Public display of affection: that you’re madly in love, or weathering a tragedy, or that your husband is the best (or worst) man alive, and so on.

The world has always run on perception. Technology has simply made it cheaper. Social networks hand you a captive audience, eager to follow whatever is happening to you, for good reasons or bad. There is a certain pleasure in announcing that your life is extraordinary, gloriously or tragically, and that the world must be informed at once. Displaying emotion in public is a kind of assertion that life is either firmly in control or spectacularly out of it, and the truth is usually less photogenic.

It is one of these, or a complicated mix of genuine romance, digital performance, the hunger for external validation, and psychological coping. We are all guilty of it to some extent. Even those who keep private matters private aren’t entirely off the hook: they are wrestling with a version of themselves they’re comfortable displaying. They aren’t hiding anything; they just have little to assert for public consumption.

It's almost a norm. A person, more likely a man, well into the second decade of his marriage, who announces regularly that he is still falling in love with his spouse, a sentiment she reciprocates at full volume. At the risk of sounding judgmental as I can’t see inside their marriage, the picture-perfect aesthetics, the high-intensity romance and the multiple public declarations felt too trite, and too far removed from the messy reality of living with someone for ten-plus years.

My gut said it was artificial, and that it hid more than it revealed. Why project a perpetual honeymoon when it can’t possibly be true? There is a plethora of relationship psychology suggesting that couples married long enough drift, quite naturally, into what’s called “companionate love”: a deep, stable, mature bond that needs no applause.

When a couple seeks applause at every opportunity, the honeymoon-on-loop routine is not just embarrassing but performative. They are trying to convince, or delude, themselves as much as the rest of us. It reads as overcompensation for a lost spark and, I sometimes suspect, as less about the partner and more about personal branding. I, the one who posts, not we, deserve credit for the dream marriage.

There’s a name for this behaviour, though it stops short of being a disease: external reassurance-seeking, often tied to high attachment anxiety. People with heightened relationship anxiety tend to ramp up their online presence to feel better about themselves. To me, it’s a futile attempt to write a public narrative loud enough to drown out private uncertainty. To a keen eye, the filtered, curated pictures signal a problem rather than blissful togetherness. When real life turns routine and drab, people indulge in relationship curation, a temporary illusion of marital perfection that masks a deeper lack of spontaneous, uncurated connection.

So the next time you feel the urge to broadcast your perfect marriage, remember: in a secure marriage, validation is cheap and internal, and can happen in shared silence. When a marriage requires daily marketing, heavy editing, or a long essay to justify its worth, the audience is being drafted to fill an emotional deficit. Nobody signed up for that job, though plenty will leave a heart emoji.