of life when social currency is everything. 

 

 And now Facebook and Instagram — and presumably TikTok, though I ’ll be damned if I ’ll add yet another possibility to my time- wasting options, so I ca n’t say for sure about TikTok — has turned the entire 21st century into high academy, and formerly again the popular kiddies are holding out their bouquets and blurting, “ Smell these; are n’t they godly?” 

.There are numerous reasons to detest Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram its raptorial business model, its part in spreading false election information and false vaccine information, its exacerbation of political polarization, its stinking up the details of our particular lives and turning them into a commodity. 

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 But important of the unhappiness formed by “ social” media does n’t come from its toxic effect on society. It comes from its toxic effect on us. Other people’s beautifully curated Facebook and Instagram posts are no closer to real life than reality Television is, and perhaps we indeed know it, but it still makes us feel bad. “ I do n’t know veritably numerous people that come down from 30 twinkles on Instagram feeling really good about who they are,” the developer and podcaster Debbie Millman told Kara Swisher last week in an interview on Sway. 

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No wonder loneliness is an epidemic now, and the loneliness of the 21st century is n’t like the loneliness of the 20th. Now it’s aggravated by still numerous hundred — or thousands — of “ musketeers” we've online. All Valentine’s Day long, it’s love notes and jewelry and heart- bedazzled pajamagrams. All day long, it’s night and delicacy and flowers thrust under our tips. Do n’t they smell godly? 

 

 Romantic love is a beautiful thing, but it isn't the only way to feel connected, to feel seen, to feel loved. It’s not indeed the most important way to feel those effects. The fullest happiness comes from a community — a real community of real people. Whether or not that community includes a mate, it surely does n’t arise from an online platform that sows disharmony and anguish, an algorithm that only deepens mortal despair. 

That’s what I used to write on Facebook at this time of time, though I do n’t do that presently because the lower time I spend on Facebook the happier I am. But if I still posted Valentine’s Day felicitations on a point swarming with public affirmations of love, then's what I would write to anyone who's lonely, whose heart is broken, or who grieves a love gone too soon from this gorgeous, temporary world 

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 Whatever the world seems determined to tell us on this day for love that shuts so numerous people out, no bone is alone. We are, all of us, made for one another. 

You were made for me, and I was made for you, and we were both made for the grieving widow and the friendless child and the old man sleeping in the sunny library president and the tired barista just slightly leaning her hipsterism against the counter and the teenager sneaking a bank in the parking lot and the woman in high heels pumping gas and the cyclist pedaling head-down in the sibilant of passing business and the wearied checkout clerk and the bothered mama whose child won't put on her shoes and the fog- breathed lineman in the pail high above branches just on the verge of breaking into cub.