Imagine this: you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed just like you do every day. You scroll down a bit more and… BAM! You’ve officially run into your first cringe-worthy Valentine’s Day post.

With every Valentine’s Day comes the unnecessary flood of pictures, videos, blogs—you name it. For some odd reason, it has become quite popular for the teens of the twenty-first century to parade their lovers around social media just like a prize winning pig at a cattle auction. It’s time to put these undesired and redundant posts to an end.

It seems excessive for people to post and boast about their relationships. The HuffPost says, “Consider just how much time you spend online and how much time you spend worrying about your digital self-image.”

This appears to be ignored as people do the exact opposite. By constantly worrying about “fitting in” with their peers, teens tend to do what everyone else does. Posting images with their boyfriend/girlfriend or changing their relationship status to “in a relationship” on Facebook is how teens communicate. The real question is: why is this necessary?

The question may seem complex, but the answer is straightforward: social media provides popularity ranks. It’s the harsh, but true, reality. These so-called popularity ranks can be determined by a plethora of things including how many likes each post a person puts out receives, how many followers each person has, what a person’s actual feed looks like, how many views they have on their story, etc. Welcome to young-adult society everyone!

Don’t omit the other pictures, though. As most wish that the posts would stop at the boyfriend/girlfriend pictures, the human race hasn’t been that successful yet. I shudder and scream inside every time I wander upon the teddy bear and candy pictures. “Omg guys. Can you believe what (fill in the blank) got me???!!!” I feel mortified.

“If you don’t have a boyfriend, these posts make you feel horrible,”says AAHS sophomore Ella Jane.

The teens who post these photos are attempting to swank about their relationships in a way that everyone will see. Four score and seven years ago, we would have found that interesting. Nowadays, when everyone else is doing it, not so much.

Let’s not forget about all the single people out there! We’ve all seen those posts from desperate, lonely teens who currently aren’t in a relationship. “Single and proud..”, “Single and NOT ready to mingle…”, “Happily single…” People don’t care. These people are a different brand of attention seekers and must be stopped. These posts are meaningless, and quite frankly, ignored. Coming from a fellow web-surfer, I can say that half of the time, those people get the big red unfollow. Whoops.

In the end, it’s hard to ignore these posts, but they still exist. By ending the chain of these pictures, everyone will benefit. One can only hope that these posts come to a halt. Valentine’s Day is joyous for its purpose, but these days it seems more overrated than romantic through these posts.